Can Tradition Be Saved?

I’ve
been thinking about the movie Silent Running a lot
lately when I look at the shelves in my favorite
beer stores. The 1971 sci-fi classic was the story
of an ark in space, studded with artificial
habitats to save examples of Earth’s plants and
animals from a world ravaged by pollution and war.
Bruce Dern, as a semi-psycho ecologist, is faced
with the destructive termination of the project
because of costs. He rebels, taking over the ship
to sustain these precious few remaining trees and
animals.

Why
do I think about a dated eco-drama when I look at
the great beers racked on the
shelves?

By LEW BRYSON

Because
Europe’s small brewers used to be the sheltered
habitats for unique beers, serenely floating along
in their tiny markets, but now market pressures are
driving a consolidation whichhas brewers tossing
beers overboard in a rush to profitability which
overlooks differentiation and, well, art and
beauty. Baltic porters, milds, doublebocks, cask
ales, dunklesbiers, hellerbocks . . . It’s raining
pilsner in Europe as brewers slash costs, and other
beers are drowning in the rising tide of golden
conformity.

Some of them are
being saved, and we’re living in the ark. America’s
small brewers may soon be the only ones in the
world making some types of beer. That’s been their
mission since the beginning, brewing variety. The
question is how long it can last.

European brewers
are in the grip of a consolidation frenzy right
now, have been for five years, and probably will be
until there are three or four large brewers left.
It looks a lot like America in the 1950s and ’60s,
as every brewery tries to grow large enough to have
a market presence – to attain the size needed to
spend worthwhile marketing Euros in a united
Europe.

The natural
consequence of a drive to fund significant spends
is to focus that spending on a single beer – to get
the most use for the Euro. That means European
breweries are not only getting bigger (and fewer)
through mergers, it means they are focusing their
efforts on a single brand, which is almost always
the house (loosely-defined) pilsner. For more and
more European breweries, it is no longer about the
beer – it’s about the brand.

“The corporate
brewery buyouts (in Europe) are focusing on the
heritage of the brand,” said Bill Covaleski, of
Victory Brewing in Downingtown, PA. “It doesn’t
really matter what the liquid in the bottle is.
These companies are more marketing-driven, rather
than product-driven, and in the marketer’s mind
everyone is open to change, even apt to change.
They’ll take on a brand figuring it has a certain
lifespan. Then when that brand’s done, they can get
people to buy something else.”

Covaleski admits
that it’s only natural that marketing-driven
companies don’t stick with older types of beer.
“Marketers don’t like stasis,” he said, “because
stasis doesn’t allow them to have any fun. Making
and selling the same thing all the time doesn’t
appeal to them. It’s great for a brewer to be able
to take one recipe and hone it over years. But
marketers don’t get paid to do the same thing over
and over again, they get paid to be new and
exciting and different.”

The depressing
part of this kind of direction is thinking of the
brewery employees who don’t realize what’s happened
when their brewery gets bought. “There are still
people in the breweries that still try to make
those beers,” said Covaleski, “but they’re making
it for corporate bigwigs who don’t give a damn
about what it tastes like. Their employers, the
owners and top management, have already been gutted
and sold. The Teutonic fat lady has cleared her
throat. It’s not over yet, but it’s
coming.”

Things are still
possible here in America. “We’re fortunate here at
Victory,” Covaleski said by way of example. “We’re
beer geeks, we run the company, and we’re still
able to call the shots.” It works for them, too –
Victory continues to grow in double-digits and
maintains gargantuan buzz in beer enthusiast
circles across the country.

They’re also doing
their bit to save the world’s beer heritage.
Victory Festbier is an homage to the classic marzen
beers of Munich – amber, medium-bodied and full of
the dry malt flavor of those beers. “I’d guess the
first festbier I had was a Spaten,” Covaleski
recalled. “I remember a great party in 1986 when a
buddy actually got a keg of Spaten. It was a great
day. We feel strongly about wanting to have a beer
like that around to drink. It’s personal
motivation. We make beers that we like to drink,
and figure that someone else will probably want to
drink them as well.” But after regular trips to
Germany, and frequent sampling of imported beer,
Covaleski feels that Victory’s Festbier is perhaps
closer to that 1986 Spaten than most German
festbiers are today. “When we discovering beer back
in the 1980s. . . ” he said, then paused. “What we
make as Festbier is in line with the beers we were
enjoying at that time. We’re brewing to satisfy our
passion for a beer that’s lost, really.”

The new brewer at
Paper City Brewing of Holyoke, MA, Ben Anhalt,
feels the same way. “I don’t think they’re the
traditional Oktoberfest beers anymore,” he said of
German imports. “The small breweries and brewpubs
in Germany still do it. There are a few places that
still brew a spring beer and lager it longer. But
it’s going away. It doesn’t matter anymore, anyway.
You can make a pilsner and put “Oktoberfest” on it,
and your sales will be higher. It’s all marketing
now.”

Everyone knows
about the training program IPA got put on by
American brewers. This originally robust and hoppy
beer had become anemic in its home territory of
England, under 5% ABV and barely hopped enough to
punch its way out of a wet paper sack. Now IPAs are
great, strapping things with bulging malt muscles
and billowing clouds of hop aroma.

The man who
started them on that path was Fritz Maytag, who
went to England back in the early 1970s to learn
how to brew true ales and bring that knowledge back
to beer at Anchor Brewing. He was in for quite a
shock. “I thought I’d learn about ale brewing,” he
said. “But I found that the ales were not
traditional – not all malt, not dry-hopped. They’ve
been using sugar since the 1800s. They invented
light beer, if you would – sugar is more
fermentable. The beers had no hop aroma to speak
of, the color, I was confident, was from added
caramel color. I was shocked.”

Maytag went on.
“English beer had gone through the same thing
American beer has gone through,” he said. “It
became very standardized, very bland, except for a
bitter quality, but very little flavor, or aroma,
or body, or any real character. Of course, it was
brewed with sugar so really it was light beer. In
effect they made light beer before we did. There
was a loss of richness and tradition in ale
brewing, even in Britain, which we all think of as
the home of real ale. But the real ale wasn’t very
real.”

Maytag would brew
up a beer called Liberty Ale, which has become a
perennial, a touchstone of the movement that holds
up remarkably well to current standards. He calls
it “a product that time has caught up with. It’s
still pretty hoppy, but there are a bunch of other
ales that are that hoppy and that malty and that
bitter. But believe me, it wasn’t the case 25 years
ago.”

Liberty and the
beers it inspired would succeed to such a degree
that they were reintroduced to their natural
habitat – strongly hopped IPAs have appeared in
England, brewed by English brewers like Freeminer
(Trafalgar) and Hopback (Summer
Lightning).

Porter was even
further gone – it had completely disappeared in the
UK by the 1970s. Old signs in pubs still told of
its existence, but it had been completely
supplanted by stouts and brown ales. Porter
survived only in lager-brewed forms in the US
(Yuengling and The Lion each continued to brew a
porter) and in eastern Europe – the massive porters
of the Baltic that are more like imperial
stouts.

Once again, it
fell to the Americans to rescue the beer. One of
the original rescuers was Dave Geary, of Geary
Brewing in Portland, ME. He went right to the
source to make his porter. “When I was living in
London,” he said, “I struck up a friendship with a
bookseller. We corresponded after I came back to
the US. He sent me a treatise from 1802, called
“Every Man His Own Brewer”, and it was about
porter, written by a disgruntled employee of a
Shoreditch brewery. It describes porter in great
detail, what it was, how it was made, who drank it,
and what it was like. We used that as the basis for
our porter. You hear a lot of bullshit about
finding old recipes in the family Bible written by
dwarves . . . this one just happens to be
true.”

Porter has turned
out to be a small but steady staple of the craft
brewing industry. One brewery, Deschutes, has
successfully turned the beer into their flagship in
the porter-hungry Pacific Northwest. And porter,
too, has been “released in the wild”. A number of
small breweries and brewpubs in the British Isles
make a porter these days.

I’ve had a
personal hand in one of these rescue projects, and
I can say that it’s deeply satisfying. Heavyweight
Brewing, of Ocean Township, NJ, is a one-man
operation that brews big beers in small batches.
Tom Baker is the one man. When I found out about
his brewery opening a few years ago, I immediately
sent him an e-mail urging him to make one of his
big beers a Baltic porter, a type of beer that I’d
developed a strong liking for.

The Baltics were
largely preserved by the inertia of communism in
eastern Europe, but now they are being phased out
at a growing number of breweries, including two of
the best examples from Okocim and Pripps. Carlsberg
owns a majority share of both brewers, and also
owns Sinebrychoff, a Finnish brewer which also
makes a Baltic porter. I’m sure the thought at
headquarters ran something like, “Why make three
great, different Baltic porters when you can make
one?” Of course, it didn’t hurt to cut the
competition for Carlsberg’s own porter.

This is a prime
example of how fantastic beers are being casually
wiped out by consolidation, like the recent merger
of German brewers EKU and Reichelbrau. Each made an
exquisite huge bock beer – EKU had its massive
Kulminator Urtyp Hell, Reichelbrau the ice-brewed
Bayerisch G’frorns. When the breweries merged, the
decision was made that the consolidated brewery
really only needed one huge beer, and the G’frorns
got the axe. Never mind that it was a classic beer,
a unique original.

Beers like that
inspire the kind of passion Tom Baker and I poured
into the Baltic porter project. Tom had read my
e-mail, but it wasn’t until he chanced to have a
Sinebrychoff two months later that he caught the
fire. “Koff was the only Baltic I’d ever had,”
Baker said. “Then it was easy to know I had to make
that beer.” I pulled together every bit of
information I had on the Baltics, grabbed a bottle
each of Okocim, Dojlidy and Zywiec porter, and went
to visit Tom at the brewery. We had a great morning
sampling and talking beer, and Tom started to
formulate.

What we came up
with was a beer we named Perkuno’s Hammer.
Originally meant to be a one-shot, the beer
generated enough buzz for Tom to make more. “It’s
my best-selling beer now,” he told me recently. The
Hammer comes into its own in these cold winter
months, and Tom will be busy, bottling, making
special cask versions, and promoting.

And he has become
a Baltic porter fan just like me. “I buy ’em
anywhere I can find ’em,” Tom said. That means,
unfortunately, that he’s subject to the same
vicissitudes. “When I was out at a beer festival at
Penn State,” he told me, “I ran into the people
from Stawski importers, and they said, ‘Isn’t that
a shame about Okocim Porter.’ What?! I started
calling around on my cellphone to places in New
York City to try and find someone with a stash, but
no one had any. I cried a little.”

That’s the
downside of the story of the ark. Even though
Americans are catching the styles, the originals
are disappearing, never to be seen again. “What do
we have to wait,” asked Tom Baker, “maybe 50 years
before Europe realizes they made a mistake, the
same mistake we did?”

Chris Frashier is
a brewer at Old Dominion, where they recently
released a Baltic porter as their winter specialty
brew. He’s amazed at how Europeans are rejecting
their own beer heritage. “I was just reading that
in Germany,” he said, “the young kids are
influenced by TV to the point that kids in Cologne
don’t want kolsch! ‘That’s what the old guys
drink!’ They want a Bud, that’s what the chicks
drink on TV. It’s shocking to me, when they could
have Kolsch, or bitter in London, and they drink a
Bud. Your priorities are wrong!”

Americans’ beer
heritage is one of tweaking the classics, and
that’s true even when they’re saving them.
“American Belgian-style ales are unlike Belgians,”
said Baker, who makes a Belgian-style golden ale
called Lunacy. “They’re inspired by the Belgians,
but it’s different. Maybe that’s how the Belgians
started out. It’s the same thing for us – we’re
reviving styles, but we’re doing it our way. You
know, I wouldn’t want to make Okocim Porter, I just
want to make my own interpretation. Why make
something that’s already great?”

Okay, so it’s an
ark with a genetic engineering lab on board. At
least they’re still afloat. It’s a blessing to save
these beers in the face of the yellow tide of
pilsners that’s sweeping Europe. Hold what you’ve
got, Europe, the ark’s coming.