|
The results are in — for the World Beer Cup that is — and the winner of the “Large Brewery of the Year” is Blue Moon Brewing Co. Wow!
They won only two medals — a gold for Honey Moon, and a silver for Chardonnay Blonde, but I guess that was enough to beat out the world’s other brewing giants — like Anheuser-Busch, and InBev.
So, where is this Blue Moon Brewing Co. located? According to its website, Blue Moon, the beer that is, began life at the Sandlot Brewery, the brewpub at Coors Field, home of the Rockies in Denver, CO.
It states, in the small print at the bottom of the homepage that it’s brewed by BMBC in Toronto and imported into the US by BMBC, in Golden, CO.
OK, most people in the beer biz know that Blue Moon is brewed by Coors...which merged with Molson. Actually, Blue Moon is now brewed at Molson’s Montreal plant.
When I called the Molson brewery in Montreal asking about Blue Moon Brewing Co., I was connected with a customer service representative in Colorado — a polite and helpful one. She had no problem telling me exactly who was making Blue Moon and where. When I asked why there was no mention of Molson/Coors on the Blue Moon website, she insisted they weren’t trying to mislead anyone.
I pointed out that the history section of the Blue Moon website concludes “...still just a bunch of friends having fun making beer. What’s not to love about that?”
“That’s a pretty big bunch of friends these days, eh?” I ventured.
The folks who run the World Beer Cup, however, want to call a spade a spade. Which is why Blue Moon is in the “Large Brewery” category, because it is more than 25 percent owned by a large brewery.
The problem is that both of the medal winning beers were brewed by and submitted to the competition by the Sandlot Brewery, which does all the test brewing for Coors’ Blue Moon beers.
See, a few years ago the Sandlot, a perennial medal winner at the Great American Beer Festival, cleaned up and won the Small Brewery of the Year award. Some craft brewers objected to that, and so there was a realignment consistent with the current definition of craft beer (you’re not craft if you’re over 25 percent owned by a non-craft brewery).(For more on the definition of craft brew, see Jack Curtin’s story at www.alestreetnews.com).
The following year, the guys at The Sandlot responded with some creatively named, and, yes, award winning beers. Anyone remember “Most Beer Judges Are Boneheads Pilsner,” and “Clueless Beer Writer Red?”
The guys at The Sandlot obviously are “still just a bunch of friends having fun making beer.”
By the way, all beers submitted to the World Beer Cup are required to have been sold to the public at some point in the prior year. Customers have never tasted Chardonnay Blond at The Sandlot, however. Luckily for Coors, the brewery did make a couple of kegs available to the Falling Rock taphouse for public consumption. But don’t hold your breath for 6-packs — that grape juice is pricey stuff.
The “stealth beer” debate is ongoing and represents a very real concern for craft brewers, due in part to the success of Blue Moon itself. In a Q & A with Harpoon’s Rich Doyle (page 8-A), the incoming Brewers Association board chairman cites competition from the large brewers in the craft beer category, along with access to raw material, as the two biggest challenges facing craft brewers.
Craft brewers would like big brewers to tell consumers who’s making their so-called craft labels. And that brings up the debate of, “just because it’s made by a mega-brewer, is it inferior? Shouldn’t it just be about the beer?” Plenty of people seem to be drinking Blue Moon. The question is would they drink it as much if they knew who was making it? Doyle seems to think not. “All the evidence points to consumers (in our category) wanting to drink local products,” he said.
The large brewers certainly seem to buy into this type of thinking or they wouldn’t be so willing to obfuscate the issue. (It would be interesting to taste The Sandlot’s versions of Blue Moon alongside the versions commercially brewed in Canada, as I’m sure their brewers do.)
As evidenced at the recent Craft Brewers Conference in San Diego (page 9-A) the “halo effect” of craft beer is brightening the entire picture for beer and the big brewers know it. One example of them cozying up to craft brewers was the installation on the board of their Beer Institute of the first ever voting member from the small brewing community — outgoing BA board chairman Steve Hindy of Brooklyn Brewery.
On the other side of the coin, as Lew Bryson points out (Magic Hat/Pyramid merger, page 17-A), as small brewers get larger, they are often not so different from the big guys.
Cheers to Beers, Great and Small — Tony Forder
|
