You pop open a bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, an old reliable that you’ve been drinking since the 1980s.
Did you ever think about the long and winding road that your beer took from the brewery to your lips?
You tear the pull-tab off a tallboy can of Oasis, a double IPA from a microbrewery halfway across the continent that showed up without fanfare a local retail outlet.
Tryon Distributing, Charlotte, NC (Sean Living-Water)
You have the bartender draw you a pint of The Public, a hoppy pale ale from the first packaging brewery in Washington, DC, since the Eisenhower Administration.
Did you ever think about the long and winding road that your beer took from the brewery to your lips?
It’s a Big Beer World
There are over 13,000 brands of beer registered in this country, according to the National Association of Beer Wholesalers. Some accounts, like the Westover Market in Falls Church, VA, will take whatever you’ve got. The grocery store lines it shelves with over 1,000 brands for takeout and operates a small bar and beer garden. “It’s chaos!” laughs Zachary Duarte as he shows me their cold room, which contains an Everest of kegs and cardboard cartons, alongside boxfuls of dormant tap handles.
Most businesses need to be more selective. Recently, I was allowed to sit in on a meeting between Dogfish Head Craft Brewery’s Sam Calagione, a partner in Manhattan’s recently-opened Birreria brewpub, and the managerial staff as they plotted beer orders. The group poured over a printout listing units sold over the past month for 35 brands: house-brewed and guest beers, bottled and draft. Written next to each were comments like “sold three 50-liter kegs in five days,” “spikes depending on crowd,” “failed to sell well.” Calagione says he’s a proponent of “craft beer Darwinism”: “If a beer is doing well, award the brewery with another tap to see how it goes.”
Birreria, perched on the fifteenth story of a high-rise cater-corner from Manhattan’s famous Flatiron Building, attracts a young, adventurous, well-heeled crowd who are willing to pay $10 a pint for house beers like the chestnut mild and thyme pale ale, and as much as $38 a bottle for some of the specialty imports from Calagione’s Italian partners in the venture. “People want a back story here. They want to have fun,” remarks general manager Allen Arthur.
