10 BREWING & BEVERAGE INDUSTRIES BUSINESS On July 27 of this year, in a story that quickly made the rounds on social media, the American music and culture magazine Paste reported that, in a collaboration with Evil Twin Brewing, the Richmond, Virginia-based brewery, The Veil, had produced a beer flavoured with deep-fried chicken tenders from the fast food chain, Chick-fil-A. The beer, called Fried Fried Chicken Chicken, went on sale at the brewery a day or two later. I have not tasted Fried Fried Chicken Chicken and I’m not sure that I wish to do so. But that it’s a (rather pricey) collaboration with Evil Twin comes as no surprise, since I was able to taste another of that company’s collaborations a couple of years back when Big Ass Money Stout, an ale made with Norway’s Lervig Aktiebryggeri and brewed with frozen pizzas and money, went on sale at the Three Johns pub in London. It was, despite what the beer rating sites might report, not terribly good. While they might quite rightly recall the axiom, “just because you can doesn’t mean you should,” beers brewed with unusual or bizarre ingredients of all sorts are proliferating these days, and not just because they might taste good. (Most, to my experience, at least, do not.) They are instead, to a very great degree, a product of the beer times in which we live. It will come as no surprise that breweries are multiplying like rabbits these days, with over five thousand in the United States, close to a thousand in my homeland of Canada and about the same number in even traditional wine nations like France and Italy, and nearing or, by now, exceeding twice that count in the UK. As such, being heard above the fray is becoming more and more difficult. One way to get written and talked about, of course, is to chuck some sort of ridiculous ingredient into a small batch of beer and, providing you have a sufficiently large social media following, film and post footage of yourself doing it. The more preposterous the ingredient and over-the- top the resulting beer, the better. “Ha, ha, ha, we’re dumping kabobs and sriracha mayonnaise in this 13% Imperial stout! Aren’t we wacky?” No, you’re not. What you are is clever and calculating, knowing damn well that not only is a video of reddish mayo and dubious meat being slopped into the brew kettle almost guaranteed to go viral online, but that people will likely line up afterwards for a chance to sample the resulting “limited edition, maximum four bottles per person” beer. Which brings us to the second ‘beer times’ element, that being ratings sites like Beer Advocate, ratebeer.com and UnTappd. Although all are US-centric, such sites are now globally popular and driven by two sorts of beer drinkers. On the one hand, there are those who see them as easy ways to log their personal tasting notes or, according to numerous people I’ve spoken with, simply keep track of what they have been drinking. Such folk likely make up the large majority of users and drive the success of these operations. The minority, on the other hand, is made up of the die-hard tickers and traders, those who number their ratings in the thousands or even tens of thousands. For many of those people, the chance to try a one-time-only beer is an opportunity not to be missed, since it means not just adding another notch to the ratings bedpost, but getting one unlikely to be replicated by others. Those folk, plus brewery loyalists and the simply curious, are the drivers behind oddball beer sales. The above points might make it seem as if there is no downside to creating weird brews like those noted above. However – put the kabobs and mayo down! – there is also a bigger picture situation at play when strange substances begin finding their way into the kettle. Brewery reputations are made over the long term, not the short, and while one cry-for-attention brew might be overlooked by brewery fans and friends, going this route too often risks turning the business into a bit of a joke. When the venerable, 30 year old Oregon brewer, Rogue Ales, released a series of unconventional beers in the early 2010s, for instance, the US craft beer cognoscenti responded largely by ceasing to take the brewery seriously. Whether as a result or by coincidence, sales stagnated. Rogue is now re-earning the respect it lost via a series of impressive beers featuring ingredients from their own farms – newsworthy, but not gimmicky! – but it’s been a long road back for the company. Anyone contemplating getting too outrageous in the brewhouse would do well to pay heed. Stephen Beaumont Letter from North America Just Because You Can… A professional beer writer for 27 years, Stephen Beaumont is the author or co-author of a dozen books on beer, including the new, third edition of The Pocket Beer Book, arriving this November, and 2016’s fully-revised and updated second edition of The World Atlas of Beer, both co-written with Tim Webb. Stephen’s latest solo book is The Beer & Food Companion, which was published to much critical and commercial acclaim in October of 2015. Stephen has also contributed to several other books and written innumerable features, articles and columns for publications as varied at The Globe and Mail and Playboy, Fine Cooking and Whisky Advocate. When not writing, he travels the world extensively, tracking down new breweries and hosting beer dinners and tastings from São Paulo, Brazil, to Helsinki, Finland, and Beijing, China, to Seattle, Washington. 10_Layout 1 13/08/2017 08:11 Page 1