How to Survive
No product is completely recession-proof. Importer Dan Shelton of Shelton Brothers in Belchertown, MA, reports that his sales have flattened somewhat in 2009, but he attributes this to distributors and chain stores getting cold feet and cutting back on products, not slackening consumer demand for the new and unusual.
We already buy 40 percent of their production and we could use a lot more,” Shelton says of Cantillon in Brussels, a tiny (annual production about 1,000 hectoliters) producer of uncompromisingly tart and funky lambic beers. Among their occasional offerings is Cantillon Saint Lamvinus, a beer fermented with cabernet sauvignon, Bordeaux and other classic wine grapes that straddle the divide between two beverage worlds. Customers are happy to pay $30 a bottle or more, which prompts Shelton to reflect, “The high-end of beer is a bargain compared to the high-end of wine. Beer is an affordable luxury people want to keep in their lives.”
Shelton’s biggest beef is the registration fees that individual states impose on labels. “It costs $150 per label in the state of New York,” notes Shelton, who markets about 160 different brands there. “We have no idea how many of our beers will sell enough to justify the fees.”
The Cantillon brewery dates back to 1900, but Shelton Brothers carries the beers of some foreign microbreweries whose heritage dates back less than a decade. They include Nøgne Ø (“naked island”) in Grimstad, Norway. Its founder, Kjetil Jikiun, is an airline pilot whose job took him on frequent forays to the United States and its blossoming beer culture. (Larry Robinson, beer buyer for Chevy Chase Wine and Spirits in Washington, DC, recalls him as a tall, Nordic-looking fellow with a keen interest in craft beers.) Jikiun’s recent experiments include Red Horizon, a strong ale (in the neighborhood of 19 percent ABV!) fermented with a sake yeast and a Christmas beer aged in Islay whisky barrels. On his excursions abroad, he’s also done collaborative brews with the folks at Stone Brewing Co. in Escondido, CA, and Jolly Pumpkin in Dexter, MI.
Another of Shelton’s clients is Mikkeller in Copenhagen, Denmark, founded in 2006 by two young homebrewers who attended the University of Kansas together. The brewery’s moniker is an amalgam of the founders’ surnames. One of the partners, Kristian Klarup Keller, has since left to edit the music magazine Soundvenue, leaving Mikkel Borg Bjergsø to run the shop on his own.
Perhaps its most famous beer to date has been Beer Geek Brunch, an imperial oatmeal stout made with Kopi Luwak. The beans of this exotic coffee have passed through the digestive tract of an animal called the Asian palm civet, where enzymes reportedly break down the bittering compounds in the beans and enhance the flavor. This is probably the world’s only beer that can claim part of its raw material is filtered through a weasel.
Also brewing beers far from the norm is BrewDog of Fraserburgh, Scotland, a microbrewery that, according to its website, specializes in “beer for punks.” Its founders, James B. Watt and Martin Dickie, are reported to draw inspiration from American craft brewers like Dogfish Head, Stone, AleSmith and Three Floyds. One of their beers, an 18.2 percent ABV imperial stout named Tokyo and brewed with jasmine and cranberries, was banned in Britain because of its high alcohol content and a tongue-in-cheek label that reads, “Everything in moderation, including moderation itself. What logically follows is that you must, from time, have excess.”
The public outcry led BrewDog to release Nanny State, an “imperial mild” with an alcohol content of 1.1 percent by volume and an estimated 225 international bitterness units’ worth of hops. Those two aren’t available in the United States yet. But the brewery’s U.S. importer, Preiss Imports in Ramona, CA, has brought in BrewDog Atlantic IPA, a India pale ale that was aged for two months in the North Atlantic aboard Watt’s fishing boat in an attempt to replicate the long, bumpy sea voyage to India that the original IPAs would have endured.
Last November, BrewDog released its most extreme offering to date, an imperial stout called Tactical Nuclear Penguin that measures (so the brewery claims) in at 32 percent ABV, making it the world’s strongest commercial beer. The brewers used the eisbock method of freeze distillation to reach this level, chilling the beer down to -20 degrees for three weeks and removing the ice as it formed.
And so we’ve come full circle: The earliest American microbrews were inspired by German pilsners, English porters, Belgian fruit lambics and other styles that the brewers sampled on trips abroad or encountered here in the imports aisle. Now, a new crop of foreign microbreweries is taking its cue from the United States, giving American styles some unique twists and forging new ground.
The world is a global village, and its craft brewers are comrades in arms.
