The Sweaty Summer of Our Discontent

The National Weather Service forecasts a high of 104 today (40C), part of a three-day run of triple-digit temps. Honestly, I have no right to complain. Three-day runs of hot temperature are typical in Oregon, and by Friday we’ll be back to normal. Meantime, the hop growers are readying their bespoke equipment to bring in those emerald gems we so love, and fresh hop season is just around the corner.

I’m going to be hiding out through this hot snap, taking a bit of a mini-vacation. I hope to be back at the end of the week with part three of my series on West Coast IPAs—a fun post that will touch on future tech and where our beer world is going. However, I can’t very well leave you with a mere update, so to go with our hot weather, I offer a few Monday morning hot takes for your consideration. Feel free to condemn and refute them in comments. You’ll need the entertainment if, like me, you’re hiding under a cool rock until this heat blows over.

1. Tilray is a “Craft Brewery”
The big news last week involved the transfer of eight breweries/brands from one giant foreign-owned company to another, as ABI sold off some of their distressed assets to Canadian company Tilray, which now owns a dozen labels. Tilray, established as a cannabis company and now scrambling to find profitable products, is apparently a “craft brewery.”

“They are owned by a company that is not yet large,” he said about Tilray. “We’ll see how many more acquisitions they make, but it’s still well under 6 million barrels. My back of the envelope puts them at about 900,000 barrels after the acquisition,” [Brewers Association Bart] Watson said.

Needless to say, this is crazy. The Brewers Association can call its members whatever it wants, but we in the media need to divest ourselves from this language. It’s pure spin now, and now contributes to consumer confusion. The US contains roughly 9,000 breweries, and they all make beer. Some of this beer falls into the “craft" segment, which constitutes every kind of domestically-brewed beer not described as “mass market lager.”

My hot take here is observing the irony of this situation. Redhook and Widmer Brothers, breweries that took on a minority stake from ABI and lost their status as “craft breweries,” have regained their status now that a foreign multinational has acquired them. Tilray, according to the BA, qualifies as “independent” and “small.” Okay then.

2. The Craft Segment Has Stalled
The Brewers Association also released their annual mid-year survey, finding that the craft segment is down 2% so far this year. That’s an improvement from earlier in the year, when this segment was down 9%. Amazingly, brewery openings outpace closings, and the total number of breweries crept up.

My hot take here is merely lukewarm: this isn’t surprising, nor would I expect matters to improve anytime soon. The mood is gloomy, and breweries are going to continue to struggle.

3. Heterodox Style Guidelines
In June, the European Beer Consumers’ Union released a new style guide, overseen by Tim Webb. Styles still exist at the granular level, but Tim has clumped them in new and possibly controversial ways. He identifies six major groups: industrial lagers, traditional lagers, ales, specific style clusters, regional specialties, and flavored beers. The weakest part is the division of certain beers into “specific style clusters,” which includes categories like wheat beers, wild ales, and stouts and porters, and “regional specialties,” which enumerates the local beers of some but not all brewing countries. (Ukraine is in, the US isn’t.)

My hot take: I like it. It does separate styles out using different criteria, looking variously at where they’re made, what they’re made of, or, in the case of industrial lager, who makes them. That’s a bit dicey, but the very exercise is also dicey. There’s no way to do this in a perfectly organized manner. I like Tim’s arrangement because it is flexible and intuitive. Best, it relegates style to a secondary consideration. In that respect, it’s a valuable contribution to the discussion.

* Bonus Hot Take
The Midjourney illustration at the top of the post illustrates how hard it is to get AI to do what you want. I asked for a can of beer, and it gave me four images of beer glasses, not cans. It also failed to render them as surrealistic paintings. Nevertheless, the one I chose appears to be boiling, and it is melting, sort of, despite depicting a moon of a planet in the Orion Nebula (presumably).