Craft brewers: Want better beer? Size matters

Large, corporately owned breweries have dominated the American beer market for decades, and now there is news that global beer giant InBev may absorb America's largest brewer, Anheuser-Busch.

Craft brewers don’t follow the mantra “bigger is better” – they’ve made a different choice, to stay small.

It’s “a philosophical approach to making beer,” said John Mallett, manager of production and operations at Bell’s Brewery in Kalamazoo, Mich. “It’s about trying to maximize the quality of the product.”

A brewery must produce fewer than 2 million barrels of beer a year to qualify as a craft producer, according to the Brewers Association in Denver, Colo. Mega-brewer Anheuser-Busch produced 24 million barrels – enough to fill almost 8 billion bottles – in 2007.

Craft breweries must also be independently owned and produce at least half of their beer using malted barley, unlike large breweries, which often use other grains.

“We’re trying to get into the essence that is beer, and for me that is malt flavor,” said Mallett.

Beer is made by adding water to malted barley, creating a sugary liquid called wort, which is then boiled. Hops, the blossoms of a hop plant, are added to the mixture for flavor and aroma. After it has cooled, yeast is added, which consumes the sugar and produces alcohol and carbon dioxide, creating beer. The process takes as little as a week.

“Yeast is the philosopher’s stone that takes nature’s goodness and converts it into liquid gold,” said Teri Fahrendorf, craft brewing veteran and founder of the Pink Boots Society, an organization for women brewers. (Brewers wear boots to protect their  feet from the wet conditions.)

To make a lighter-flavored, less expensive beer, large brewers frequently add corn and rice to the barley as additional sources of sugar.

“Obviously, any product that’s going for an absolute mass market is going to be something that ends up being bland because it's made to offend nobody,” said Chicago Beer Society board member and past president Brad Reeg.

“As far as I’m concerned, craft beer is about flavor,” said Ray Daniels, a craft beer marketer and professor at the Siebel Institute of Technology and World Brewing Academy in Chicago.

Craft brewers embrace the wide spectrum of flavors that four simple ingredients – barley, hops, yeast and water – can create.

Malting is the process of starting the growth of a barley seed, and then halting it by applying intense heat. In this process the grain’s starch begins to convert to sugar, providing food for the yeast. The amount of heat applied is a major factor in the flavor of the beer.

“We can apply less heat to it, more heat to it, damn near incinerate it,” said Mallett.  “And with these different treatments at the end of the malting process, you get radically different flavors. So, black malt, which is pretty much burnt, has a real acrid, burnt character, not unlike coffee.”

Varying the types and amounts of hops added creates different aromas and bitter flavors. The time at which hops are added, during the boiling process, dramatically affects the flavors the hops impart, according to Matt Van Wyk, brewmaster at Flossmoor Station in south suburban Flossmoor.

Even the water affects the flavor. Breweries filter the water and tinker with its mineral content to emulate water chemistry at places like the original brewing site of Bass Ale, Burton-on-Trent, England, according to Mallett.

Water there is higher in calcium sulfate, which Mallett says will give the beer a “very drying, not astringent, but bitter-enhancing characteristic.”

In contrast, he said another form of calcium, calcium chloride, will give beer a “sweet kind of character – a fullness, a body, a richness.”

Yeast also greatly affects the flavor of the beer, most obviously when comparing ales, the staple of craft breweries, and lagers, the beer produced most by big breweries.

“In simplest terms, the difference between an ale and a lager is the difference between ‘wow!’ and ‘aaahhh,’” according to Mallett.

Anheuser-Busch, maker of refreshing aaahhh-style lagers like Budweiser, will release a new brew, Budweiser American Ale, in October in reaction to the increasing popularity of craft-brewed ales.

“Our company,” according to Keith Levy, vice president of brand management of Anheuser-Busch, “is really guided by the consumer’s behavior. So, if the consumers want interesting styles of beer, craft-style liquids, things of that nature, then we want to be able to provide that to them.”

Craft brewers have found their consumers are looking for a personal experience. According to Mallett, craft beer consumers are attracted to the story of their beer.

“Beer created out of someone’s gut and personal passion,” appeals to craft beer drinkers, according to Daniels. “It’s a manifestation of imagination and vision – people recognize that.”

Instead of buying beer produced half-way across the country, many craft beer drinkers relish the local brew. “The fact that they’ve actually been there themselves, they’ve had a personal experience with the brewery,” makes a difference, according to Daniels.

Fahrendorf agrees: “People want to meet the cheesemaker, they want to meet the beermaker too.”

On a trip to Blackstone Brewery in Nashville, Tenn., craft beer fan and Chicago homebrewer, Dr. Ryan Carrick, had just such an experience. He enjoyed the porter on tap and told the manager, who then “went upstairs for, like, 15 minutes, to try and find the recipe for me.”

“He was just going to give it to me. I didn’t even ask for it,” said Carrick.

This sort of camaraderie is characteristic of the craft beer community.

“It’s really remarkable to me just how cooperative it is,” said Mallett. “Because we’re helping each other, all of us make better beer.” There are approximately 1,400 craft breweries in the United States.

Although they might not adhere to the limits craft brewers impose on themselves, large companies like Anheuser-Busch also have the goal of making better beer. 

“To me, limiting the size of the brewery or the ingredients really isn’t the idea here,” said Levy. “It’s more about how you brew the beer.”

“They do something I could never do,” said craft brew veteran Fahrendorf. Large companies like Anheuser-Busch, Coors and Miller produce in vast quantities a very consistent, high quality and “technically perfect beer.”

“But it has no soul.”