During the nine months that the brewery survived, I came to meet new people and develop relationships that remain with me today. It’s those friendships that make the industry of craft beer as strong as it is. Collectively, we share a passion for making amazing liquid, and oftentimes this enthusiasm manifests itself in collaborative efforts between like-minded brewers.

This notion of brewers getting together and sharing ideas on recipe development would actually appear to be a recent phenomenon. Last time I checked, the guys making Budweiser and Coors Banquet Beer haven’t convened annually in the hopes of creating the ultimate lawn mower lager. In their defense, they may be waiting for hell to freeze over. That would appear to be the ultimate reason for the mountains to turn from blue to red.

Each brewer has his or her reasons for working on a collaborative project. When I approach these opportunities, I’m drawn to them like musicians sharing a love for sitting in and riffing through a part of someone else’s jam session. I rarely look to be the lead on the project and prefer to be a traveling artist collaborating at someone else’s facility so I can see how things are done outside our environment.

I’ve collaborated on over 15 different beers now with friends, acquaintances and even people I’d never met before. Each of those productions has given me a chance to explore other breweries, foster new friendships and create awareness for our brands. Traveling to other corners of the globe to brew a new recipe continues to be one of my favorite parts of my job (especially if that travel takes me to Maui, as it did last winter).

There isn’t a published set of rules for collaborating on beers, but there are a few things I consider before agreeing to make bedfellows with another brewery. First and foremost, I believe with conviction there needs to be a legitimate reason for collaborating. Without this, you have no story, and interest in the project will be tepid at best.

During a judging session at the 2007 Great American Beer Festival, while seated next to Hildegard van Ostaden of Brouwerij Leyerth (Urthel), she and I hatched a plan to collaborate on a low-alcohol saison under The Lost Abbey brand. We knew in nine months San Diego would play host to the Craft Brewers Conference. As such, many of the best brewers in the world would be visiting (including Hildegard) and looking to experience our brewing culture. She came to our brewery armed with a wealth of brewing knowledge I have never possessed. Spending eight hours working on a brew together allowed us to converse in depth on some ideas I wished to inquire about.

The recipe was quite simple to work out. Hildegard hoped to brew a saison with no spices in a straightforward manner. Given that The Lost Abbey produces Red Barn Ale (a spiced saison) year-round, this was a great side project for the brewery. Her husband, Bas, created the artwork that adorned the label. We call it the Dom DeLuise label here at the brewery, as Bas really played up my strongest features …

Ten years ago, collaborative beers were less commonplace than they are today. The landscape has changed, and the shelves are now littered with these kinds of releases, I’m left wondering if we have hit a proverbial wall in an almost Grammy-fication of collaborative beers.

Each year, we know that the Grammy Awards show will feature a night of artistry and even some unconventional unions of musicians. Some will seem incredibly natural, like Santana and Rob Thomas, and others more fraught with peril (Milli Vanilli anyone)? While not my first Grammy Awards show memory, I clearly remember that February night in 2001 when Marshall Mathers (Eminem) took to a thundering and rainy stage to perform a version of his hit “Stan.”

He was joined that night by Sir Elton John, who accompanied Eminem in a show of unity. As an openly gay male, John sat in to debunk the rumors of hate swirling around The Marshall Mathers LP release. Their duo still rings as one of the best collaborative musical performances I have ever seen. But most importantly, their performance mattered. It resonated and it found legacy. To me, the essence of a great collaboration should also cause a group of people to work together, hopefully finding meaning in a shared experience, all the while creating an exceptional opportunity for the audience.

And while I’ve been around the collaborative brewing block once or twice even in Belgium, I’m no brewing moped. Rather, I prefer to believe I’ve become a seasoned and selective partner who knows what he is looking for. Of course, we all have to start somewhere. For me, the year was 2002, and like many I was a young ambitious brewer when I collaborated on my first beer. Some local brewer friends and I got together to brew a German-style stein beer. This method of using super-hot rocks to heat the wort was a first in San Diego and certainly told a great story.

Some seven years later, I built on that same process and improved it when I invited Tonya Cornett (then of Bend Brewing Co.) to collaborate with Port Brewing Co. on a new spring release named Hot Rocks Lager. In launching Hot Rocks Lager, we were able to bring back the super-heating of black granite rock addition to a batch of beer and retell the story of how the process came to be. Our brewers love this beer, and the process of super-heating rocks and caramelizing wort continues to be one of the most interesting things we do here at the brewery.

Tonya and I divided the recipe in half. She was tasked with creating the grain bill as I worked on the hops and tweaked the fermentation to take advantage of my understanding of our brewery processes. In doing so, we brought together a shared idealism, and the resulting beer has become one of our most award-winning recipes (a lager no less). If you’re keeping score at home, that’s one for Collaborations and zero for the Duds.

The role of collaboration is complicated. Sometimes it’s educational. Often, it can be technical if a smaller brewery works with a larger, more sophisticated brewery. It can be celebratory or even improvisational. There are few rules for collaborative brewing, but singularly the one that guides me is that too many cooks in the kitchen can yield less than ideal results. This happened to me and some of my best brewing friends once in Chico, CA.

A group of us worked to produce a heritage lager in a sort of “Esprit de Saint Louis” sort of way. It featured wild rice, purple potatoes and even some “beachwood” collected from both the shores of Delaware and San Diego. All told, the beer turned out fantastic. Yet it really didn’t “do” anything.

So we were ushered to a super-secret lab where we played around with all kinds of concentrates and natural additives. Ultimately some carrot juice and cucumber essence jumped in to support the lager. As we set out to improve the beer, the cooks in the kitchen crossed our fruit and vegetable streams in a disastrous those-ingredients-are-better-left-for-salad kind of way. With apologies to Stevie Wonder, I learned that unlike ebony and ivory, cucumbers and carrots do not always go together forever in perfect harmony …

Thankfully, there are more successes than misses, and collaborative beers are here to stay. They present the consumer with amazing opportunities at every turn. What remains to be seen is how many duds the shelves can support before there is a rejection of the artistry. I know that we’re not done with our collaborations here at the brewery, and we’ll continue to be selective about whom we partner with and hope the rest of our craft brewer brothers and sisters follow an equally rooted example.

SAN MARCOS, CA— The 7^th Annual San Diego International Beer Competition concluded Sunday, June 23, with The Lost Abbey earning 6 total medals as well as being  honored with the first ever “Champion Brewery” award. (The Champion Brewery award was bestowed upon the brewery location with the most cumulative points based on awards.)

For three years running, The Lost Abbey / Port Brewing (Port Brewing Co.) has led or tied for the lead with the most medals in The San Diego International Beer Competition. In 2011, Port Brewing Co. garnered 6 total medals which was tied for the most awards. At the 2012 Competition, Port Brewing Co. topped the leaderboard with 8 total medals in addition to winning the Best of Show for Carnevale Ale.

“Having one of the largest commercial craft beer competitions in California each year, we take great pride in competing at the highest level on our home turf,” said Tomme Arthur, Director of Brewery Operations for The Lost Abbey and Port Brewing. “Consumers are always looking for validation, an award from the San Diego International Beer Competition shows them the excellence in brewing we strive for each day.”

The San Diego International Beer Competition and Festival ran from June 21 through June 23 at the Del Mar Fairgrounds. The competition received over 900 entries from 19 different countries and 22 states in the U.S. making it one of the largest in the country.

Today’s brewers, it would seem, are cutting deals with their own personal devils. Where once you would never invite the devil to come dance in your brewery, many brewers are now opening their doors to Satan’s minions of sour (Brettanomyces, Lactobacillus and Pediococcus) in the hopes of joining the ranks of legendary beers and bellowing out the low pH blues.

In many ways, brewers are stumbling over each other as they race to the sour beer crossroads. Breweries that have never dabbled in the black art of sour beers are wielding machetes in the hopes of blazing trails and entirely new paths. And in doing so, many of them are dancing with Lucifer himself as they polka and cha-cha-cha their way into unfamiliar arenas. So it begs the questions: Are these beers any good, and how did we get here?

Historically, sour beer producers have never had to cut deals with the devil. They chose to embrace his personality years ago. Their Old World methods of wort production were designed to only make sour beers. Yet they represent such a small percentage of brewers making beer this way that their use of micro-organisms and wild yeasts is as if they are witch doctors.

The lambic producers around Brussels and the red ale producers surrounding Flanders share a commonality of sour beer aged in oak barrels for extended periods of time (up to three years). Here, the barrels are used as vessels of hope in the purest sense. Each barrel acts as its own micro universe, and there is only a degree of certainty surrounding each vessel.

In Belgian sour ale production, oak barrels act more as stewards than as custodians. Wort is sent to these barrels in the hopes that all the environmental factors will come together to produce an exceptional beer. Modern-day brewers, conducting most fermentations in stainless steel, are far more custodial in their zest to produce clean and predictable fermentations and resulting beers.

Yet there is a new breed of sour beer producers who are attempting both. And this group is hell-bent on challenging the status quo. While not seeking fame and fortune in the purest sense, they are clearly tempting the devil’s due and making some exceptional beers at the same time. And many of their beers are marrying the flavors of oak with sour beer production.

It was once thought that only Belgian brewers were the best producers of sour beer in the world. And while clearly they remain the specialists of spontaneous fermented beers, there is a brave new world of sour beers from all corners of the globe available to the adventuring enthusiast willing to seek out new and unusual sour beers.

As a craft brewer, I am lucky that beer doesn’t require that kind of patience. Most of the beer we produce can be consumed after the 17th day of production. And like most craft breweries, our modern equipment and technology allow us to operate with a high level of precision.

But like Walt’s Magic Kingdom, there remains a place where a brewer’s disbelief is suspended and consumers come looking for that magical beer experience. This place is Brussels, Belgium, where brewing is shrouded in a heavy mystery. As a brewer of wood-aged beers, I have made Brussels my adult Disneyland, and it never disappoints.

In and around the city of Brussels and the Senne River Valley, brewers make a heritage specialty beer known simply as lambic. It remains one of the most romantic beers produced in the world. And like the best rides at Disneyland, it has a narrative, a protagonist and an antagonist. But most importantly, the production methods reach out and engage your senses.

Lambic brewing remains a controlled appellation, requiring a production method of making beer through spontaneous fermentation. Unlike New World techniques in which pure yeasts are added to each batch of beer, lambic is revered for the fermentation yeasts descending like manna from the heavens. Unseen microbes and wild yeast in the air populate the brew, leaving it more magical and mystical than Doc Terminus riding into Passamaquoddy looking for Pete’s Dragon.

In theory, spontaneously fermented beers can be made anywhere, though the best still come from Belgium. Many brewers outside Belgium are now attempting to make their own lambic-like beers by opening their breweries’ sugary wort to the native flora surrounding their brewery. Some have been enormously successful. Others have been epic failures. But it’s this sense of adventure I prize most as a brewer, and it’s also the very thing that drew me to visit the lambic producers of Belgium.

While I had read plenty about the families who produce lambic, my first brewery visit transported me to a fantasy-like world the moment I walked through the doors of the brewery known to most as Cantillon, and to the locals in Brussels as the Museum of Gueuze. This was a brewery that had been making lambic since 1900. I went in thinking it would be like every other brewery I had visited. I left convinced artisanal lambic breweries like Cantillon are places of wonder and amazement.

I wasn’t sure what I would see when I first crossed the threshold into the Museum of Gueuze. I stood there, frozen in time. I marveled at the sights, sounds and actions around me. The first 10 minutes of my visit were pure chaos, with equal parts beer production and theater going on. Members of the Roy family, the owners of Cantillon, were hard at work producing lambic and greeting guests. I half expected the entire family to stop and break into song, as if a Belgian production of The Pirates of Penzance was going on during the open brew day.

The brewery is multi-leveled. With the exposed wood beam construction and trap doors between levels, in many ways it feels very much like stepping into the belly of the Niña, Pinta or Santa Maria. The first person I saw was a young man playing the part of the captain. Always on the move, he was affable and respected by the staff and consumers alike. Breezing through the room, he approached and stuck his out hand, as if to say “Jean Van Roy, Captain of the S.S. Lambic. Glad to have you aboard on our journey today!”

His first lieutenant checked in periodically to give details about the preparations for the day. Below the wood deck, crewmembers worked to secure the supplies and move barrels and sacks of barley. It appeared the S.S. Lambic was sailing well at that moment.

Jean’s father, in the role of the ship’s doctor, greeted new travelers, documenting where they were from. One by one, he opened their bottles of lambic and sent them off to meet their fellow passengers. The queen mother tended to the storefront, where provisions and trinkets signifying the journey were being sold, gathered for takeaway back to the visitors’ home countries. All of this theater-in-the-round took place while brewing continued in the back of the building. It was a scene like no other brewery tour I have been on.

Watch the video.

Arthur, the co-founder and director of brewing operations at The Lost Abbey, previously joined the staff to taste and discuss the first six beers from the brewery’s Ultimate Box Set. This collection is the culmination of a year-long series of special edition beers inspired by classic rock songs.

Watch the video of the first Hangout.

Any given cohort coming through the ranks together―learning the craft, launching a new business, testing the economy―has strong connections based on having faced similar challenges at the same time. But there are also strong ties established between craft brewers who enter the field at different times, as one generation speaks to another.

We invited three young but well-established brewers to sit down with three up-and-coming craft brewers and listened in on the three conversations: over lunch, over pizza, and―implausibly― over morning coffee. Here are brief glimpses of where craft brewing is now, and suggestions as to where it might be headed.

Brewing is Business and Passion

Tomme Arthur

Port Brewing Co./Lost Abbey
San Marcos, CA

Patrick Rue

The Bruery
Placentia, CA

Considering its propensity for setting trends, Southern California was surprisingly slow to embrace craft beer. Tomme Arthur was there at the beginning of the “overnight sensation,” beginning his brewing career with Pizza Port in Solana Beach in 1996.

“In the mid-nineties, it was a big turning point in San Diego,” he recalls, “because Ballast Point opened up, AleSmith opened up, Stone opened up, and we started to see in our environment, in San Diego, a real shift from lots of other people’s beer in our town to locally-produced beer in our town. And not only in town―in the case of Stone, when they started bottling their beer, and they became the first San Diego brewer to ship beer out of town, on a measurable basis.”

Fast forward to 2008. San Diego has a nationally-recognized beer culture, prominent enough to have hosted the annual conference of craft brewers twice in a four-year period. Craft brewing has a presence further north, in the greater Los Angeles area, where Patrick Rue is opening The Bruery. Like Port Brewing and the Lost Abbey in San Diego, where Arthur now brews, The Bruery focuses on the highest niche of the already high-end craft beer market. In the last six months, Rue’s bottled beer has found distribution in eight states.

Hello Mother, Hello Father,

I’m writing this postcard from Beer Camp Chico at Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. As you both know, I have visited many breweries before, but this place is far and away the most magical. There are tank farms stretching to the heavens everywhere we turn. They remind me of the redwood forests where we used to camp.

Since we got here this morning, I have met some cool campers like me.  Did you know that Tom Nickel and Jeff Bagby―my best brewing friends―made the trip too? It means you don’t have to worry about me getting into too much trouble. Because we know they’re the real troublemakers. The guys tell me we’re sneaking out to the Crazy Horse tonight for $1 Banquet Beers. I might even muster enough courage to ride the mechanical bull.

Today we met camp counselors Steve and Terrence. I don’t normally get jealous, but I think Terrence has the best job. He gets to walk around and just point at things. He knows so much about everything. (But I’m convinced that when he doesn’t know the answers, he just makes things up.) Most likely, he’s going to tire of me though. I ask a lot of questions. But that’s how you raised me. Question everything. Today, I even discovered that pale ale tastes freshest when you’re pedaling a bicycle made for ten! How cool is that? I have to admit it seemed like something built for Willy Wonka.

They say it’s one of Ken’s projects. Everything here seems to be imagined by Mr. Grossman. He runs this amazing camp. Here at Camp Chico, everyone speaks very highly of him. I hope someday, I can run a brewery this cool. I’ve been told that if I behave (and don’t drink too much of something they call Torpedo), I’ll get to have lunch with him tomorrow. I doubt I’ll sleep tonight. It promises to be the highlight of my trip. I’m even going to eat all my vegetables, as to not embarrass you.

We toured the brewery today and went on numerous thirst-inducing hikes. Thankfully there is always beer at the end of each hike. Don’t worry, even with all this beer, I won’t be getting dehydrated. Because, today I learned beer is 90 percent water. However, I am concerned about my weight gain. Camp Chico isn’t some New Age diet camp. The restaurant serves unbelievable food and they have 20 beers on tap up here. Some I’ve never tasted before.

Before we’re done here, I need to finish my camp project. Our group has to imagine a beer, design a recipe, and then assist the brewers. We’re making an imperial stout. It’s called The Empire Strikes Black. You know with a name like that, it’s going to be epic. Rumor is, they’re going to age some of it in bourbon barrels for a year. The brewers here seem impressed by our project, as it’s the biggest beer they have ever made.

This camp is incredibly educational and the seminars are very informative. Did you know these guys use more whole flower cones than any other brewery in the world? Every camper is ultra impressed by the hop freezers.   My group selected hop cones from New Zealand for our beer.

The best part about camp is that when I come home, I won’t be bringing you any crappy macaroni artwork pieces. Nope, I get to bring home beer. This will make you the envy of all your friends. I’m done with other camps.  This place has it all. I haven’t even left yet but I know I’m already going to miss it here.

You’re the best.
Tomme

Tomme Arthur aspires to be a beer camp counselor one day. He currently serves as Director of Brewery Operations for Port Brewing and The Lost Abbey.

Tonight they’ll sleep in tents, or just sleeping bags on the cold, hard cement, but tomorrow they’ll be listening to bands and drinking even more beer from when the proceedings kick off at 11 a.m., until late into the following night. The prelude to a multi-band, multi-stage rock festival?

Nope.

This is Dark Lord Day. The one day a year, late in April (this year the 25th), when the Three Floyds Brewery hosts quite possibly the biggest craft beer release party in the U.S.—a gathering of 5,000-plus people—to unleash its monstrous, and fiendishly sought-after strong stout, Dark Lord. The economy may be in dire straights, unemployment is continuing to rise, but there seems to be no shortage of people clamoring to pay $15 for a 22-ounce bottle (or six) of the latest vintage of Dark Lord, with its wax-dipped cap and cartoonish label.

Welcome to the insane world of limited-edition beers.

Power to the People

Three Floyds’ Dark Lord Day—a 12-hour marathon of beer and bands—is just the most extreme, over-the-top case of fanaticism engendered by a single beer. There are plenty of other limited-edition releases produced by equally small, regional craft brewers throughout the year.

Seasonals, by definition, are “limited”—be it a summer hefeweizen or a high-alcohol winter warmer—and most brewers have tapped into the growing popularity of that segment. But only a handful of breweries and specific beers—Lost Abbey’s Angels’ Share, Portsmouth’s Kate the Great, Foothills’ Sexual Chocolate, Deschutes’ The Abyss, and of course Dark Lord, to name a few—seem to stir up the kind of frenzy that compels people to travel from as far away as Japan and Denmark for an event such as Dark Lord Day.

It wasn’t always this way, though. And we can thank the Internet, with two sites—Ratebeer.com and Beeradvocate.com—specifically fueling the current madness. This was all surely an unintended consequence of the public ratings that members of these sites are allowed to post on specific beers they’ve tried—from pints they had at a pub to bottles they bought at a store to samples they tried at a beer festival. These, along with detailed tasting notes, then get compiled into rankings based on the points that Joe Public “reviewer” assigns the beers.

While it’s a sort of populist way to determine the “best in the world”—and isn’t that what the Internet’s becoming, giving a voice to the masses via blogs, forums and other new media?—it has also helped foster a certain hysteria. As of this writing, prior to Dark Lord Day 2009, nearly 500 BeerAdvocate users, going back to 2002 when Dark Lord was first made, have posted reviews of the various vintages of the beer released over the years, using florid language—”big malty chocolate cake with hints of toffee, coffee, clove and dark fruits”—to describe its every nuance.

One rather incredulous beneficiary of this kind of rating/reviewing hysteria is Tod Mott, the head brewer at Portsmouth Brewing in Portsmouth, NH, whose Kate the Great Imperial stout has been regularly ranked in the Beer Advocate’s Top 10. His annual Kate the Great release party in February has drawn people from up and down the East Coast and as far away as Illinois for the chance to pay $10 each for a couple of the scant 900 22-ounce bottles (there’s a two-per-person limit) that are produced. Last year’s offering sold out in a mere four hours, probably about as long as a flight from Illinois to New Hampshire. “It’s really funny because [the ratings are] so subjective,” he says. “There are so many incredible beers on the West Coast that I’m totally blown away that we’re ranked number four. This tiny little brewpub in the middle of Portsmouth. We produce 1,200 barrels of beer a year.”

But those rankings and the buzz surrounding them do have a lot of power. After all, what serious beer lover/enthusiast/geek wouldn’t want to try—cue symphonic flourish from heaven above—The Greatest Beers In The World? And since most of the beers topping these lists are, no surprise, damn hard to get a hold of because of the small production runs and, therefore, nonexistent national distribution, it just feeds that irrational desire many consumers seem to have for things that are hard to get.

A number of brewers mention these sites specifically when trying to explain the rise of the limited-edition cult beers. “[It’s] all thanks to the Beer Advocate, the goddamn Beer Advocate,” Portsmouth’s Mott grouses jokingly. “It’s ridiculous. I mean, [Kate the Great] is a good beer, but, Christ, there are so many good beers out there.”

So what about water?

Though less acknowledged today, since brewers can effectively alter it to suit their needs (more on that later), water is, in fact, primarily responsible for the development of the pantheon of classic beers. “It is really interesting to look at the variety of styles that popped up in different parts of the world and became popular and good because of the water they had available to them,” notes Harpoon Brewing’s vice president chief brewing officer, Al Marzi. “The ingredients were all the same, except for the water, and you’ve got completely different beers being made.”

The basic recipe has always been water, malt, hops and yeast. So, why did the darker beers develop in Munich and Dublin, the hoppy pale ales in Burton, England, the pilsners in Plzen? As Olympia Brewing Co. founder Leopold Schmidt, so astutely proclaimed at the turn of the 19th century, it’s the water.

The True Connection Between Hard Rock and Beer

Water is the medium in which all the magic in the brewing process happens. And as innocuous as it seems—it’s clear and, for the most part, tasteless—it’s not all the same. You may have actually noticed when traveling that the water in, say, Portland, OR, may smell (or even taste) a little different from the H2O that comes out of your own tap at home. You may even have to use more soap or shampoo to get a good lather depending on what the water is like. This is what’s referred to as water hardness. And this, specifically, is what’s responsible for the development of different beer styles.

The chemistry of turning malted grains, yeast, hops and water into a delicious, refreshing alcoholic beverage, is relatively straight forward: grains are transformed into starches that, with the help of water and heat, the yeast can consume and turn into alcohol. But a little something called “water hardness” complicates things. “Hardness is mainly due either to lots of calcium and magnesium in the water, so-called ‘permanent’ hardness, as it’s relatively difficult to get rid of,” explains Professor Alex Maltman of the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences at Aberystwyth University in Wales, “or bicarbonate in the water, ‘temporary’ hardness, which can be precipitated out by boiling.

“There’s a whole range of taste effects [in brewing] that arise from the presence of these substances, such as calcium promoting the bittering contribution of hops, and magnesium enhancing beer flavor, like salt in food. But the main effect—certainly of bicarbonate—is to affect the pH, or acidity, of the liquid during brewing.”

Yeast, who, let’s face it, do all the heavy lifting in the brewing process, are particular about the environment they work in. So, if the pH is comfortable for them, they can do their job well. Now, before this chemistry was known to brewers, they simply had to adjust their ingredients to suit the water. Bicarbonate-rich water—such as that in Munich and Dublin—creates a high pH (too alkaline for the yeast to do their thing properly). But roast some of the grains nice and dark, and it lowers the pH in the mash; the yeast are happy and they make a tasty dark brew, such as a German dunkel or Irish stout.

We can thank the varied geology of this great blue marble we inhabit for the variety of beers we drink today, because the different dissolved minerals in water—depending on the source—have had a profound effect on the development of brewing beer. “Burton-on–Trent in England has very mineral-rich water, including calcium and magnesium,” says Professor Maltman, “so it produces a strong tasting beer. It is also rich in sulfate, which adds a characteristic flavor and improves stability. This why the style known as English pale ale originated there, and the stability enabled it to travel far in those colonial days, even as far as India, if brewed strongly—hence India pale ale.” A relative lack of dissolved minerals, or “soft” water, such as that in Plzen in the Czech Republic, was key in the development of pilsner.

So, yeah, it’s the water. But, really, it’s what’s in the water. That is to say, those dissolved minerals—calcium, magnesium, sulfates and bicarbonates—are really what affect the pH, taste and stability. Which begs the question, how did they get there and why do some places have more or less? The answer lies in the earth itself. “The chemistry of water is greatly influenced by the geology of the aquifer in which it has resided,” explains Professor Maltman. “As one example, the bedrock below Burton, England, consists of sedimentary strata formed around 250 million years ago—a time when what is now England was closer to the equator and in desert conditions. Saline lakes evaporated to leave the sediments—what is now bedrock—rich in minerals such as gypsum, also known as calcium sulfate, and Epsom salts, also known as magnesium sulfate. Just as they were originally dissolved in the ancient lakes, these minerals now readily dissolve into the local groundwater, which is why Burton brewing water is like it is.”

So one may safely draw the conclusion that since the geology of North America is equally varied, the water is too. True enough, and though it hasn’t exactly given rise to specific beer styles, the water available to brewers here has had a profound effect on them—from San Diego’s challengingly hard water to the surprisingly perfect-for-brewing Brooklyn water. The difference today is that with the advanced understanding of what’s in our H2O—most municipal water suppliers can provide brewers with an analysis of the water makeup—we no longer have to brew beers that suit the particular local hardness. Or as Al Marzi at Harpoon so cleverly puts it, “The brewer’s art can be expanded to create any type of water he’d like to have for a particular style.”

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.