1. Some Surprises in the Growth of Craft Beer

The impressive growth of the craft brewing segment over the last decade happened so steadily that in itself it was hardly surprising at all. Why wouldn’t a better product have more success? Totally unforeseen, however, was the role played by big mainstream wholesalers in that success, especially after the MillerCoors merger and InBev acquisition of Anheuser Busch shook up their comfortable worlds. They took on the brands, set up special craft divisions internally, helped educate their retail customers and treated the beers with respect. Consider: at GABF last year, two large Philadelphia wholesalers were honored for their efforts promoting and selling craft beer. Whoever saw that coming?

That was probably the most shocking turn of events, but the now common disregard for rigid style guidelines and the emergence of beers never dreamed of by any aside from the most manic homebrewer 10 years ago is also a bit mind-boggling. And these are not just rarities and one-offs, but rather proud and permanent in brewers’ portfolios. Remember when telling someone his beer was sour was a bad thing? A welcome side effect of crafts’ success is that specialty beers from around the world, many of them inspired by the creativity shown by our craft brewers, are now routinely available, surely a blessing unforeseen.

Most of us never considered cans as part of the craft beer scene either, nor how perfect a package they would turn out to be; Oskar Blues release of Dale’s Pale Ale was considered something of a gimmick early on. Authentic cask ales were not on the top of most lists, brewer or consumer, when the new century was aborning, but a groundswell of demand, mostly occasioned by the efforts of Alex Hall in NYC, has (thankfully) changed that.

2. Taking It to the Extreme

Some people hate them and consider them an abomination not to be tolerated. More love them, a fortuitous thing given how many brewers have embraced the concept. We’re talking about extreme beers, a designation with no clear meaning and which no brewer has yet used to classify one of his.

As best it can be characterized, “extreme” in this instance means Bigger, Bolder, Different. Back in the day, Dogfish Head called them “off-centered ales,” a more pleasing description, if equally meaningless. If a beginning can be traced, it all started with Double IPAs out of California, tributes to the hop-centric heart of craft beer fandom. These worked well enough in the hands of skilled brewers, but became unbalanced disappointments under others. But the best of them, ah, the best of them are truly glorious.

The term is applied these days to any high alcohol beer which does not conform to some existing style standard, to barrel-aged beers of all sorts (another wonderful concept in the hands of experts), arguably the most interesting of all experiments because of the often unexpected results. Sour beers are the rage of late and they too offer endless potential for good or evil; their wonder at their best makes the risk not only acceptable but devoutly to be desired.

What we have here is commercial brewers embracing their homebrewing roots and finding that you can too go home again. Traditionalists are left to embrace the comforting thought that an unintended result of the focus on extreme beers has been a renewed campaign for so-called session beers. The double edge of that sword is that, since there is no real definition, a perfectly conceived session beer might also be considered, well, extreme.

3. Beer and Food: It Started with Garrett

It is difficult to overstate the importance of Garrett Oliver’s groundbreaking volume, The Brewmaster’s Table, as the precursor for the Brewers Association’s cause célèbre of the last decade, winning beer a place at white tablecloth restaurants as a companion to or replacement for wine. That book and the charismatic Oliver eased the way for events such as the ASN Ultimate Belgian Tasting in NYC, Mondial’s Flavors event in Montreal, and the BA’s own SAVOR event in Washington DC and similar celebrations.

It was the Beer Week phenomenon which swept the nation in the last three years that finally put the concept over the edge. Some of the nation’s best chefs, many of them beer lovers in their private lives, embraced the opportunity to explore all the many and varied aspects of beer in their recipes, freed at last from the limitations of wine. Sam Calagione and Marnie Old, with their touring vaudeville show of beer vs. wine dinners, didn’t hurt either.
None of this happened in a vacuum. Enlightened restaurants and taverns have been offering up exceptional beer-themed dinners since the late ‘90s: from Beer Chef Bruce Caton’s dinners at San Francisco’s Cathedral Hill Hotel to Monk’s Café in Philadelphia, which has become internationally famous for dinners which often feature beers available nowhere else in the nation, to Ebenezer’s Pub, which has earned the same sort of rep from a small town in Maine. And every brewpub worth its salt has ramped up attention with periodic events matching its beers with food (local food if they’re smart).

But the breakthrough came with Garrett Oliver, the guy who wrote the book.

4. Beer Moves Online — The Rise of Blogging and Social Media

Brewers have always been early adopters of technology, from the industrial revolution to the beginning of the Internet, when many breweries were among the first businesses to have websites.

While in general terms the first decade of the 21st century will be known for blogging and social media like Twitter, MySpace and Facebook, it’s especially true for the beer community. It’s almost hard to remember, but five years ago there were very few blogs dedicated to beer on the web.

The Blog came first, having been around in one form or another since about 1994. But the modern blog came a few years later, when the term “blog,” itself a shortened form of “weblog,” was coined in 1999. But in the last decade, blogging software, often free and easy to use, made blogging explode into public consciousness. As early as five years ago, there were very few blogs dedicated to beer. Today there are literally hundreds covering beer news, regional happenings, homebrewing and everything under the beer sun.

MySpace debuted in 2003, followed by Facebook a year later. MySpace was the early leader but in the last year or so Facebook has overtaken MySpace as the online social media of choice. Many breweries have all but abandoned their websites to Facebook fan pages as a more engaging and interactive way to communicate with their customers and fans.

In March of 2006, the first tweet was sent via Twitter. Since then, billions more have followed with millions of people and breweries now tweeting on a daily basis. Of the over 18 million Twitter accounts, beer has been a “trending topic” on several occasions, proving its worth as a valuable tool for beer lovers in a variety of ways, from micro-reviews to promoting beer events. We may not yet be able to get beer over our computers, but everything else is now available online.

5. The Change in Festivals from Smaller Niche Fest to Wider Beer Weeks

In the early days of microbreweries there was essentially just one kind of beer festival. You paid your money and got an opportunity to sample a lot of different beers poured by as many breweries as showed up for the event. And that was fine…for a while.

These days, the ways to showcase craft beer have exploded. While the traditional festival still has its place, there are so many new and different ways to experience craft beer, from the ever-popular beer dinner to the smaller, more intimate niche festival. Over the last decade this type of festival has grown by leaps and bounds.

Most often they’re put on by a brewery, a guild or one of a handful of better beer bars and are often held indoors, allowing them to take place at any time throughout the year. They’re also more intimate, allowing for a richer experience for the über beer geeks and the people who particularly love a particular festival’s unique theme.

Niche beer festivals are defined by the themes they explore and the crowds they attract, highlighting a single style of beer or other broadly defined category. They showcase specific beer styles such as Barleywines, Double IPAs, IPAs, and even Pilsners. Beyond specific styles, other themes include barrel-aged beers, Belgian-style beers, cask or real ales, extreme or strong beers, gluten-free beers, holiday beers, organic beers, single hop beers, and wet or fresh hop beers.

The other big change in fests in recent years is the rise of entire Beer Weeks, with up to as many as ten consecutive days dedicated to showcasing beer in a wide variety of ways at diverse venues within a narrow geographic area. At last count, there were nearly two-dozen beer weeks across the country with several new ones planned for the coming year.

6. Brewers Getting Together — Collaboration

Beginning in the late 1990s, brewers began experimenting with what was a logical extension of the open helpful, sharing atmosphere that made the craft brewing industry a unique business. Unlike many industries that zealously guard their trade secrets, brewers instead created a model of business where competitors actually help one another with problems, the borrowing of ingredients as well as ideas. That next logical step was collaboration, where two or more brewers get together to brew a special batch of beer together.

One of the earliest recorded collaborations was between Brooklyn Brewery’s Garrett Oliver who traveled to the Brakspear Brewery in the UK to brew a Bitter with Peter Scholey. That was the beginning of many collaborative brews, the most famous of which must surely be the Brooklyner-Schneider Hopfen-Weisse with Hans-Peter Drexler of G. Schneider & Son. Likewise, Dogfish Head’s Sam Calagione has been doing collaborations quite literally since his honeymoon, when he snuck away from the bridal suite in Paris to brew at a French brewpub. He’s likewise gone on to do many such beers, including last year’s Life & Limb with Sierra Nevada Brewing.

In the last decade, we’ve seen so many collaborations done that it’s nearly impossible to keep track of all of them. Just a few of the most accomplished and prolific collaborators include 21st Amendment, Allagash, AleSmith, Avery, Brooklyn, Dogfish Head, Fifty-Fifty, Lost Abbey, New Belgium, Russian River and Stone Brewing. Though there are countless others, suggesting that collaborations are here to stay, and one of the biggest trends of the last decade. Collaborations have even now been built into the fabric of the GABF, as collaborations between homebrewers and commercial brewers are eligible for a special prize, the GABF Pro-Am.

Internationally, craft brewing became a global phenomenon as brewers from different countries connected through the internet. De Proef in Belgium began its Signature series collaborating so far with brewers from Port, Allagash and Bells. And one brewing company, Denmark’s Mikkeller, without its own brewery, is virtually collaboration only.

7. The Big Blands Playing Catch-Up

One of the interesting trends of recent years has been the efforts by big mainstream brewers to emulate craft beers. Only Coors, which had been at it for a while, really pulled it off with the early stealth marketing of Blue Moon and a wise decision to allow that brand to find its niche rather than canceling it early on as Anheuser Busch would almost surely have done. A-B’s own efforts at stealth marketing were laughable. When you build your business on marketing rather than craft (in the broad sense of the word), it’s difficult to break the mindset.

For all the truly bad beers which came and went, though, some good things came out of the attempts to fool consumers. As mainstream companies began reintroducing the concept of seasonal beers to their mass audiences, it became an easier task for craft brewers to sell dubious publicans on the idea that a tap for Oktoberfest or Bock or Wheat was not an off-the-wall concept. And while niche marketing turned out not to work so well for mega-brewers, it was a tacit acknowledgement that there just might be more to beer than just the same old, same old.

Ultimately, the sale of A-B to InBev exposed the soulless corporate aspect of the majority of American brewing, made Boston Brewing, a craft, the largest American owner brewery in the nation and opened the doors for a resurgence among classic regional brewers, led by an astounding growth spurt by Yuengling, the oldest U.S. brewery of all.

8. Canned Hops

2002 will be remembered as the year that microcanning began. That’s the year that Oskar Blues, from Lyons, CO, debuted Dale’s Pale Ale. Years of metal leeching into the flavors — known as metal turbidity — and the rise of craft brewing had put the can on the endangered list, at least as a package for better beer. Plus, canning lines were massive and expensive, and the minimum can run was a full railroad car!

But in the intervening years, can manufacturers solved their turbidity problem using an organic polymer — really a water-based epoxy acrylic — that was sprayed inside each can during manufacturing, so it could honestly be said that the beer never touched the metal. Then a small Canadian equipment company, Cask systems, came up with a novel idea, creating an affordable manual canning line, and persuaded a can maker, Ball Corporation, to significantly reduce their minimum orders. All they had to do was convince someone to try canning their beer.

Eventually some one did, when Dale Katchis of Oskar Blues decided to give it a try. Initially skeptical, the more he looked into it, the more convinced he became it could work, and set off what he called “the canned-beer apocalypse.” The biggest challenge they faced was changing the near-dogmatic perception that beer in cans was wrong. But by 2005, Oskar Blues had grown to be the biggest brewpub in the U.S. and Dale’s was declared by the New York Times to be the best pale ale in America.

Many other brewers took notice, too, and just eight years later there are at least 66 craft brewers canning their beer in 31 states, plus another dozen hand-filling 5-liter cans. With large regional brewers like New Belgium and Pyramid Breweries now canning their beer, canned craft beer will only continue to grow in popularity.

9. The Emergence of Our Feminine Side

The impression is that women finally began embracing the craft beer revolution over the last decade, but a look around the room at any major brew festival has always been evidence that the ladies are hip to hops. They sure have become more noticeable lately, though. And such recognition as ASN’s Beer Goddess program hasn’t hurt either!

Professionally, Teri Fahrendorf, with her creation of the Pinks Boots Society and her attention-getting cross-country brewing tour, was one of the major faces of this new look. And it was hard to ignore Jennie Tally, brewmaster for the three Squatters brewpubs in Utah. When Annette May, beer department manager at Merchant’s Fine Wine in Dearborn, MI, became the nation’s first certified female cicerone, we sat up and took notice, perhaps remembering as we did that Rogue’s Sebbie Buhler has been one of the nation’s best known beer reps for years.

Women beer writers like Lisa Morrison and Lucy Sanders are respected veterans in that field, but Carolyn Smagalski, whose platform at Bella Online gives her an audience most bloggers can only envy, has taught a whole generation of woman readers about the glories of beer. Cornelia Corey was the first female Beer Drinker of the Year in the annual Wynkoop competition in 2001 and Diane Catanzaro became the second in 2007.

Those few just scratch the surface of a bigger picture. And you know who’s looking at it all and smiling? Carol Stoudt, who was there at the beginning.

10. Beer Turns Greener

Jokes about green beer aside, organic beer and breweries adopting green practices, that is reducing their footprint on the environment, were very much a growing trend throughout the last decade. To be sure, breweries for many years have been ecologically conscious. As early as the 1880s, breweries like Anheuser-Busch were giving their spent grain to farmers, a practice that many breweries continue today. And with Coors’ introduction of the aluminum can in the Fifties, recycling was born.

But those simple and obvious common sense ideas gave way over the last decade to a truly staggering array of green ideas. New Belgium built a wind farm, Anderson Valley went solar, and so did Stone and Sierra Nevada, who also has a dedicated employee with the title “Sustainability Coordinator” whose sole job is finding better ways for the brewery to improve their environmental impact. Boulevard put a living green roof on their new brewery expansion. It uses succulent plants and natural stone to absorb both heat and water, even extending the life of the building itself. And Eel River Brewing became the world’s first 100 percent bio-mass fueled brewery, powered entirely by energy created as a byproduct of a hog plant down the road from the brewery.

That’s just the tip of the emerald iceberg; some other areas where breweries are being green include emission, energy efficiency and power generation. Then there’s water conservation and treatment, waste reduction, recycling and diversion, along with smarter transportation decisions.

One step farther is the breweries that have chosen to make organic beer. In the 1990s, the organic hops available were limited at best. But beginning this century, the variety of hops improved dramatically, and so did the number of and quality of organic brewers. At recent Great American Beer Festivals, organic beers have won gold medals up against non-organic beers in multiple categories. Organic beers are no longer simply in a separate niche, but have undoubtedly come into their own.