A $90 Six-Pack of Pilsner
Aaron Goldfarb wrote one of the more remarkable articles about beer I’ve ever seen. Posted at VinePair, it details the story of Screaming Eagle winemaker Nick Gislason and his side project making beer. Called Hanabi, the small-batch brewery is reserved for lager, disbursed in a few batches throughout the year and a six-pack goes for ninety bucks.
The pitch comes from the lifestyle approach of wine marketing, which involves heavy narrative elements to inspire aspirational FOMO. Here’s the boilerplate from the company website.
“We approach the art of lager brewing with a winemaker’s perspective and palate. We believe in sourcing heirloom varieties of barley from interesting terroirs around the world, and embracing the seasonal differences as a means of honoring the agricultural origins of our beers. Using time-honored brewing techniques that coax out complex flavors, and with the patience of winemakers, we allow these beers to ferment and mature slowly, at their own pace, to deliver incredibly delicious beers of precision and intention.”
Yet as obtuse as that sounds to beer folk (there’s nothing here Bavarians haven’t been doing for 500 years), it’s essential to the story. To justify such a price point, something special must be afoot. It leads to comments like this.
“Our experience with yeast ecology in a wine context encourages fresh ideas about how to manage grain fermentations to bring about desired flavors, aromas, and textures.”
Cross-discipline inquiries often lead to unexpected insights. Brewers have been trying to learn from winemakers for more than a decade to bring a different way of thinking to flavor and process. The two industries approach their craft in very different ways, and brewers love how winemakers think. Yet except for flowery language, nothing Gislason does is unusual.
And quotes like this are just insulting:
“With winemaking we make time for things like this, build the time into the business model, whereas in hustling breweries that are trying to crank out lagers in four to five weeks to stay economical, you just don’t have time for things like that,” he says. “Certainly in winemaking, the value of patience and time is well understood, along with the interesting and delicious things you can do with it.”
I don’t mean to suggest Gislason isn’t serious about why he’s doing or isn’t making good beer. He worked at Boundary Bay and has studied at UC-Davis. But he’s just making beer like other brewers—professionals who have dedicated their lives, not just weekends and evenings, to the study and craft of making beer.
“We only brew Hanabi lagers three to four times per year, seasonally, due to the long maturation times and spiritual inputs that our methods require.”
The real innovation is the marketing and price point. The beer is around eight to ten times as expensive as other craft lagers in the US. (Despite Gislason’s claim that devoted lager makers are rare, Hanabi has lots of company.) A story justifies that price tag, not the beer itself, not the ingredients or time.
More power to him if he can sell beer at the price of a $30 bottle of wine. Hanabi isn’t the first brewery to shoot for the price stratosphere. So why does his project irritate me so much? It’s because of the latent critique of other brewers it necessarily contains.
I’ve spent a lot of the past decade talking to brewers who are incredibly devoted to their craft, who have invested in brewing school (sometimes in Germany), who have studied beer’s tangled history, who learn everything they can about the barley, malt, hops, and terroir of ingredients. I have been inspired by the depth of their knowledge and the care with which they’ve built breweries and created processes devoted to making the best beer possible. Gislason hasn’t discovered some secret to brewing that escaped their notice.
I hope Gislason is able to convince wine folk of beer’s complexity and accomplishment—it deserves broader appreciation. That’s noble work. I just wish he’d show a bit more respect for the other practitioners also making great beer.