Sometime last summer, I got an e-mail from this guy Kevin. I didn’t know who he was. He was a fan of North Carolina beer and had an eye on this website called Know Your Brewer. It was a site that I had run across before – it was something that had been put together at the tail end of Pop the Cap by Sean Wilson – the guy who put PtC together – as a site to highlight North Carolina beer. Kevin had noticed that there wasn’t much movement on the site and had a few ideas about how to get things rolling again. I’ve never been quite sure about why he decided to include me on the e-mail (among a few others who I DO understand, because they’ve been involved in the beer scene – @Geistbear and another local beer guy – who ended up being too busy to be involved at the time). It turned out to be me, Sean, and Kevin sitting at a bar sort of brainstorming ideas of how to highlight NC breweries.

A few weeks later, the North Carolina Brewers Guild spoke up. They were interested in pulling the content that Sean had originally put into Know Your Brewer into their domain, NCBeer.org. They needed someone to manage the creation of content and help move the site forward. Sean was busy (and still is) with the launch of his own brewery, so he sent a message out asking if anybody was interested in stepping up. I jumped at it, and have been working for the Brewers Guild managing their website, its content, and whatever else they need – alongside Rob Ulick who has been in-freakin’-valuable and fantastic – ever since.

In the meantime, Know Your Brewer went a little vacant. A lot of the content that had originally been created got moved over to ncbeer.org. A lot of the traffic moved, as well. But I had an idea sort of banging around in the back of my head and I pitched it to Sean.

This Know Your Brewer idea was a good one. I had really enjoyed reading the interviews on the site, and I was a little sad to see it die. What if, I asked, we took the time to move this nationwide? Wouldn’t it be cool if we could celebrate breweries everywhere? One of the things that had struck me ever since I started getting into the craft beer industry is just how nice the people are. It might be the friendliest industry I’ve ever had the pleasure to be a part of. There’s camaraderie in the place of competition. What’s more, like any small business, the people involved are very much the epitome of their own brand.

Every brewery has its own story that each day and each beer become sentences, paragraphs, and chapters of. The people that work there are characters in their own storyline. Customers – beer geeks – tend to get wrapped up in the story of the brewery and in most cases (high profile breweries aside) don’t get the chance chance to know anything about the greatest protagonist: the brewer. That, I said to Sean, is what I’d like to see. We’re such a young industry, we’ve got so many good people with so many good stories – someone should be telling them.

For whatever foolhardy reason, Sean agreed; we’ve been moving forward ever since. He’s been an idea machine and – let’s face it, it was his site. That he was gracious enough to allow me to descend on it with my idea was wonderful. That he jumped in feet-first with brainstorming and hard work whilst in the midst of starting a business is beyond awesome.

It’s been a little rough to get moving at times. Neither of us really have the time to dive into another project that we’re not getting paid for. The site needed a pretty hefty redesign and, most importantly, it needed content. I started contacting breweries in every place that I was traveling in the winter and coming up in the spring and trying to arrange interviews. We asked a friend of mine that I met through Intrepid Media, Russ Carr to give us a hand with the design and then we set out to recruit writers. Kevin Myers, the guy who sent me the e-mail to start this insane chain into action, was one of the first people to sign up. His interview with Josh Brewer of Mother Earth Brewing will start off our second week. The reason that Know Your Brewer looks as snazzy as it does is due 110% to the hard work that Russ put in. I owe Russ lots and lots of beer.

The reason that we have good content queued up is because we’ve had some really great writers step up and volunteer to throw some stuff our way. Nobody’s getting paid to do any of this. We’re all working through this as a labor of love to tell the stories of some pretty admirable men and women.

Take the time to head over to Know Your Brewer and read a little bit about Brian Connery, Senior Brewer at Dogfish Head – a really nice guy who took time out of his schedule two days after Christmas, to get interviewed by me at the end of his work day. He’s dealt with me badgering him over the past few months, promising that this content was going to go up sometime and, oh by the way, would you mind answering this other thing, too?

I hope you enjoy reading about his background and about why he loves his job so much. Later on the week, you can read a great recipe that he made up using two Dogfish Head beers that I’ll actually be cooking up in my kitchen this evening.

I hope, too, that I can get back to writing here on a more regular basis. Know Your Brewer has been taking up so much of my attention lately that Top Fermented has only gotten a few rants from me. Look for more in the upcoming weeks – when I’m not typing out my interviews for KYB.

And finally, I hope you’re moved to take the time, go talk to a brewer, and write it up to submit it to Know Your Brewer. We will always be in want of more content, but with 1500 breweries in the U.S. and more opening every day, there’s no reason that we shouldn’t be swamped with it. If you’re interested in contributing, send a message over to info@knowyourbrewer.com and we can get you hooked up.

Enjoy.

I sat down to watch Beer Wars last night. It’s interesting doing this now, almost a year after it’s been released, seeing the original reviews, the reactions, and seeing what’s happened over the past year. As a note, one of the first columns that I wrote on this blog was about Beer Wars – actually about the hype surrounding it which, at the time, was kind of rubbing me the wrong way. Looking back, I’ll admit that one of the reasons that the hype was bothering me was because I wasn’t able to actually go participate in the one day release. I’m now glad that I didn’t, because I’m sure that had I viewed it then, I would have seen it entirely differently.

Yesterday, due to a new distribution contract with Warner Bros., Beer Wars hit streaming Netflix and I was finally able to get a look at it, albeit a year removed.

Allow me to start here: I enjoyed it.

In fact, I enjoyed it a lot more than I originally thought I was going to. The first 10-or-so minutes of it, in particular, I thought were playful, fun, and educational and really showed the ridiculous scale of the beer industry quite well. Jim Koch’s regular statement of, “Bud spills more beer in a single day than I make in an entire year” (featured in the film) is very apparent here and that message alone is worth watching the movie for. I wish the entire film had carried the tone of the first ten minutes, even so much as to carry the cartoon Anat Baron all the way through.

From a “I’m critiquing this movie” standpoint, I think Beer Wars suffered a little from not really knowing what it was. It wanted to educate, and then it wanted to criticize. At times it was a little unfair in its criticism, sometimes ignoring reality in favor of a flashy point and in general I’m okay with that if that’s your modus operandum – but it clashed with the educational and feel-good parts of the film. I found myself thinking that if Beer Wars had merely presented the facts of the scale of the industry alongside the wonderful story of how craft beer has evolved, without trying to be edgy and in-your-face and make points against BMC (and especially Anheuser-Busch), that it would have carried its point much more effectively. In the end, it felt like an Anheuser-Busch critique vehicle wrapped around a warm and fuzzy story about Sam Calagione with a little bit of feeling embarrassed for Rhonda Kallman on the side.

Like I say – I enjoyed it and I would recommend this movie to others. I wonder at how it would play to people who are not beer geeks. I will probably never know. I’m not sure I know non-beer-geeks that I haven’t at least somewhat indoctrinated, anyway.

I cannot say enough about Sam Calagione in this film. He makes the movie and without him it would not have been nearly as compelling. Nevermind that he’s the GQ posterchild of craft beer, the guy is so damn charismatic and.. and.. likable that it’s impossible not to root for him. When he’s sitting there with his kids climbing all over his shoulders with that goofy grin of his, it puts the, “Yeah, so I had to put my family into a crippling amount of debt to try to chase this dream” into harsh relief and you want nothing more than for him to succeed. He was the perfect centerpiece for this movie.

I wish there was more Dick Yuengling in it. He just makes me smile. Go get ‘em Dick!

I cannot, however, figure out the choice of Rhonda Kallman and Moonshot here. It looks, in the movie, like a failing brand from the get-go. The problem is that the film doesn’t convince me that the reason that she’s failing is because she’s getting roughed up by A-B. It sounds like a gimmicky product, she even sells it like a gimmicky product in the parts of the movie where she’s looking for investments ($6 mil! Holy moly. I’ll take the $800,000, please.). I don’t know. Maybe my opinion is colored by the fact that I know that New Century, who makes Moonshot, also makes Edison Light which is my second least favorite beer in the entire world (behind Leinenkugel Sunset Wheat which, I swear, tastes exactly like circus peanuts). Sorry Rhonda, I’m just not a fan. I’d feel more empathy if I thought it was a great beer.

The one moment where I really wanted to back Rhonda up was a scene in a bar, where some jackass patron who is trying the free beer she’s given him asks her, “Does your husband know you’re out here doing this?” right before another one asks, “Will this cure whiskey tits?” I never felt as bad for her as when she laughed along with them like it was all some sort of joke when by all rights those guys needed a good solid cock punch.

“Does your husband know you’re out here doing this?” Really? You sexist assbag!

Anyway – without getting lost in these details, I went into watching this with a couple of questions in my mind:

1) In retrospect, did the movie live up to the enormous amount of hype that was generated?

I think that the enormous amount of hype actually hurt this movie. It had such an onslaught of publicity that I think it needed to be Gone with the Wind to live up to the expectations of critics within the beer industry, much less traditional media. With all of the buzz, it needed to absolutely blow your mind to be treated with anything except let-down afterward. It’s really a shame. There’s a good story here and there are good messages, but because it wasn’t Citizen Kane it didn’t get the attention it deserved after release.

On the other hand, because Ms. Baron was working on getting this out without a distribution deal, because it was being released in the one-time-special-event manner that it was, I’m not sure I can come up with a better way to have marketed it. You had one shot, you had to make sure people were there or it was going to be an enormous financial loss. That’s rough.

With any luck, Warner Bros. will be able to help market it outside of the craft beer community which, frankly, is not the audience that needs to see this movie – it’s preaching to the converted.

2) Why was the BA so eager to support prior to screening it, and what, if anything, did they gain by it?

At the time of the Beer Wars release I kept asking myself: Why are so many prominent members of the BA wrapping themselves up in the promotion of this movie when, by their own admission, they have not screened it?

Watching it, it hit me: If I was filmed for a movie, and I knew that I was going to be on the big screen, I sure as hell would promo the shit out of it, too! In the grand scheme of things, they knew that the movie was going to be complimentary to their cause and their industry because they had spoken about the point of the film with Ms. Baron. At that point pushing this movie was a no-brainer; it was good publicity for yourself, your company, and the industry as a whole, regardless of whether or not the movie was brilliant.

I was surprised to find out that there were only small clips of Charlie Papazian, Greg Koch, Maureen Ogle and the Alström Brothers in this, though, considering how prominently they all featured in the promotion (and live discussion on release night). Good personalities! I’m glad they were used in the live discussion; it led me to believe that I would see more of them in the film than I did. I wish that a recording of the live discussion would have been available via Netflix.

So, what, if anything, did the BA gain? Awareness. But I think that’s it – not that that’s small. However, I feel that Beer Wars drew a harsh picture of the three-tier system and distribution that I’m not sure is necessarily in the best interest of the BA. The three-tier system and wide distribution networks have a lot to do with the fact that I’m currently able to drink Stone Arrogant Bastard and New Belgium Fat Tire here in North Carolina. Both Greg Koch (Stone) and Kim Jordan (New Belgium) were briefly featured in the film and I’m sure that they would both tell you that without distribution agreements that would not be possible.

She took a (warranted) passing shot at the tactics and bullshittery used by some distributors, but rather than doing an expose on slimy (and illegal) business practices, we got a short montage of Ms. Baron hunting for purportedly mythical Neo-Prohibitionists which, I might argue, are actually a real threat to the industry.

Overall, however, I think the BA – and the craft beer industry in general – receives a net gain here, even if just off of the first 10 minutes of the film, and the crazy freakin’ title that shows up on top of the Dogfish Head introduction segment: “Dogfish Head: 0.0002% Market Share.” I may have missed a 0 there. Regardless, it was REALLY effective.

3) What’s the best way to follow this up?

Yes, I’d like to see more. Maybe Beer Skirmishes. I’m just not a huge fan of war.

I think that, in actuality, there were 2 or 3 documentaries all smushed into one here and that either through lack of focus or lack of funding we got this movie. Here’s what I think we potentially have inside Beer Wars:

- The story of the craft beer industry, its inception and growth and a straightforward honest comparison between craft beer and BMC. ie – show off the little guys, and show just how little they are and what a disadvantage they are at without having to trash BMC. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar and all that. I suspect we’ll get a lot of this from the upcoming Beer Pioneers.

- An expose of the tactics of the less scrupulous members of the distribution industry in comparison with the distributors who are now focusing on craft and trying to play by the rules.

- A politico documentary of BMC lobbying vs. Beer Institute lobbying vs. BA lobbying. None of it’s pretty (lobbying just isn’t), but it would be fascinating to see where they differ and where they all overlap (and I’m sure they do).

Any single one of those could be a compelling documentary and some of them, if done correctly, could actually be a driving force for change in the industry. I hope that Ms. Baron will find success through her Warner Bros. distribution contract and will come away with the funding to pursue one of these topics in depth.

In verbose conclusion I say: Go forth and watch this movie. Most especially, make sure that those you know that aren’t huge beer geeks watch this movie and be ready to go to the bar and talk it over with them over a pint of good, locally made, craft beer.

Back – way, way back in internet years – just after last year’s Craft Brewer’s Conference, I wrote a little piece about why and how breweries should be using Twitter. It was originally a bit of a followup from watching the internet panel at the CBC. I wasn’t confident that the panel really convinced people why they should be using social media. In fact, I’m not even sure if left people with a favorable impression. So passionate was I about this, that I got together with a couple of great people to put a panel together for this year’s conference.

I’ve been planning on writing a few columns in support of the panel this spring as I work through collecting my thoughts for later discussion. The first was going to be what I perceive as the effective differences between Facebook and Twitter, built for a craft beer business perspective. That’s still coming, but via the magic of the internet, I was pointed over to a thread on ProBrewer that kind of got me by the short hairs.

Let me see if I can summarize this thread for you:

“What’s this Twitting thing? Is that on the Google? I can’t understand what those kids are saying without my ear horn!”

It makes me want to slap people. There is nothing in this world that pisses me off more than willful ignorance. The idea that you can’t understand something because it’s new is a one-way ticket to stagnation and failure. In the end the real issue is that you’re scared. Grow a pair. It’s a plastic box with electronics in it. We call it a computer. You use several every day, probably even to make beer.

I’m sure that all of the guys that posted to this thread are smart. You have to be smart to brew beer and run a business. You have to know a good deal of chemistry, physics, and biology. You have to have business sense and be at least relatively decent with numbers, you have to be savvy enough with people to know your customers, know what they want, and know how to get them to buy your product. And then you put something out like “I could really give a s#$t if those who read our company tweets consume my beer. If they would take guidance from a simple message from a stranger, they’re idiots.”

Shit, man. You just described marketing. You ever watch a commercial? They’re on the television now. Oh, right- that’s another plastic box with electronics in it. Forget I asked.

Nevermind, the lovely irony of asking “Has everyone willingly given up privacy?” on a public message board using your real name as a username. Liam, buddy: Misdirected ire. You must have been having a bad day that day, eh? I hope I can get up to Yellow Belly the next time I’m in NL to try your beer, regardless of that fact that you’ve completely written me off as a customer. Hey – does that mean I can drink for free?

And I don’t really mean to take the piss out of Liam here, it’s just to easy to troll and be snarky when people give you such opportunities! Moving on:

Allow me to address a few of the points that I’m going to summarize out of this thread (and countless freakin’ others out there):

Social Media is for “young people”

Almost 40% of Facebook users are between ages 36 and 65.

60% of Facebook users are over the age of 25.

Those damn kids. They’re probably planning your 30th high school reunion using the Facebook. Maybe you should get in touch.

Social media is a fad.

Facebook reported hitting 132 million users in December 2009. MySpace reports almost 50 million. Twitter reports 23 million. They’re not all overlapping users, though many are (there’s the followup column I’m writing, see?).

Allow me to translate that into math:

If every drinking-aged adult in the country (~200 million) buys beer (they don’t), and craft beer makes up ~5% of the market share (they do), then more people over the age of 26 use Facebook (79.2 million) than drink craft beer (10 million) by a factor of a whole shitload. Fad. Sheesh.

I don’t have time for social media

I don’t have time to promote my business! I don’t have time to get people interested in my brand! I don’t have time to sell my product! I don’t have time to interact with my customers! Waaah!

Really? You know how long it takes me to send out a tweet? Like 25 seconds. To be fair: I type fast. Let’s say it takes you TWICE as long as me to type – no! Three times as long! Finger-pecker!

Ach! My aged fingers can not stand typing for over a minute! I can’t take 75 seconds out of my incredibly busy day to interact with my customers just once!

If you’re that busy, you’re probably at a point where you could consider hiring someone to help you. If you make the point of hiring somebody who’s not an anti-social curmudgeon, then chances are you could make managing social media part of their job and then you don’t have to worry about understanding anything fancy and new.

Look, there’s only one excuse for this type of response: You don’t get it. And you know what? That’s okay! It’s totally fine to not intuitively understand something the first time you look at it. To assume that it’s stupid because you don’t understand it is folly.

You don’t have to spend a lot of time on social media. Can you? Certainly! It can be borderline addictive. I’ll get into that in my next point.

It’s all anti-social crap for people with ADD!

You’re confusing social media with iPhone owners. (I kid! (Mostly!))

Social media is the opposite of anti-social. C’mon, people. “Social” is in the freakin’ name. Every interaction via any form of social media is essentially a part of a conversation. It’s not an update look-at-my-life-because-I’m-so-freakin’-awesome tool. It’s a human interaction please-talk-to-me tool. It’s not just:

“I had a Brooklyn Backbreaker at Tyler’s Taproom last week and I gotta say: pretty awesome.”

It’s also:

“Oooh, I’ve been wanting to try that one. Is it still on tap?”

People are talking about you. They’re talking about your product and they’re talking about your brewery. They’re talking about them a lot and having meaningful conversations about them. That is exactly why social media can be so addictive – interacting with people is fun. You do it in the bar all the time, right? Oh, right – I know: Only with people you know, or people who have the same interests as you, or maybe just the pretty girls.

Yeah, okay. Just like social media. Look, you don’t have to interact with anybody that you don’t want to. You choose who you follow and the people who follow you are enthusiastic fans of your business and your product. They are your good customers and your best evangelists. Not only do they want to have a conversation with you, they want to have a conversation about you to others. You can’t ask for better marketing than that – don’t you want to be a part of that conversation and have the chance to help guide it?

True story: I have met more new beer people in my area in the past year via Twitter, Facebook, and this blog than the previous 6 years I’ve been living here. And I’m talking great people – awesome people that I like to go hang out with after work and have a beer with, people that I have invited over to my house for dinner and drinks, and people that I hope I will not ever lose touch with because they’re such good people. Wow! Being anti-social is fun!

Social media is not a replacement for human interaction – it’s an augmentation.

It’s not a press release machine – it’s a customer interaction tool.

It’s an easy and effective tool that you can use to share your brand and your story with an eager-and-waiting audience and probably have a lot of fun at the same time. Use it. There is no downside and no reason not to.

I keep running across references to nanobreweries, but up  until now I never gave them much thought. My mind kept going back to this old article on MSN last year, “Something’s Brewing Close to Home” in which they note (or quote actually):

The nanobrewer isn’t going to quit his day job. They are brewing because they love the process and want to share the results with the people in their neighborhoods…

That sounds crazy to me, so I wrote it off. But I keep seeing the concept pop up, so I started doing a little research, and I think I just didn’t get the correct characterization off of said MSN article (an MSN article being unclear? Shocking!). It just kinda ends after introducing the concept. From what it looks like, you homebrew, and then you drop the thousands upon thousands of dollars you need for the necessary permits and licenses to sell your product, and then for some bizarre reason you keep your day job.

See? It is crazy. Totally batshit insane.

But! There are other operating nanobreweries around. The Hess Brewing Odyssey, a nanobrewery in San Diego, recently compiled a list of operating nanobreweries in the U.S., some of which are making the step up to being small craft breweries, though in reality a small craft brewery is all a nanobrewery really is. Sorta.

There’s no good definition, but what seems to be settled upon is that you’re making an amount of beer, per batch, that is considerably less than one would expect from a production brewery: half-barrel or one-barrel systems are common and sometimes even less. If you think about it, in that respect, Dogfish Head can be said to have started as a nanobrewery.

There are only a handful in the country, but it’s been enough for the TTB to put together some guidelines. They are basically a reminder of what constitutes the amount of beer that you can legally make in your home every year and that if you sell it, you need a license.

Michael, the person behind the Hess Brewing Odyssey, has compiled an absolute wealth of good documentation about how to open a brewery, nano or not. He covers all of the forms and hoops you have to jump through quite well (in fact, I’ve already bookmarked it to use as a reference), but the associated cost is still there.

So, I ask: If you don’t have a sizable bankroll at your disposal (Hi, I’m looking for investors, interested? Let’s talk!), is starting a nanobrewery financially feasible as a startup option? In other words, if this isn’t going to be a hobby – you’re not going to keep your day job – is that type of investment worth making 1 – 2 kegs at a time? A 7bbl brewday isn’t going to be much different in time vs. a 1bbl brewday, but at the end of it all you have 14 kegs to sell instead of 2 in return for your 8 hours of janitorial work. Will a 7bbl brewery cost more? Certainly. At least the brew system. Any sort of packaging and packaging system will cost exactly the same, and you’re going to use it a lot more frequently. If you’re making a go at starting a business,and you start that small, I feel like you’re going to be spending all of your time making your product, rather than selling it, and the latter is really important if you want to make a profit.

On the other hand, I’m a proponent of slow growth in the craft beer industry. Every single book I read about startup businesses in craft beer, every single time I hear an industry veteran talk about their startup experience, the number one thing I hear (though mostly in subtext) is, “We grew too fast, and had a hard time keeping up with production demands, so we went into a ton of debt.” I mean, I hear about companies that are now successful quote things like 7 – 10 years to cash-flow positive. I’m not convinced it has to be like that. Maybe starting super small and selling deep into a market is a way to avoid that. The path to cash-flow-positive growth is to not grow until/unless you can afford it and bust your ass in the meantime. It’s a theory.

I just can’t get by the fact that you have to brew 5 days a week to sell a half-barrel keg to 10 accounts. That’s a lot of time – and it’s a lot of fermentation space! I have a hard time imagining it.

Maybe the purveyor of a fine nanobrewery will stop by here and set me straight. They’ll let me know that, actually, they put together their operation with $5,000 and a box of coat hangers and they only brew on weekends, but I’m going to guess that’s not the case. I’m going to guess that they all meet at least one of the following conditions:

- they are rich
- they are in an enormous amount of debt
- they are making a go and hoping against odds that this venture doesn’t make them bankrupt
- they are still employed at a full-time job elsewhere
- they have an anonymous benefactor
- they are homeless and sleep under their lauter tun
- they have a really-well-employed spouse or partner
- they employ magical elves to make beer while we sleep
- they are, in fact, wizards

What do you think? Starting that small is an undeniably cool (and even romantic) concept, but I wonder at how sustainable the businesses are. It’s great to see that some of the ones listed in the link above are making a step up in growth, but how many will successfully make that step, and how many will make that step at all? Are these merely extended hobbyists or is this a viable entrance strategy to the craft beer industry?

I’d love to hear from others.

In case you missed it, there was a little sort-of announcement made by Stone this past week. You can watch the video (or read the blog post) to get the whole deal, but here’s the gist: Stone is considering the possibility of opening a brewery in Europe. That’s the announcement. That they’re considering it. Needless to say, this has garnered quite a few reactions, and I had a few of my own that I wanted to throw out and around for discussion.

I have to admit that my first reaction was a little knee-jerk “What the hell” kind of reaction that I appeared to have shared with a few others out there. Basically, the reaction goes somewhere along the lines of: What the hell? I can’t get Stone beers in [name one of many U.S. states] and now they’re going to open a brewery across the ocean?!

It’s where I sat for the first day or two.

To be honest, it’s an unfair reaction. Distribution laws are different state by state. I’m sure Stone would love to distribute to all 50 states. They would be silly not to, but it’s just not as easy as throwing beer in the mail. There’s all kinds of TTB hoops to jump through at both a federal level and a state level and then you need to find a distributor that 1) will carry your product 2) they way you’d like them to. Oh, and then retailers need to buy it. In some states, Stone doesn’t even have more than a few products that will be able to get to the shelf because of alcohol caps. So I’ll reserve my judgment on that one.

My next reaction was a little disappointment. I’ve always had a little soft spot for Stone because of their plan to sell deep into their market before expanding. That I started seeing Stone beers available in really out-of-the-way places on the East Coast made me assume that they had reached their goal of saturation in Southern California and that they were attempting to establish other markets. Okay, I say that a little tongue-in-cheek. I have a thing for small breweries. I hate it when their goal is constant growth. It smacks of greed to me. The craft beer market is too small for greed.

A lot of breweries have been taking the quick-expansion route in the past year. The fact that I went from never having had a Fat Tire before to getting irritated that every bar I go to in North Carolina has a Fat Tire tap before they have a local brewery tap has kind of irked me. To then follow that up with seeing Stone aggressively expand into my market made me a little wary. The American Southeast still has a way to go before it picks up huge hop profiles as its thing (and I doubt it ever will), so Stone hasn’t quite seen the same kind of ubiquity, but it’s here nonetheless. I kinda wish that I still felt the same sort of mystique I used to for Stone. When it was something that I couldn’t get my hands on, it was more special. Now it’s just a big IPA that I’m not always in the mood for at the beer bar. Availability cancels mystique.

On the other hand, this is how I’ve always thought breweries should handle expansion: Don’t ship your beer across god-knows-how-many miles and trust in some distributor that you can neither see nor control, build a new local brewery and distribute from there. It makes sense that if they want to expand their market to Europe to open a new brewery – it makes sense from a “I want my beer to be good and fresh” perspective. It makes sense from a business perspective, and I can get behind that.

My next reaction was amusement. Go back and watch the video and try to think about it in comparison with American foreign policy over the last.. oh.. 20 years. What unmitigated dicks Americans are. Greg and Steve come off as so damn cocksure in this video. “Don’t call us if you just want a brewery in your backyard – unless you’re a KING!” I know that they’re doing it to try to be quirky and cute and funny. But imagine that English isn’t your first language and you won’t be very surprised that there is – from the makers of “Arrogant Bastard”, mind you – a followup apology video to France. Take it from somebody who is related to a bunch of non-English-speakers: Humor doesn’t translate well.

And honestly guys: You’re funny. You are! But this is the internet. You had to know that was coming. Pictures of kittens get angry reactions. It’s the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. You could have prepared that “apology” in advance. (Though I’m sure that all of the reactions that you received were from unmitigated dick Americans.)

My final reaction? I’m not sure I’m there, yet. Part of me feels like a move across the ocean is kind of giving up on the American market. Despite Greg’s assurances that they would essentially exist as separate enterprises, I know that someone’s attention is going to be divided. In a very selfish way, I’d like Greg’s enthusiasm for craft beer and the craft beer market to be hyper-focused on the U.S., not Europe. Craft beer is still trying to gain a solid foothold here. It’s still struggling against imports and malternatives. To put it in perspective, Coors sold 150% more Zima in 1994 (1.2 million barrels) than all of the microbreweries (based on the BA definition) in the country did beer in 2008 (880,000 barrels).

I guess in a way, my feelings do reflect my pansy-ass, small-business-loving, latte-drinking, craft-beer-sipping, uber-liberal, somewhat protectionist political views: Why should we solve the world’s (beer) problems when we still have so many (beer) problems here at home?