The cover of the September 2013 issue of All About Beer Magazine.

Chief Oshkosh Red Lager was about to go national. It had found a distribution and marketing partner, and was ready to bust out of Wisconsin. Jeff Fulbright, the founder and president of the brewing company behind Chief Oshkosh, Mid-Coast Brewing, excitedly placed the beer in a spectrum that showed both his ambition and confidence.

“The West Coast has Anchor Steam beer, and the East Coast has Samuel Adams beer,” Fulbright said in a statement. “Through this union, we have created a company that has the strength to distinguish our line of beers as a dominant Midwestern representative of the rapidly growing microbeer segment.”

The idea for Fulbright’s company was born of the larger craft beer movement in the late 1980s and 1990s, right before it entered its period of greatest growth. Information still traveled primarily over the telephone or by word of mouth; and it was at a Great American Beer Festival in Denver in the late 1980s that Fulbright ran into Jim Koch of the Boston Beer Co., which itself had gone national a few years before.

Fulbright, then in his mid-30s, with bushy brown hair and a moustache to match, told Koch of his idea to revive the Chief Oshkosh brand in his native Wisconsin. He had checked on the trademark: It was available. The beer had been brewed until 1971 by the Oshkosh Brewing Co., one of many regionals that collapsed amid the post-World War II consolidation in the brewing industry.

Oshkosh Brewing itself had been formed by the 1894 consolidation of three Oshkosh-based breweries nervous about competition from Schlitz and Pabst in nearby Milwaukee, according to Lee Reiherzer of the Oshkosh Beer blog, who first tracked down Fulbright’s story.

Koch suggested that Fulbright brew Chief Oshkosh under contract at an existing brewery, which was what Koch himself was doing for his fast-selling Samuel Adams Boston Lager. Fulbright took Koch’s suggestion back to the Midwest, where he studied brewing at the Siebel Institute in Chicago and incorporated the Mid-Coast Brewing Co. in May 1991.

Its signature beer would be a red lager that Fulbright devised at Siebel and brewed at the Stevens Point Brewery, a regional 70 miles northwest of Oshkosh.

Chief Oshkosh Red Lager hit the local Milwaukee market in 1991, retailing for $3.99 a six-pack. Fulbright lined up coverage on three TV stations in Wisconsin as well as in the consumer and trade media. He reached out to legendary critic Michael Jackson personally as well as to this magazine—Jackson praised the beer for an “unapologetic, robust sweetness” and All About Beer said it was “just delightful.” Distributors signed on, and by the end of 1992, Chief Oshkosh would spread statewide, with those plans to go national following quickly after.

The craft beer was already a hit, when, on June 17, 1991, a Monday, Fulbright hosted a formal unveiling for about 45 people at the Oshkosh Hilton. He and volunteers poured the red lager from cans.

That’s right: cans.

Surprised?

You’re forgiven. The history of canning in American craft beer is drenched in myths. For instance, ask most industry experts, including the brewers themselves, and they would date the advent of craft-beer canning to late 2002, when Dale Katechis decided to can all his Oskar Blues brands, particularly his signature Dale’s Pale Ale. Oskar Blues, out of tiny Lyons, CO, is considered to be the first American craft brewery to can its own beers.

But it wasn’t the first American craft beer sold in a can. (And it wasn’t the first in North America, for that matter, to can its own beers, with that honor belonging to Yukon Gold in Canada’s Yukon Territory in 2001.) Chief Oshkosh Red Lager predates Dale’s Pale Ale by 11 years, as do at least four other domestic offerings: Pete’s Summer Brew from Pete’s Brewing, Wisconsin Amber from Capital Brewery, Brewski Brewing’s Brewski Beer and Iron Range Amber Ale from James Page Brewing—all hit shelves, either regionally or nationally, before 1999, though each was canned on contract by larger companies.

For Fulbright, the decision to can in 1991 was purely economic, and he was not aware that he was unique in craft beer. “I just saw it was the only means to an end because, well, I won’t say how little money we started with,” Fulbright told All About Beer in April. He estimates that the total was “way under $100,000.”

His decision to can might have saved him an estimated penny per ounce, according to a source familiar with beer packaging. Canning manufacturers, then and now, typically demand minimum orders of several thousand cans. Fulbright was soon producing 2,000 barrels annually—or roughly 660,000 12-ounce cans. He poured the savings from canning into marketing as well as into ingredients that were rare, even for craft beer, including Belgian Caramunich malt, which gave Chief Oshkosh its reddish hue.

Chief Oshkosh would not survive the decade, doomed by a distribution battle with Miller, which by 1993 was aggressively pushing a red lager through Leinenkugel, the Wisconsin regional it acquired five years before. Fulbright’s distribution would grow to 13 states, but it wasn’t enough: In 1994, Mid-Coast Brewing and the last cans of Chief Oshkosh disappeared from shelves. Most of the other craft beer brands in cans would also fold before or soon after the turn of the century under similar pressure brought on in large part by the national breweries (only Capital Brewery remains).

That left Oskar Blues, starting in 2002, to loose the ongoing trend of craft brewers, small and large, canning their beers. The number of craft breweries canning at least some of their beers has increased at least 28,400 percent in the last decade. The biggest addition to this canning roster came in February, when Boston Beer Co. announced it would begin canning its iconic Samuel Adams Boston Lager.

The announcement, however, by chairman Jim Koch, Jeff Fulbright’s informal adviser all those years ago, only added to the myths about craft beer in cans.

The Big Line

Koch’s announcement was front-page news in The Boston Globe. The Feb. 17 article began by framing the decision to can in revolutionary terms—with a capital R: “The project’s code name—Bunker Hill—hinted at the formidable challenge Boston Beer Co. faced: could the craft brewery that revolutionized American beer put its Sam Adams lager in a can without sacrificing the taste millions of consumers expect with every sip?”

Koch’s main concern about canning, according to the article, was that the metal might ruin the taste of his beer, never mind harm consumers’ health. It’s a concern that has dogged canned beer for decades. Fulbright confronted it from retailers and consumers in the early 1990s, and Katechis faced the same questions a decade later.

While some consumers say they taste a difference between canned and bottled beers, the science suggests any difference is in their heads.

Aluminum cans, for one, have been lined for decades with a coating between the metal and liquid. Ball Corp., the nation’s largest can manufacturer and Boston Beer’s partner on its new can, said through a spokesman that it and other manufacturers have been lining since “at least back to 1970 or so for aluminum cans when they were introduced, and even earlier for steel beverage cans.”

Had aluminum cans lacked such lining, it’s unlikely canned beer—canned anything, really—would have taken hold in the marketplace: Over time, the aluminum would have poisoned one consumer after another. As it stands, hundreds of millions have consumed beer from aluminum cans and lived to tell about it.

“The mythology is that cans used to suck because they didn’t have lining and now cans are lined,” said Jaime Gordon, technical sales representative for canning-machine manufacturer Cask Brewing Systems. “It’s a misperception—cans have always been lined. If they weren’t lined you wouldn’t be able to drink out of them.”

Controlled studies have further shown the lack of aluminum seepage into beer. In March 2008, the Health Ministry of Canada, where canned craft beer was born, examined the presence of bisphenol A (BPA) in different canned beers, including Stella Artois and Heineken (though no American craft-beer brands). BPA is an industrial chemical often used in the lining of metal cans as well as plastic containers like water bottles. Too much BPA can be unhealthy, especially for infants.

The Canadian study concluded that aluminum cans allowed minuscule amounts of BPA to seep into beer, not enough to be unhealthy, suggesting that modern cans keep aluminum out of beer but that the lining keeping it out stays away, too. In fact, the same study showed higher amounts of BPA in some canned soft drinks like Diet 7Up and Mountain Dew than in the canned beers.

Still, the myth persists that aluminum affects the beer—and that the single biggest technical, never mind mental, leap for any craft brewer wishing to can remains separating metal from beer.

“A lot of times people say, ‘Oh, yeah, they’ve got these new cans, with new lining,’” said Brian O’Reilly, brewmaster at Sly Fox Brewery in Pottstown, PA, which in April became the first craft brewery to sell beer in cans with completely removal tops, a technology from Crown Holdings Inc. “It’s not like craft breweries jumped on canning just because the lining was good; it’s always been good.”

Green and Green

To hear an early pioneer like Katechis tell it, or a relative latecomer like Koch, the decision to can for a craft brewer arises largely with two goals in mind.

The first is consumer mobility. That is, craft brewers want their customers to be able to cart their brands to the softball diamond, the campground, the shore and other places where glass can be problematic. Here was then-Oskar Blues brewmaster Brian Lutz in a Modern Brewery Age Q-and-A shortly after the 2002 launch of canned Dale’s Pale Ale: Cans “make it easier for outdoor enthusiasts to take great beer into the back country, in the canoe, the ski pack, anywhere they want to.” And here was The Boston Globe in 2013 on Koch’s announcement: “[T]he plans are to roll out cans of Sam’s Boston Lager and Summer Ale in time for beach-cooler weather.”

However concerned craft brewers might be for consumers’ beer mobility, the single greatest driver of the canning trend has been what drove Jeff Fulbright’s decision more than 20 years ago: economics. Once the right equipment came along, it proved a lot cheaper for craft brewers to can than to bottle.

In 1999, Calgary, Alberta-based Cask Brewing Systems introduced a small, manual machine that could can two 12-ounce beers; it cost no more than $10,000 at a time when even used canning machines routinely sold in the six figures. The machine was originally aimed at brew-on-premises retailers; when that trend fizzled, Cask turned to craft brewers. Oskar Blues was its first American client.

The brewery’s success in cans was undeniable. Its Dale’s Pale Ale bested 23 other pale ales in a blind taste test run by New York Times critic Eric Asimov in 2005; and three years before that, Oskar Blues signed a deal with Denver-based Frontier Airlines to carry Dale’s on all fights—a decision, Frontier noted, based in part on the lighter packaging. (Lest another myth arise, Oskar Blues was not the first canned craft beer carried on a domestic airline: In the late 1990s, Continental carried Pete’s Summer Brew and Northwest carried James Page.)

Consumer mobility aside, canning can affect the mobility of a distributor, which can, in turn, affect the bottom line of brewers. According to a source familiar with beer distribution, the typical truckload of 20 pallets of 12-ounce bottles translates roughly to 54 to 60 cases; 20 pallets of 12-ounce cans, however, can total 72 to 84 cases.

The second goal driving craft-canning decisions, to hear most brewers tell it, arises from environmental concerns. Cans, simply put, are easier and cheaper to recycle than bottles. And the fact that distributors are able to ship more cans at a time than bottles can cut the amount of carbon emissions associated with transporting beer.

Canning, though, does have its dark side environmentally: namely, bauxite mining to get at the mineral precursor to aluminum called alumina. Bauxite mining entails leveling large areas of land and then drilling down (or detonating down, as the surface demands) to get at the alumina.

The process is akin to strip-mining for coal. As the New Belgium Brewing Co., which began canning popular brands like Fat Tire Pale Ale in 2008, advises on its website, consumers interested in having the lowest environmental impact should “drink draft beer out of a reusable cup.”

The Greatest Myth

As of May, 2013, 285 craft brewers were canning 956 beers covering 80 styles, according to CraftCans.com, a site that tracks the trend. Lagunitas Brewing Co. was not one of them.

In an email to All About Beer, the brewery’s founder, Tony Magee, said that concerns over the environmental impact of canning—including what happens to the can linings when recycled—had contributed to his decision to not follow the trend. (He also questioned the emphasis on canning as an environmental fix when few breweries try to curb the effects of that most prevalent of greenhouse gases, which is that most copious byproduct of fermentation: carbon dioxide.)

“It’s like if someone made a blanket statement that only lager beers were truly pure,” Magee said of the cans vs. bottles environmental debate. “There’s an implication that there were impurities in ales. It’s the things that didn’t get said that were the most important elements in evaluation.”

Perhaps this is the biggest myth, then, in craft-beer canning: that the trend’s upward arc is an inevitable one. There are major holdouts—Lagunitas is the sixth-biggest craft brewery by sales volume, according to the latest Brewers Association figures. And bottling seems to be inescapably entwined with American craft beer. Two cases in point: Jeff Fulbright began bottling Chief Oshkosh Red Lager as soon as he could, in June 1992; and the man who inspired him to start his own beer line, Jim Koch, allowed Whitbread, under license, to can his cream ale sold in the United Kingdom from 1996 to 1999.

Production was “modest,” according to Boston Beer.

With the influx of new craft breweries on the scene comes an even greater number of consumer choices, whether it’s the local nanobrewer opening up nearby or a new production facility packaging up specialty offerings and distributing across the country. The shape of what’s ahead (we can probably safely rule out the above übernanobrewery-in-every-garage theory) remains unknown but rather encouraging. It’s been repeatedly suggested by distributors, by craft-beer veterans—by folks with money on the table, in other words—that craft beer is likely headed for 10-15-plus percent market share, at least in due time. (It’s currently around a modest 6 percent.) What would that future beer scene look like?

Long term, it’s anyone’s guess. But perhaps one might gain at least a glimpse of what craft beer’s future holds by looking at faint trends that have already appeared on the horizon. Over the past five years or so, a vibrant group of successful, highly specialized craft breweries—dedicating themselves to Belgian-style ales, or German-style lagers, or “farm-to-bottle beer,” or barrel aging, or Brettanomyces—suggests that future growth, in part, may very well be found within craft beer’s underexplored niches.

King Brett

While it really only gets easier for beer consumers to benefit from the industry’s growth, the flip side is that these up-and-coming breweries face increasing competition: for shelf space at retailers, for tap space at bars, for distribution and even for brewing equipment. Brewers are frequently indicating lengthy lead times for new equipment orders or (just as often) a lack of readily available used equipment. Supply and demand fluctuates, of course, as manufacturers and secondhand markets attempt to adjust to how fast the industry is changing.

Another major constraint is ingredients, says Paul Gatza, director of the Brewers Association: “If you were trying to start up now and you don’t have a contract for your hops and you’re thinking you’re going to make this killer Cascade IPA, you may not be able to get Cascade for a year until you’re able to contract for the next growing season.” Whether hops or fermentation tanks, supplies are still limited.

One way to avoid some of these constraints is to take paths less-traveled, assuming a different artist tack. Gabe Fletcher, who established a loyal following during his 13-year stint at Midnight Sun Brewing Co. in Anchorage, AK, launched his own brewery, Anchorage Brewing Co., in June 2011 with the telling motto of “Where brewing is an art & Brettanomyces is king.” Anchorage Brewing focuses almost completely on beers fermented with Brettanomyces.

Fletcher’s new operation is currently situated in a concrete warehouse directly underneath the Sleeping Lady Brewing Co. The warehouse contains wooden foeders for aging some of his beers, and his brewing arrangement involves renting Sleeping Lady’s equipment to produce wort before pumping the unfermented liquid into his rented warehouse for multistage fermentation.

By focusing on a yeast-driven approach, Fletcher manages to circumvent some of the ingredient constraints felt by many of the more traditional brewers. Yeasts are comparatively easy to obtain and propagate. Anchorage kegs very little, overhead’s kept to a minimum, and Fletcher’s lineup—including offerings such as Whiteout Wit Bier (triple-fermented and aged in French Chardonnay barrels), Bitter Monk (a Belgian-style double IPA, also with Brett) and Galaxy White IPA (bottled with Brett)—is positioned upon far less-frequented territory.

Speaking of Sleeping Lady’s brewing approach, Fletcher comments, “They would be more of a general [approach]. You know, your IPA, your stout, your pale ale, amber, golden: kind of the core beers a lot of microbreweries go with. But they’ll also do some other really interesting stuff, too: some other Belgians, imperial stouts, barley wines. … But nothing with Brett, no sour beers, and that’s kind of why the owner was OK with me starting downstairs, because [Anchorage Brewing] didn’t compete with their business at all.”

The Galaxy White IPA is what Fletcher has typically made the most of, as its time in production (about three months) is short relative to some of the other Anchorage beers, which can take up to a year and a half from start to finish. That first release of Galaxy, procured early on, showed juicy tropical-fruit hop character and a modest Brett contribution of citrus, along with a mild peppery firmness from peppercorn additions and witbier yeast.

It will gradually show a lessened hop presence with time in the bottle, while the Brettanomyces will continue to develop and take over: a temporal transition Fletcher is artistically drawn to. “It just turns into a completely different beer. I like the journey.”

In his previous position at Midnight Sun, Fletcher had been experimenting with sour beer cultures before 2007, but it wasn’t until then that things started to click. “In ’07, I made a beer called Pride [a Belgian-style strong pale ale]. And that beer sort of changed everything for me as far as working with Brett and figuring out how to make beers taste good through that whole process. I was really, really happy with that beer, and then after that I just kept on adding [Brett] beers to the list that we did until I left. … I guess I sort of saw the niche in the market, and I saw how it was growing. And there were some people doing it, but they weren’t doing it on a big-enough scale to fill much of the market.

“There was never a market before this, you know? Like, 10 years ago, you could sell a little bit of this kind of stuff, but nowhere near what it is now. And people, man, their palates are just so different now.”

Things have been progressing well for Fletcher, both in terms of a planned expansion and consumer response. In January 2012, the beer-reviewing website RateBeer.com (which, in full disclosure, I work for) named Anchorage Brewing Co. the top new brewer in the world for 2011, as ranked by the site’s users.

Better Bitters

It’s important to emphasize that brewers have effectively been filling niches for centuries, and, from our vantage point in the U.S., perhaps the vast majority of foreign breweries might feel like niche breweries if they were suddenly relocated to American soil. (The inverse might be rather less true, as this country’s craft beer scene has, for a multitude of reasons, generally tended to dabble in and sample from the older, established beer cultures abroad.) But it’s less a question of clear-cut categorization than it is something far more pragmatic: In competitive and well-developed craft beer scenes, how does a talented brewer manage to open up a new brewery without getting lost in the crowd?

Having recently researched and published a beer guide to Northern California, I can at least confidently speak to how things are taking shape in this section of the country. This region is home to breweries like Anchor Brewing, Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., Russian River Brewing Co., Bear Republic Brewing Co., Lost Coast Brewery, North Coast Brewing Co., Lagunitas Brewing Co., Marin Brewing Co., Moylan’s Brewery and so forth. One doesn’t simply walk into NorCal with a mediocre IPA. So many of the new breweries and breweries-in-planning here are doing one of three things: (1) opening up small-scale brewpubs or tasting rooms in cities that don’t yet have a local, (2) going the low-overhead contract or alternating proprietorship route (see sidebar), and/or (3) launching with a focused, underrepresented niche lineup.

One of these new local niche breweries is Dying Vines in Oakland, which opened in November 2010 and produces its English-minded lineup of session beers out of Linden Street Brewery, with which it maintains a close relationship. Kel Alcala, managing partner at Dying Vines Brewing, was also recently named head brewer at Linden Street, such that Alcala now oversees both breweries’ production.

“Whereas people refer to us as gypsy brewers and have that kind of moniker,” Alcala says, “for us it has always been that single drive to keep everything as tightly in-house as possible, and working with Linden Street [and founder Adam Lamoreaux] in particular, knowing that we’re going to make each batch as consistent as possible.” (Linden Street, in a similar vein, focuses entirely on brewing “Old California Lagers,” as they’ve termed them: effectively, pre-Prohibition steam beer.) In many ways, these brewing approaches can be seen as a throwback to equipment-driven realities. “Traditionally, English breweries are single-infusion, you know,” Alcala says. “You mix your grain and your water, you let it sit, you run it off, you collect it.” Similarly, a German brewery was traditionally set up to handle the step and decoction mashes specific to brewing those styles. Belgium: similar deal.

“There’s a lot of breweries over in Belgium that are cast-iron mash tuns, I mean old-school equipment that definitely imparts a different type of flavor, much more rustic-type flavor, and to have a linear production facility [like some of the U.S.-based brewers that occasionally dabble in Belgian styles] that’s all geared toward just whipping beer, and then try and do an artisanal style, … it kind of does a disservice.” While these limitations aren’t often appreciated or always noticed on the consumer level, a brewer’s system and equipment often strongly influence the beer styles that brewer can do well.

Skeptical? The devil’s habitually in the details, but consider the following: For the last two years, the Great American Beer Festival Small Brewing Company of the Year Award has gone to exactly these types of breweries: Chuckanut Brewery in 2011 (which opened in 2008 brewing German styles) and Funkwerks in 2012 (which opened in late 2010, with a focus on Belgian saisons). At Dying Vines, Alcala is brewing up beers like Old Brick Bitter and Dee’z English Mild that are atypically precise for American attempts at English-style ales. “When I have a person who grew up in England … come over here and tell me that this is the first proper pint of bitter they’ve had since they left home,” Alcala reflects, “it’s a good feeling.”

House of Barrels

Another Bay Area brewery (one that hasn’t even officially opened yet, as of this writing) will also rely on the excess brewing capacity of its neighbors. But it won’t be an alternating proprietorship. Nor can it really be considered a contract brewery. The Rare Barrel, opening up on the western side of Berkeley later this year, will be something else entirely.

Jay Goodwin, The Rare Barrel’s director of blending and brewing, previously served as head of barrel aging at The Bruery before venturing out on his own. With partners Alex Wallash and Brad Goodwin, he’ll be spearheading this ambitious approach to a barrel-aging-focused “beer company,” which will be more along the lines of Belgian lambic blenders than anything resembling a conventional American brewhouse. Two hundred and five red wine barrels from Central California already fill their warehouse, and they’re currently working out the final details with the local breweries they’ll be partnering with to provide them with unfermented wort.

The general concept: Create wort at local breweries with room to spare, truck it back to their warehouse in stainless-steel tanks (via a 16-foot box truck, as often used in wineries), and then handle the fermentation, conditioning, sampling, blending and packaging of a wide range of sour beers onsite. They hope to release their first beers by late 2013, predominantly packaged in 750 ml bottles and initially self-distributed throughout the Bay Area.

Their approach not only affords them the ability to avoid various upfront equipment costs (pattern alert!), but it also gives them the freedom to focus on a less-charted element of brewing that most other breweries tend to do as a side project. “If we focus all of our efforts on sour beer,” Wallash says, “we feel like we will have a better understanding of how to make it and overall, in the long run, make a better product than if we were to spread our production efforts out across a number of different things.”

The aphorism “constraints breed creativity” was something Goodwin mentions as a sort of premise underlying all of this, and that tends to ring true not only within the context of The Rare Barrel, but also for many of these other niche breweries as well. The saying “Jack of all trades, master of none” didn’t happen to come up—but it certainly could have.

Conceptual Art

One further way in which these new, niche-minded craft breweries are coming into focus is showcased by San Francisco’s Almanac Beer Co., which adds a more concept-minded approach to the above group. Jesse Friedman and Damian Fagan launched Almanac in 2010, with their “farm-to-bottle beer” embodying the motto “Beer is Agriculture.” In many ways, Almanac is taking the locally minded ideals of craft beer closer to their logical conclusion.

“The real core idea,” Friedman explains, “is that beer is traditionally made with dried ingredients that can easily be transported and stored. And the result is that it really divorces beer from a sense of place and a sense of, to pull from wine vocabulary, a sense of terroir. By collaborating with local farms, local agriculture systems, we really try and create beers with a culinary point of view, … a real sense of place and the idea that these beers are tied to the Northern California agricultures, and if you made these beers somewhere else with different ingredients, they would not be the same.”

Producing its beers at Hermitage Brewing Co. in San Jose (there’s a trend here, and especially so in the Bay Area), Almanac recently launched two year-round “California table beers”: a honey saison brewed with local honey from Marshall Farms and an extra pale ale incorporating mandarin oranges from Blossom Bluff Orchards in the San Joaquin Valley. They also showcase California-grown barley and hops throughout.

It’s an approach that’s been particularly well-matched to the culinary mindset around the Bay Area, allowing Almanac to place its bottled products in higher-end restaurants that often use the same purveyors that supply these beers’ special ingredients. While occasionally exemplified in similar approaches, like Fullsteam’s “plow-to-pint” mindset in North Carolina, it’s an uncommon brewing philosophy that pairs nicely with craft beer’s recently culinary push.

Friedman put the idea of niche brewing into an effective parallel with concepts well beyond craft beer. “Nintendo’s CEO, when they created the Wii,” he recalls, “talked about what they called their ‘blue ocean’ strategy. What that referred to is that there are two types of ocean: There’s red ocean and blue ocean. Red ocean is red because it’s [filled] with sharks fighting over the same area. And blue ocean is blue because there’s no one there.”

It will be interesting to see how many more new breweries favor this safer approach, particularly as the craft beer industry continues to grow more congested. I’ll be lounging out in the blue waters, should anyone need anything. Because to understand these niche brewers, and the ones that will soon follow, is to know why our beer options have never been better.

He didn’t offer a long list of adjectives about their flavor, simply stating they were “the finest and most aromatic hops grown.” Spalt Spalter, as they are known today, likely hadn’t changed much since 1511, when the town banned the export of highly sought-after hop cuttings, nor have they since. One difference that Hans Zeiner, manager of the Spalt hop growers association and a farmer himself, has noticed is requests from brewers for hops picked later, so they are richer in essential oils.

“The brewers want different hops. Some want a greener hop; some want a hop that is a bit more mature. It is about the aroma, the aroma they want.” He cautioned against waiting too long. “If it’s too old, the aroma is not so fine anymore. The aroma has changed, but I cannot say how it changed.” In Spalt “fine” seems to be the only adjective necessary.

Contrast that with a different sort of description from John Mallett, production manager at Bell’s Brewery in Michigan. Mallett spoke at a seminar during the 2012 Craft Brewers Conference in San Diego, along with other members of the Hop Quality Group, recently formed because these brewers recognize the need for better communication with American hop growers. Mallett quite obviously was referring to Bell’s own highly hopped Hopslam, a double IPA, when he explained the importance of telling farmers the sort of flavors and aromas brewers want.

“(Imagine) if you’d gone to the hop growers association 20 years ago and said, I’m going to have a beer that we make 4,000 barrels of one time a year,” he said. “It flies off the shelf at damn near $20 a six-pack, and you know what it smells like? It smells like your cat ate your weed and then pissed in the Christmas tree.”

John Mallett of Bell’s Brewery is a member of the Hop Quality Group, which recognizes the need for better communication with American hop growers.

The adjectives used to characterize hop flavor in beers today obviously include more than “fine.” For instance, there’s catty, polite language for cat piss; and dank, slang for potent marijuana. They reflect that more than a few consumers now embrace pungent, intense flavors considered offensive not long ago. But they also describe aromas such as pine, pineapple, grapefruit, tangerine, melon, mango, lychee, passion fruit, gooseberries, blueberries, stone fruits . . . even Lifesavers and sauvignon blanc.

The Barth-Haas Group, the world’s largest supplier of hop products, recently suggested that hops producing such unique flavors be called, logically enough, “flavor” (or “flavour”) hops. This is a bit confusing for Americans familiar with the brewing process. They understand that brewers boil hops, usually those with a higher percentage of alpha acids, for an extended period to extract bittering iso-alpha acids, and those hops are classified “bittering” or “alpha” hops. Because essential oils are lost during boiling, to preserve them brewers wait until later in the process to introduce “aroma” hops. Sometime between adding the hops for bitterness and those for aroma, they may include a “flavor” addition. This might result in floral and spicy notes found for hundreds of years, or the bolder new flavors of today.

To avoid any confusion, the Society of Hop Research in Germany more recently adopted the label of “Special Flavor Hops”  for varietals bred to exhibit attributes previously considered “un-hoppy.” Peter Darby, who oversees hop breeding in Great Britain, refers to them as “impact hops,” while others simply refer to them as “special.” That many drinkers want these new flavors is clear. Why some hops deliver them and others do not is not.

What Makes American Hops Different

Hops add many positive attributes to beer, most notably aroma and flavor, the latter a result of what’s experienced in the mouth, including bitterness. The chemistry involved in bitterness is relatively well understood. Not so with aroma. More than 20 years ago, two researchers in Oregon proposed establishing an Aroma Unit (AU) comparable to the International Bitterness Unit (IBU). They intended that brewers would use their Hop Aroma Component Profiles, which identified 22 specific compounds, along with the AU, much as they would use the alpha acid content of a particular variety to adjust hopping rates. Since the 1960s “scientists have tried to identify the compound responsible for hoppy character in beer without success. Hoppy aroma in beer is probably not attributable to a single component but rather to the synergistic effect of several compounds,” they wrote in 1992.

Hop scientists have learned much since then, but that statement remains frustratingly valid. J.L. Hanin first used steam distillation to isolate hop oils in 1819, and later in the century Alfred Chapman isolated the key compounds myrcene, humulene, linalool, lynalyl-isonate, geraniol and diterpene. After the introduction of gas chromatography in the 1950s, researchers soon identified more than 400 compounds. The contribution many of them make is not clear because they occur at low levels, individually below perception thresholds. Synergy may change that.

Twenty-first century discoveries have brought some elements into focus. In 2003 Toru Kishimoto at the Asahi Breweries  research laboratory in Japan, determined a compound called 4-mercapto-4-methylpentan-2-one (otherwise referred to as 4MMP) is a main contributor to muscat grape/black currant character apparently unique to hops of American heritage. It has a low odor threshold and occurs naturally in grapes, wine, green tea and grapefruit juice. Hops grown in the New World, including New Zealand and Australia as well as the United States, contain 4MMP and other compounds observed only at trace levels in hops grown in England and on the European continent.

Other researchers in Japan found several American varieties contained compounds that were transformed into limelike and other citrus flavors during fermentation, but that existed only at very low levels in European aroma hops.

Something obviously happened to European and American hop varieties during the course of at least 1 million years since they split from one another. The genus Humulus likely originated in Mongolia at least 6 million years ago. A European type diverged from that Asian group more than 1 million years ago; a North American group migrated from the Asian continent about 500,000 years later. Although three North American botanical varieties exist in the wild, scientists don’t agree on how much they differ from one another, but they clearly are genetically unlike the Europeans. Virtually all hops cultivated today either are direct descendants of European types selected for their brewing and agronomic qualities, also known as landrace hops, are European varieties crossbred to improve those brewing and agronomic qualities, or are a cross between European and American varieties.

That last category didn’t exist until 1917, when E.S. Salmon of Wye College in England took a hop collected in the Manitoban wild, and thus obviously native American, and pollinated it with English hops. Today, every hop in demand for exotic, fruity flavors is such a cross.

Consider Citra, the poster child for special flavors. Descriptors of its aroma include grapefruit, lime, citrus, gooseberry, tropical fruits, lychee, melon and sauvignon blanc winelike. It is half Hallertau Mittelfrüh, a German landrace variety often referred to as “noble”; one-quarter U.S. Tettnanger, which is in fact the English landrace variety Fuggle; 19 percent Brewer’s Gold, one of the first hops to result from the crosses Salmon made in 1917; 3 percent East Kent Goldings, another English landrace variety; and 3 percent unknown, which might well be—like Brewer’s Gold—influenced by American wild hops.

(View a graphic on the future of Citra)

Hop Oils and the Magic of Biotransformation

When brewers talk about hops, they actually mean the cones of a female hop plant. Hop oils constitute up to 4 percent of those cones, but more often much less. The four most prominent are myrcene, caryophyllene, humulene and farnesene. The first is a monoterpene, meaning it consists of 10 carbon units, while the latter are sesquiterpenes (15 carbon units). Myrcene has a green, herbaceous, resinous aroma associated with fresh hops and not always considered desirable.

It often constitutes 50 percent or more of the oils in American cultivars. Most of its aroma will disappear during boiling, but it can be prominent in dry-hopped beers because it has a low perception threshold on average. People’s perceptions of aromas, in fact, vary widely, presenting another challenge for all seeking to understand hop aroma. The prominent oils in hops are found in many other plants, and in the case of myrcene these include thyme, lemongrass, verbena, pistachio and fruits such as mango and grapefruit.

In their oxygenated form, sesquiterpenes are more likely to survive boiling, resulting in herbal and spicy aromas also described as “fine” or “noble.” Farnesene, for instance, makes a distinct floral contribution to beers hopped with Saaz. It often constitutes less than 1 percent of oils in bred hops but up to 20 percent in Saaz. One specific caryophyllene alcohol compound, an oxidation product, may add a very strong cedar wood note many describe, again, as “noble.” However, as much as half of the drinking population may be blind to this particular compound. Floral, mildly woody, spicy are qualities that not long ago almost exclusively defined pleasant hop aroma. They remain desirable today, but may be overwhelmed by the addition of hops—particularly bold hops—late in the boil or post-fermentation.

As a hop ripens, many other monoterpenes form along with myrcene, including linalool, geraniol, nerol, citronellol and limonene. Although their presence is often measured in tenths of a percent, they are essential to producing citrus, fruity, floral and woody aromas, whether through synergy or interaction with yeast.

Research in Japan points to the importance of the physical interaction and biotransformations that take place in the presence of yeast. In one study, scientists investigated how geraniol and citronellol, accompanied by an excess of linalool, contribute to citrus aromas and flavors. Focusing on the Citra hop, they sought to identify the key flavor compounds contributing to the aromas specific to the variety—including passion fruit, gooseberries and lychee.

They brewed one beer with only Citra hops and another with Hallertau Tradition and coriander seeds. Both Citra and coriander are rich in geraniol and linalool. The finished Citra beer contained not only those two oils but also citronellol, which had been converted from geraniol during fermentation. The same transformation from geraniol into citronellol occurred during fermentation of the beer made with coriander. Taste panels perceived the beers as relatively similar.

The same researchers followed with another study that compared the composition of monoterpene alcohols in various hops and examined the behavior of geraniol and citronellol under different hopping regimens. They concluded that blending geraniol-rich hops increased the amount of geraniol and citronellol in beer, and that this enhanced citrus character. They determined that hops more easy to find in the market, in this case Apollo and Bravo, could produce aromas similar to hops in short supply.

Still another study in Japan pointed to just how complex sorting out the variables can be. In that one, scientists examined the changes in hop-related compounds during the fermentation process, finding that keeping everything else the same and changing only the yeast strain resulted in noticeably different hop aromas.

Such results illustrate the need for still more research.

Oregon hop merchant Indie Hops, founded only in 2009, pledged more than $1 million for what can broadly be described as aroma research at Oregon State University. “Our ultimate goal is to determine what is it in hop oil that drives flavor,” said Thomas Shellhammer, who is in charge of the brewing science education and research programs at OSU. Shaun Townsend, an OSU faculty member who heads the breeding aspect of the partnership with the Indie Hops, would then use the information to develop cultivars with particular oil profiles.

Meanwhile, There’s Alchemy

Greater understanding of the hop aroma and flavor matrix doesn’t automatically make it easier to integrate bolder hop aromas and flavors into the larger beer flavor matrix. Patrick Ting, for 30 years a hop chemist at Miller (and MillerCoors) before recently retiring, pointed out it is a mistake for brewers to try to equate specific oils with specific odor compounds. “You can’t say we’ll add a little bit of this, a little bit of that,” he said.

Although hop aroma remains something of a black box, brewers find ways on what seems a daily basis to maximize these new flavors. Given a chance to brew with two of the new German “Special Flavor Hops” early in 2012, Bear Republic Brewing brewmaster Richard Norgrove started with a base best described as a wheat wine. He blended Mandarina Bavaria and Polaris in a ratio of 60 to 40 or 40 to 60, depending on the addition, making one at the beginning of a 90-minute boil, one with 60 minutes remaining, one with 40, and then dry hopping with the pair.

“I like to do a lot of blending, maybe change the way the oils come across,” he said. He talked in terms of abstract art versus portrait art, probably because he paints with watercolors himself. “With watercolors you dilute or strengthen the vibrancy of color by the way you use water.”

Dry hopping may eliminate one bit of the mystery for brewers, because post-fermentation hopping preserves much of the aroma in a freshly kilned hop. However, the translation is not direct, and Sierra Nevada brewmaster Steve Dresler said that can be good for his beer. The brewery has learned if yeast is not still active at the beginning of dry hopping, some odor compounds will not develop. “We don’t get the same floral estery notes in some other beers if we use the torpedo [dry hopping] process simply cold without yeast contact time,” he said.

Sierra Nevada literally invented its “torpedo,” a device packed with hops through which its brewers circulate beer after fermentation, to dry hop more efficiently. It uses Magnum (a high alpha hop rich in oil), Crystal and a restrained amount of Citra to dry hop Torpedo Extra IPA. “You can overbrew with Citra,” Dresler explained.

Once again, Citra is a poster child for the new. It can be divisive, and that’s likely part of its appeal. When Sierra Nevada began evaluating Citra about five years ago, men on the brewery’s tasting panel described tropical fruit flavors, while women called the same beer catty or said it reminded them of tomato plants. Women on average detect odors at much lower concentrations and are more likely to rate smells as more intense and unpleasant, but many men share an unfavorable perception of Citra.

Gene Probasco, who started the first American private breeding program at John I. Haas, oversaw the creation of Citra. “[The cross] was made for aroma,” he said, and at the time “mild” was a synonym for “good” when it came to aroma. That was 1990.

It was part of a project for a large brewery client, and nothing came of it. Two other large brewing companies essentially owned the rights, one after the other, to the hop during the next dozen years, but ultimately neither of them had a use for it. Only after the Hop Breeding Co. began sending samples to craft breweries was it recognized as special. That was 2008. Understanding why other equally special hops have the impact they do may take a little more time.

But, stop the world, I want to get off. There are still monks firing their mash tuns and kettles, continuing a tradition that was once the norm throughout the Christian world. Today, in Belgium, Trappist monks take time from their prayers to make small batches of ale of the highest quality, ales that are promoted by word-of-mouth, not advertising. To visit a Trappist brewery there is to take that journey back in time, when the pace of life was slower and more thoughtful, and the driving force was the pursuit of communal work, not commerce.

Brewing in the Dark Ages

In an age of global brands and mass advertising, it’s easy to forget that for centuries brewing was confined to the home and the church. The spread of Christianity dampened some of the wilder excesses of the Anglo-Saxon period as the church attempted to regulate drinking and to control the production of ale. Monasteries offered accommodation to travelers while the monks built their own brew houses to supply both pilgrims and priests. At a time when was water was unsanitary, vitamin-rich ale was an important part of the monks’ frugal diet. The usual ration in a monastery was eight pints a day of “small beer”—around 3 percent alcohol—for each monk. Production was prodigious. The malt house at Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire, northern England, was 60 square feet in size and the brewery made 60 barrels of ale every 10 days.

And the ale must have been of good quality. In 1158, the priest Thomas Becket, later to become Archbishop of Canterbury and famously murdered in his cathedral, took two chariot loads of ale with him on a diplomatic mission to France, “decocted from choice fat grain as a gift to the French who wondered at such an invention—a drink most wholesome, clear of all dregs, rivaling wine in color and surpassing it in savor.”

The power of the church in society and its near stranglehold on brewing was broken in the 16th century by two key figures in European history. King Henry VIII of England and Martin Luther in Germany were contemporaries, living from 1491 to 1547 and 1483 to 1546 respectively. Henry dissolved the monasteries because he needed the monks’ wealth to fill his depleted coffers while Luther set in motion the Reformation that led to the rise of Protestantism. In both countries, trade replaced feudal land ownership as the way of life. As a result, commercial brewing developed rapidly and the monks shuffled off the pages of history.

Sticking to Tradition

But in the countries that remained faithful to the old religion, change was far slower. In Bavaria, for example, now the southernmost region of Germany, the world’s oldest brewery is in the former monastery of Weihenstephan (Holy Stephen), which was not secularized until 1842. In Munich the Paulaner brewery, acclaimed for its bock beer, also remained in church hands until the 19th century. Monks at the Benedictine monasteries of Andechs and Weltenburg still brew, though they have adopted modern lagering techniques.

It’s in Belgium that the ancient tradition of ale brewing by monks still survives. The abbey of Westmalle, a few miles north of Antwerp, is one of six Trappist monasteries in the country that still make beer. The monks find that their exquisite ales are talked about and sought after by a growing number of discriminating drinkers throughout the world. Westmalle is especially highly regarded, as the abbey has given names to its main products—Dubbel and Tripel—that have become recognized styles. The abbey’s double and triple are frequently copied but rarely if ever surpassed.

The abbey’s full name is Our Beloved Lady of the Sacred Heart. An arrow-straight, narrow road from the village of Westmalle leads to the buildings half-hidden by tall elm trees that act as sentinels against the outside world. Away from the roar of traffic on the Antwerp-Turnhout road, you are struck by the silence and solemnity of the majestic abbey and its grounds. The only sound is birdsong. The word “stilte” (silence) appears on many doors—visitors are greeted by the monks with warm smiles and a finger to the lips.

Westmalle is, fundamentally, a place of worship and contemplation. The monks follow the simple edict of St. Benedict: ora et labora—pray and work. A few words are spoken to visitors but silence is the rule. It was a strange experience to eat both supper and breakfast without exchanging a word with my fellow diners. The atmosphere is quickly absorbed and I found myself tiptoeing down corridors and closing doors as though they were made of fragile glass.

One aspect of the abbey was familiar to me: the delicious aroma of toasted grain and yeast that told me beer was being made. At the rear of the abbey, the brewery stands in sharp contrast to the rest of the buildings. The characteristic symmetry and curves indicate that the brewery was designed and built in the 1930s in the Art Deco style of the time.

A switch is flicked, the lights return, the copper gleams and the brew house becomes, well, a brew house, albeit a brew house where one of the world’s greatest Trappist beers is produced. There’s obviously something about these beers and their provenance that inspires even the most secular-minded beer-lover to indulge in metaphysical deliberation.

Trappist beers are the original collaboration brews, an alliance forged between the sacred world of Cistercian monks and the profane one of commercial brewing. Westvleteren remains alone in being the sole brewery where the brothers still toil and oil the wheels of brewing, but at the rest of the seven Trappist breweries in the Low Countries, secular workers hold sway (though monks remain owners). And yet there is an aspect to brewing that mirrors the routine of prayer―cultivating and propagating the correct yeast strain, maintaining mashing temperature and using the best quality raw materials, all done day after day, brew after brew, with the preciseness of a ritual.

Which brings us neatly back to Orval. There has been brewing in this beautiful spot of southern Wallonia for centuries (the official name of the region is Gaume), though modern-day brewing only began in 1931 under the helm of a German master brewer called Pappenheimer. The brew house can be found in a large stone church-like structure standing on the corner of the road that runs round Abbaye D’Orval. The abbey itself is a cloistered and calm place, built in the 1920s, a massive monument to Art Deco overlooked by an imposing statue of the Virgin Mary. The original abbey was destroyed in the French Revolution and not rebuilt until after World War I―both ruins and modern abbey stand next to each other, a monastic display of the Christian belief in the resurrection perhaps. The whole complex is hidden away amongst lush woodland, a hideaway from the world―it’s one of the most tranquil brewing places I have ever visited.

“God’s homebrew,” is what British beerwriter Tim Webb called Orval. Yet as soon as we go through the gates (I’m with Stuart Howe, head brewer at English craft brewery Sharp’s), it’s clear that this is most definitely a place of work. A forklift truck wheels about, pallets stocked high. A clinking sound from somewhere in the building suggests the bottling line is working at full throttle. A couple of workers eye us as we wander in, they could be guys from any brewery in the world.

Rock of Ages

We’re here to see Orval’s current keeper of the flame, its brewmaster for the past quarter of a century, Jean-Marie Rock. As we survey a glass cabinet with various Orval curios from down the decades, Rock appears, almost out of nowhere, shrew-like features and twinkling eyes. He’s quiet and unassuming, walking with a monkish calm.

Beer runs through his life like a river to the sea. He started young, telling us that a jug of lambic was always on the table when he was growing up, “In the evening my sister and I would get a glass of it before going to bed.” Is it any wonder he became a brewer, which he has been for 39 years? Prior to joining Orval, he worked in Flanders at a large brewery, producing an everyday lager brand called Lamot.

“I came to the Gaume for a holiday,” he says, “and asked if I could visit Orval. One of the monks said that they were looking for a brewer, but I already had a job. Back from holiday I thought about it and then got in touch.” Such is his reputation that earlier in 2010 he brewed a collaboration brew with Steve Pauwels at Boulevard; the result was an imperial pilsner, though sadly we only get to see the empty bottle. He is now 62 and in 2007 received a long-awaited new brew house. This can produce 25,000 liters at any one time (approximately 214 U.S. barrels).

“The brew house is all automatic now,” he says, “the change was so big that people had to be taught how to use it when it was installed. A new brew house was essential as the old one was inefficient. I had been planning it for 20 years.” It cost $5 million and putting it in was a massive job; brewing had to be kept up while installation took place. “This was quite difficult. However, we only stopped brewing for two weeks.”

Founder and owner Richard Keene emerges from the barn to greet me. “Cold isn’t it?” I say, feeling the brisk eastern wind on my face. “All the better for the beer,” he replies as I follow him, his comment the first clue that this is not a regular real ale brewery. Inside the barn ancient wooden beams and bare red brick walls impose an air of antiquity, but the sight of a row of space-age stainless steel vessels is very much of the here and now.

At one end, standing on a shoulder high platform, sits a brace of what Keene calls the “cooking vessels,” the place where the beer is mashed and boiled before being pumped to gleaming conical fermenters that look like the sort of vessel James Cameron might send to the bottom of the ocean in search of the Titanic. The interior of the barn is perishing cold, suiting Keene and the beers he makes. They, contrary to what is expected from a rural microbrewery, are not the regular array of bitter, mild, golden ale and porter that 98 percent of British craft breweries major in. We might be in England, the home of real ale, but Cotswold is taking a different path. Think Bohemia, think Bavaria. Think English craft lager. Well-matured, bottom-fermented, cold-stored lager. Welcome to the revolution.

Keene grabs a tall, stemmed glass and walks over to one of the tanks. The word “Premium” and the date “3/2/10” are chalked onto a small blackboard (it was brewed four weeks before). He turns a tap and a light golden stream of beer arcs into the glass, rapidly being topped with a meringue-white collar of foam. The nose has a light, snappy, herbal note reminiscent of bitter lemon soda; in the mouth it is refreshing, crisp and retains more of that bitter lemon note without being tart; the finish is dry and bittersweet with some cracker-like graininess lingering. A refreshing, clean-tasting lager of the sort I have often enjoyed in Bohemia. “Time is of the essence,” says Keene. “This will have had three to four days fermentation and then four weeks maturation. Any shorter and it wouldn’t seem so mellow.” As if to prove a point we try a glass of the same beer, this one just two weeks old. This has a bigger bitter hit; it’s good but I prefer the older beer. “When I started at my first lager brewery,” says Keene “I could get away with less time, but here I don’t want to. If we got bigger I would invest in more vessels rather than compromise.”

Back to the Future

Keene’s sentiments are indicative of a small but growing band of British craft brewers who are applying themselves to producing lager with the same sense of quality as can be found in the most renowned lager breweries on the continent. Call it craft lager, real lager, micro-brewed lager, whatever, but these beers are closer in spirit, taste, commitment and quality to the likes of those produced by Primator, Herold and Löwenbräu-Buttenheim than the macro-brewed lagers that dominate the British market. This is a quiet revolution that currently only involves a handful of breweries, but these guys (and girls) are intent on changing people’s perceptions about what lager means; they’ve even set up a lobbying organisation called Lagers of the British Isles (LOBI).

Companies like Cotswold, Freedom and West are applying technology, innovation and craftsmanship to bring well-lagered pale (and dark) beer to the thinking drinking public. What is unique is that they are stand-alone lager breweries, for apart from the odd wheat beer, bottom fermentation and cold maturation over a period of at least four weeks minimum is the way to go. For the most part they are also small companies. West is a brewpub with attached restaurant based in a former 19th century factory in Glasgow. Freedom can be found in Burton-upon-Trent, having had several owners since its arrival on the London scene in the 1990s―it was originally close to the White Horse at Parsons Green and received early recognition from pub regular Michael Jackson. Keene started Cotswold in 2005 and now produces 3,000 hectolitres a year (“lager is nearly 70 percent of the beer market and when we started only a couple of micros were brewing it, so there was an obvious gap in the market!”).

Then there are the ale breweries such as Liverpool-based Cains and Scotland’s Harviestoun who brew a lager as part of their portfolio (both breweries muddy the water by producing “cask-conditioned” lagers). Over in Cornwall, the long-established family brewery St. Austell is also dipping its toes into the craft lager pool as its head brewer Roger Ryman explained about its forthcoming, but unnamed, lager: “From a purely commercial point of view, lager is an obvious gap in our portfolio, while from a brewing perspective, I want to do it just to prove that I can! We have not brewed a lager before so as a brewer it is a challenge to successfully brew and bring to market a new category of beer.”

Meanwhile, the craft lager pioneer is Meantime, based in the east London borough of Greenwich. Since its appearance in 2000, it has grown into the second largest London brewery and its beers have found favour in the U.S. This summer it will have a new specially commissioned brewery installed and it has also levered a 10-hectolitre micro into a brewpub/restaurant at the site of the old Royal Naval College in Greenwich. “Meantime started from nothing,” says the brewery’s founder and leading light Alastair Hook, “and this year we will be commissioning new kit that will enable us to produce 100,000 hectolitres of beer annually. This will be predominantly bottom-fermenting Pils lagers.”

But when homebrewing expands beyond this, when the brewers are throwing parties to give away beer to friends, or even getting licensed and selling it to brewpubs, but not on a scale large enough scale to be classed as microbrewers, what have they become?

They’ve joined the ranks of a small but growing group of nanobrewers.

The increasing number of nanobrewers across the country is being spurred by several factors. First is simple economics: It is cheaper to make beer at home rather than buying it. There’s also simply the love of beer and the desire to share brews with others. And when you mix those two together, typically, there is a desire to get bigger and move into near-commercial brewing.

There are a couple of things worth noting about this trend towards nanobrewing, said Gary Glass, director of the American Homebrewers Association (AHA) in Boulder, CO, who pointed out that many of the newcomers to the homebrewing field are under 30 years old. “This generation tends to seek out ways of personal expression and creativity,” he said, “and, people are looking to do things more locally in terms of beer, and you can’t get any more local than brewing at home.”

Not only are nanobrewers’ numbers proliferating, but their breweries are also becoming more recognized.

“I first heard the term ‘nanobrewing’ five or six years ago,” said Paul Gatza, director of the Brewers Association, the umbrella organization that includes the AHA, “but I’ve been hearing it more in the past five to six months in terms of very small breweries.” It’s a mixture of people who get into nanobrewing, which keeps this tiny market exciting, he explained. “You may not have profitability as a driver, so you can probably find some interesting characters behind the beers and a high level of passion.”

And indeed, there’s passion to be found whether these nanobrewers are just starting out or are well established.

For the Love of Beer

Nanobrewing typically begins with a pure love of beer and a desire to make the best a brewer can.

Chris Enegren has created a highly advanced homebrewing system in his garage in Moorpark, CA, from where he produces slightly less than 20 gallons of beer per month, which he then hands out in samples at tasting parties on an irregular basis. Upon his graduation in 2006 with a degree in mechanical engineering, Enegren teamed up with his brother Matt and friend Joe Nascenzi with the goal of taking their home-brewing hobby to the next level.

“Our first goal was to convert our then portable brewing system into something more scientific, resembling a small-scale industrial system,” said Enegren. “After countless hours of research and development, we turned our rag-tag homebrewing operation into a streamlined nanobrewery complete with official uniforms.”

Now Enegren Brewing Co. has a fully electronically controlled, semi-automatic three-tier brewery, capable of producing 10-gallon batches of beer. The company produces beers depending on the three brewers’ whims: stouts, brown ales, dunkelweizens, pilsners, pale ales, bocks, and so on.

Since automating their system, the quality of their beer has gone up. “We’re now making better beer because everything’s better controlled,” said Enegren. “It’s laid out in a logical line of operations and we’ve built up a command central to run everything―one person can drive the whole system and from there the brewery can do things on its own.” The beer is also better, said Enegren, because if something goes wrong, they can see why.

This has not been a cheap endeavor. “I put a lot of money into the electronics and automation, because the main thing was to create a real brewery and the only way to do that was to brew as much as we could and take notes on everything,” he explained.

Enegren regularly enters his brews into contests and uses the comments from the judges to improve his beers. He also gets feedback at his parties, where the 20 to 50 guests fill out cards stating what they like and don’t like about the beers.

From Dusk to Dawn

Barnyard Brewing is a much less sophisticated system than Enegren’s, but that’s not to say that its beers are not as good, or its nanobrewers less enthusiastic.

Owners Mike Hummell and Heath Hoadley run Barnyard out of a backyard in Lawrence, KS, but have big plans and hope to soon make their operation bigger. Currently their beers include a golden ale, an Irish red, a porter, a dunkelweizen and a double-fermented golden ale flavored with peach wine.

Brewer Heath Hoadley of Barnyard Brewing

The duo brews these beers on Sundays and Mondays, the only time they can work together since Hummell works days for Wonder bread and Hoadley works nights as a cook. They spend these two days brewing, cleaning and sanitizing, dawn to dusk. Hoadley also stops by most days to check on the beers.

“If I were to spend 13 hours doing something, it would always be brewing,” he said.

But along with the fun, there’s the responsibility, said Hummell. At times when they’re brewing two batches at once, he sets his alarm every hour through the night to check on the fermentation temperatures. Since Barnyard doesn’t have a license, guests at parties thrown throughout the year drink its beers. These parties attract up to 400 people, who are invited through email blasts, flyers and word of mouth.

“This is a town that’s very big on supporting its people and it’s a town that’s very supporting of craft brews,” said the grateful Hummell.

Hummell and Hoadley set up shop in July 2008 after Hoadley moved back to the Midwest following a series of brewing jobs in Oregon and Washington. He’d previously studied to become a brewmaster at several schools, including the Siebel Institute of Technology in Chicago and Doemens Academy in Munich, Germany.

Despite Hoadley’s experience, said Hummell, there are challenges. Hummell is a self-confessed family man with a wife and two kids, so giving up a full-time job that pays health benefits to take a chance on full-time beer brewing isn’t something he can yet afford to do.

Getting Paid in Experience

Nanobrewing on this scale is just one step up from homebrewing. It’s homebrewing with an audience of tasters, although these nanobrewers do have loftier goals than most homebrewers who simply want to relax in the evenings with a good drink they’ve brewed themselves.

But where nanobrewers like Enegren, Hummell and Hoadley are aiming to go, Seth Gilligan has gone.

This Seattle-based nanobrewer has been brewing since 1997 and set up his company out of his home two years ago. He moved to a storage unit in 2007 after he spilled a coffee stout on his wife’s cream carpet and was effectively banned from brewing at home.
And from his small storage space, around 10 feet by 12, for two years, he brewed beer in equipment he custom designed and built from scratch with his team of helpful brewers. He also sold growlers of beer to the many passers-by on the trail conveniently located right outside his doors.

And since the storage unit, Gilligan has moved again, and is currently looking for a larger space, one that also gets a lot of foot traffic nearby. He is also working out deals with some local bars to carry his beers, which he’ll make through contract agreements with other breweries until he finds his own brewing spot.

The brewery produces eight half-kegs every month, with Gilligan and his partners, Mark Leavens and Zach Woehr, spending the better part of their weekends brewing.

Gilligan’s Brewing Co. produces a range of beers, including a chamomile beer with wheat, honey, vanilla and sweet orange peel. This latter, said Leavens, is the most popular brew. “It’s unconventional and people here in Seattle are clutching on to it because it’s so different.”

What the three brewers love is the experimentation they do, developing recipes that appeal to their fancy. “I get paid in experience and beer,” said Leavens. “The benefits [of this job] are amazing.”

Breaker Brewing Company in Plains, PA, is one step ahead of Gilligan’s and already sells to nine local bars, which, said owner Chris Miller, “is enough to get us started and get our name out there. We’re not making a whole lot of money but we’re sustaining.”

Miller and his friend Mark Lehman set up the company in 2005, when they began using homebrew kits in Miller’s kitchen, but they soon decided they needed to be more involved and able to sell their beer legally. Breaker Brewing Co. now operates a 1.5-barrel brewery system, brewing 45 gallons at a time out of Miller’s garage. And in fact, the money that they’ve plowed into this is not insignificant. Having built everything from the ground up has cost around $15,000, and they’ve spent an additional $5,000 or so on legal fees for the licensing process.

Miller and Lehman would like to get even bigger, and quit their day jobs in computing, possibly sometime in fall 2010.

“It’s taken off a lot of faster than we thought,” said Miller. “You have to take risks but you have to do it as smartly as possible.”

Breaker Brewing, named after the coal breakers that used to be a common sight in the nearby area, offers seasonal brews as well as five to six staples. The latter include Anthracite Ale, an amber ale that tastes somewhere between a pale ale and an IPA; Olde King Coal Stout; and Goldies Strawberry Blonde, whose ingredients include strawberry juice.

When Nano Becomes Micro?

Vine Park Brewing Co. in St. Paul, MN, sells their beer in growlers.

This unusual operation is two businesses in one. By day, it’s a brew-on-premise location where consumers use the equipment to make their own beer and wine; by night owners Andy Grage and Dan Justesen sell the beer they’ve produced on their two-barrel brewing system in 64-ounce growlers. They make six to eight gallons per month.

Andy Grage and Dan Justesen of Vine Park Brewing Co.

They brew their own beers on Mondays, when the other business is closed, and brew from all-grain rather than extract, for a higher-quality beer. Brews include the popular Stump Jumper Amber Ale, which Grage likened to a Fat Tire, and the Horny Toad Pale Ale, which he described as a smooth drinking ale with a floral hop aroma, a somewhat bitter flavor, and a slightly fruity finish.

“Over the past one and a half years we’ve developed a lot of regulars for our growlers,” said Grage. “At the beginning we thought it would be existing customers [from the brew-on-premise business] because they go home empty-handed on brew day, but it’s people in the area who stop by and get two or three growlers.” In fact, 60 percent of customers are people who walk in off the street.

Beyond selling growlers of beer, there’s another step before microbrew status is achieved―although many nanobrewers aren’t aiming for this at all, preferring instead to remain nano with the flexability for lots of creativity.

However, Peter Ausenhus and Margaret Bishop are a husband and wife team who are selling their beer from a real-life brewpub, in Northwood, IA.

Worth Brewing Co. opened for business in March 2007, with Bishop, an engineer, and Ausenhus, a beer-lover, behind it.

Now the two brew around 60 barrels a year in 10-gallon batches. Beers include the Dillon Clock Stopper, a Kölsch-style beer; a brown ale, their top seller; an English mild ale; and an Irish oatmeal stout.

Ausenhus tries something new at least once a month, which is typically the favorite among his customers. “That’s probably the advantage of having a nanobrewery―that I can try lots of beers,” he said.

Almost all of Worth Brewing’s beer is sold on site, although the brewery does fill growlers to go, too. The pub is open Wednesday and Friday nights and all day Saturday and it attracts mostly locals―30 to 60 people. On Saturdays, the crowd comes from further afield―beer aficionados from up to 60 miles away.

It may be a nano trend, sitting in the shadow of microbrewing, but it’s clear these brewers are onto something. They’re having fun, creating unique beers, and some are even making money at it. So look out for a nanobrewery near you―if there isn’t one, look again: they’re easy to miss.

American Homebrewers Association
www.homebrewersassociation.org

The Brewers Association
www.brewersassociation.org

But in order to legally sell beer, a brewer must have a license, and many do pursue this route. In fact, according to Julia Herz, craft beer program director of the Brewers Association in Boulder, CO, at least 50 percent of brewers begin as homebrewers. In fact, she added, “homebrewing is a core element of why craft brewing is so hot right now.”

As a homebrewer without a license, there are caps. A single-person household can brew up to 100 gallons of beer per year, but if there are two or more adults, that number jumps to 200 gallons. To produce more beer, a license is needed.

Seth Gilligan, owner of Gilligan’s Brewing Co. in Seattle, said that while it was very difficult to get a license in his home state of Pennsylvania, it was much easier once he moved to Washington.

“They’re very friendly to small brewers here. You pretty much have to follow their process and do everything correctly, but it only took about two months,” he said, having received his license to sell growlers and kegs eight years ago.

“It’s a little time consuming but as long as you file the correct paperwork, it’s not that bad,” he said. The total cost was only around $300.

It was the paperwork that Peter Ausenhus, owner of Worth Brewing Co. in Northwood, IA, found intimidating about the licensing process.

“The TTB [Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau] sent about 20 different forms and it was just a matter of working through those,” he said. He then had to get licensed through the state of Iowa, which was much less trouble. The whole process took about three months, he explained.

Vine Park Brewing Co. in St. Paul, MN, received its license to brew and sell growlers of beer five years ago. The federal license came first, followed by the state and then the city license, said owner Andy Grage, who added that it was very hard work.

“We had to get two new city laws passed to allow us to sell growlers,” he said, “because the license we needed didn’t even exist.”

He was then told that he couldn’t brew in the building he wanted to use, so a city councilman created a new rule to allow them to stay in it.

Finally, after three years, Vine Park was licensed. The hardest part, Grage said, was dealing with the state of Minnesota. “The liquor board’s standard reply to any question is ‘You can’t do that,’” he pointed out.

Chris Miller and Mark Lehman, owners of Breaker Brewing Co. in Plains, PA, spent a lot of time researching the entire license process. They began by emailing the TTB, and then went to the state and the local zoning authority for approval.

“It wasn’t hard but only because I did a lot of research beforehand,” said Miller. “I spent dozens of hours looking into this.”

The entire process took around six months, he said.

And it wasn’t cheap. There were no fees for the TTB, but the Pennsylvania brewers’ license cost $1,500 and brand name registration is $75 per beer.

This recent trend of collaboration beers represents the next logical step in building relationships that brewers began thirty years ago at the dawn of modern craft brewing. Since then, an unprecedented sharing of knowledge and resources has led to an industry mature beyond its years. This is arguably the reason that American craft beer has built its excellent reputation in such a short time, and also why collaboration beers feel like such a natural extension of that success.

Of course, since trade guilds began in the United States, shortly after the start of the Civil War, brewers have been sharing technical information and basic advancements in brewing techniques. But today’s craft brewers have gone further. The kind of assistance they gave one another—early on and continuing through the present day—was unequivocal and without reservation.

When all the small breweries combined brewed such a tiny fraction of the total beer sold, nobody worried about market share, competition or trade secrets. Brewers in the craft industry were simply very open with one another, freely offering each other help, and freely asking for it, too, in a way that earlier generations and larger businesses wouldn’t dream of doing.

As several brewers noted, many early brewers came from a homebrewing background, and took their hobby and “went pro” at a time when there were few books available and hardly any readily available body of knowledge. Most brewers learned their craft in the kitchen, not in a formal school setting. As a result, brewers were already used to turning to other homebrew club members or on forums to fill in gaps in their knowledge.

But a curious thing happened once the size and number of small brewers increased and their market share grew bigger, too. Those close relationships endured as did their willingness to share, as brewers eschewed conventional business thinking and continued to help each other as often as needed. You’d be hard-pressed to find another business where people don’t protect their most valuable trade secrets and operational knowledge. Most industries employ corporate espionage to find out their competitors’ secrets and the threat of lawsuits to keep their own employees from defecting and taking their institutional knowledge with them to a competing firm.

You might be tempted to think that so cavalier an attitude could doom such businesses to failure or, at the very least, to not staying ahead of their competition. By any measure, however, you’d be deeply wrong. It may be counter-intuitive, to say the least, but by and large the breweries that have been the most open and helpful have also been the most successful.

By contrast, in countries where the converse is true—England, Germany, New Zealand, for example—the number of breweries is in decline and innovation is often in short supply. In England and Germany, where some of the richest brewing traditions took flower, a lack of cooperation is helping to bring about a rash of brewery closings, mergers and stagnation. In New Zealand’s craft beer scene, which actually began around the same time as America’s, a lack of openness and community cooperation has led to quality control issues and difficulty winning over consumers. In such climates, sharing recipes and providing other personal assistance with one another is not something brewers are interested in doing, and in many cases even fear their business could suffer as a result.