Tip of the hat to
Uncle Jack for
this, but mostly to my friend
Chris Lohring (the man behind
The Notch line of all session beers that's doing so well in Massachusetts), who wrote
this sad story of how he's decided -- against his will, and his heart -- to
pull Notch BSA from his seasonal line-up (Jack wrote a good post on it that brought it to my attention, and for that, I thank him; you should too).
Briefly, Notch BSA was a harvest beer, a literal harvest beer. Here's how Chris explained it:
I released my BSA Harvest in late September [of 2011]. You know, that time of
September when Fall actually begins? Something about an equinox, I
think. The BSA Harvest is a result of a program where Notch prepays a
Western Massachusetts farmer for that year’s barley crop as in
incentive, which in turn encourages local agriculture [hence the name: Brewer Supported Agriculture]. The barley is
harvested in August, malted a few weeks later [at Valley Malt in Hadley, Mass., which I mention in the Element Brewing post below], brewed in the beginning
of September, and hits retail fresh on September 21st. A real harvest
beer in the season we should drinking it.
Except, as Chris relates, his retailers couldn't do it. See,
Fall beers come out in August, or even July. Bring a Fall harvest beer out in late September -- when you would think harvest
actually comes -- and you won't find a place on the shelf --
because of the winter beers coming in shortly -- and people have already fallen into their buying pattern for the season. At least, that's the conventional wisdom among wholesalers and retailers, Chris tells us:
They claim a September release is too late for a Fall beer, as they are
making room for the Winter beers that will be in any day. This is the
hand retail has been dealt, and it is certainly not their fault. So, a
real Fall beer, the BSA Harvest, born of the change of the seasons that
yields a barley harvest, is deemed too damn late. So unfortunately, BSA
Harvest will be absent later this year, as it was killed off by the rush
to shift units...
Is Chris just crying? Wouldn't you think that in the pervading atmosphere where the favorite flavor of craft beer is
NEW, a
new beer on the shelf in September that promised
real Harvest character/story would work? Wouldn't you think actually releasing an Oktoberfest in mid-September would work? After all, I keep hearing from brewers that their seasonals
run out before the season's over! And here comes
'Tardy Brewing Company's True Oktoberfest' in September, with its label proclaiming "Never Released
Till We Hear The Oompah!" and you'd think that would
kill, right?
Probably not. What's driving the craft market today is,
increasingly, what's always driven the beer market:
volume. Blue Moon is over
3 million barrels (and apparently accelerating), and whether
we (or the
Brewers Association) call Blue Moon a craft beer
or not is pretty much
immaterial: that's how the people who are selling it and drinking it
think of it, and that's how the people who sell it...
sell it. Likewise, when
Samuel Adams seasonals come out, and when the
major regional brewers' seasonals come out, that's the bulge that moves the snake.
And...wholesalers, after a
short flirtation hustling smaller crafts and
working hard at building brands, see that they can make volume
and better margins selling the
big craft brands, and it's
less work. So if Samuel Adams Summer seasonals come out in April, that's what's
shaping wholesalers' views of how the market is
supposed to work, which in turn
shapes the retailers' reactions...once the brewers have been encouraged to
get their seasonals out earlier. Because then the wholesalers
don't have to worry about getting the Oktoberfest all sold before November 1st.
I
may be overreacting here, but there's a possibility that this is
another early sign of things going back to the way they were:
less choice instead of more in the beer market. ("Another" sign, you ask? The
consolidation of craft brewers is one: the Magic Hat/Pyramid/North American Breweries roll-up, Goose Island, Old Dominion, Widmer/Redhook/Kona.) If wholesalers start to focus on the
big craft brands, that's how things are going to go.
What to do? It's up to us, and Chris sums it up
nicely:
What to do as a consumer? It is really quite simple. Stop buying beer
out of season, and stop encouraging the trend. You may start to see more
beers that make sense in the season. Or during today’s snow storm, sit
back and enjoy that Summer Beer that was released just last week.
Is that realistic?
Is it likely? No, not at all. Just remember:
none of this was realistic or likely 20 years ago. Sam Adams was all contract-brewed.
Over half the American breweries now in business didn't exist. You could stand on the stairs and see Harpoon's
entire operation. Ten taps of
microbrews at a bar was amazing news (because we didn't even call it
'craft beer' yet). There were no mass beer-rating websites. Yuengling had not done any expansion and was just barely known outside of eastern Pennsylvania.
Most people had no idea what a seasonal beer was!
But the people who love beer
made it happen and I'm assuming
we still want it done right. If we have to
shame craft brewers into this, if we have to
make fun of them, if we have to appeal to their sense of tradition and
call them out when they ignore it --
that's how this is supposed to work! The brewers,
the passionate ones, are supposed to be
running this, not the
marketers and sellers of the stuff, and it's supposed to be
run for us, the people who
love the beer, the people who
know when the hell summer and fall begin.
Jack had a pretty pithy statement as well (He did warn us he was going to get more curmudgeonly this year):
For those of you who just want the next over-hopped, high alcohol,
unbalanced mutation of a real IPA, none of this matters, of course. You
gave up on beer a long time ago.
Are you one of those people who think Oktoberfest in August is
ridiculous (especially when they all run out by October 1st)? Do summer beers in the snow
piss you off? If you think that pumpkin beers should wait till September, if you think Maibock is for
May, if you think
winter beers shouldn't come out before mid-November at the earliest...
say something. Tell your brewers, tell your stores. And tell your friends.
