Yesterday's A&E section of the Oregonian had an excellent article, written by John Foyston, that profiled 13 new beer establishments in Portland. It's a long, but great writeup that explains why each of these places is unique and worth visiting. I highly recommend John's article--you can find it here. Below is the list of all of the breweries, pubs, and bottle stores mentioned in John's story.
I just wish someone would open up shop on the west side of Portland! What's up with that? Has the plague settled here? We like beer too! If anyone knows of any new places on the west side, please let me know!
Burnside Brewing 701 E. Burnside St.
Random thoughts: Finally...my first east coast beer! I've heard a lot of good things about Dogfish Head's IPAs. I decided to try Punkin Ale because I wanted to have a comparison with Buffalo Bill's Pumpkin Ale.
The tasting: Color is brownish gold with a white head that lingered for most of the drink. The beer is slightly hazy and there's a fair amount of effervescence. Aroma is very spicy, with nutmeg and cinnamon. Taste consists mainly of spices, and I don't taste the pumpkin. The 7.0% ABV is noticeable, but works well. Body is light, mouth feel is crisp with a fair amount of carbonation.
Rating: 3 star. Good. I would drink this if someone gave it to me. This beer is similar to Buffalo Bill's Pumpkin Ale in many ways—aroma, body, and taste (lack of pumpkin). Dogfish Head's description led me a bit astray, as I expected some sweetness and a heavier body. I didn't get either. Although I do prefer this slightly to Buffalo Bill's Pumpkin ale, I don't see myself buying it again given the price premium (double the price of Buffalo Bill).
Have you tried Dogfish Head's Punkin Ale or any other good pumpkin beer? Any recommendations?
In Part I of our interview, Nico Freccia, Co-Founder of 21st Amendment Brewery, told me about 21A's philosophy and how they've pushed the envelope with their beer. In Part II, we talked about making the leap from small brewpub to major distributor. In the final part of our interview, Nico reflects on 10 years in the craft beer business.
It sounds like 21A has been growing very rapidly. How much beer did you produce last year, and what do you expect for '10 and '11?
At our pub we routinely do 800-1,000 barrels per year, all sold over the bar. For distribution, we did 4,100 barrels in 2009 and will do close to 14,000 in 2010 (at close to 300% growth this year, I think this puts us in the top 5 fastest growing breweries by percentage in the country). We expect to hit 20,000+ barrels for 2011.
Looking back 10 years, did you expect 21st Amendment to be where it is today?
No. Shortly after opening we were dealing with the dot com crash and then a severe recession. We were just worried about keeping the doors of the pub open. It took many years for things to stabilize and the neighborhood to grow up around us. When we decided to launch our beers in cans and distribute more widely, in 2006-2007, we had no idea what to expect. I suppose we expected it was just as likely that it would be a big flop as a success. We didn't realize we were hitting what has been touted as the beginning of a massive shift and significant growth spurt for the craft beer industry.
Opening the brewpub was a dream. I had been working in restaurants for about 15 years and running them for other people. It was a huge challenge to raise the money and get the place open, but I was driven to run my own place and stop working for other people. For years, though, we lived on the precipice of disaster...every night going to bed worrying about whether we could keep the doors open the next day.
With the production business, there was a whole new set of challenges. We were basically restaurant people and small brewers moving into a whole new realm of sales and marketing. Shaun and I used to joke that we could open a women's hat shop for all we knew about running a production brewery business. But you figure it out and surround yourself with great people and I think growing as a production brewery has been really fun and fulfilling. Plus, we kept the two businesses (pub and brewery) separate so we're at least not always worrying about the whole thing coming crashing down all the time.
Looking out 10 years from now, what do you expect 21st Amendment will look like?
I just hope we'll still be making good, interesting beer and having fun with it.
The 21A team collecting Great American Brewfest bling for Hop Crisis!
I have no doubt about that! I'd like to thank Nico for being so generous with his time. I'm a new blogger and was thrilled when he agreed to meet me for an interview. I really enjoyed our discussion and learned a lot about the craft beer business. Can't wait to try your new beers.
You distribute to roughly 15 states—mostly to the coasts with a few states in the middle. How do you decide where to distribute, and where are you going next?
In San Francisco, we have a brewpub near the ball park. All the beer sold at the pub is draft, and we can barely make enough to supply the pub. When we started looking at distributing canned beer, we considered expanding our brewery, but it was cost prohibitive. So we looked for a partner that we could work with to brew, can, and distribute our beer. We couldn’t find anything in California that worked for us. So we looked out of state and found the Cold Spring Brewery outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota. It’s a family-owned, regional brewer with a large brew house and a high speed canning line. They let us come in with our own recipes and ingredients and brew our beer using their equipment.
So we have a brewery in San Francisco that serves our pub and restaurant. It’s our experimental lab where we brew our beer for the first time, test, and perfect them over the years. Then we work with our partner brewer, Cold Spring, to brew on a large scale, package, and distribute. All of the 21A beer you see in Portland (draft and cans) comes from Minnesota.
Back to your original question, we distribute to the east because it’s cheaper for us to ship there than to the west. We constantly get calls from distributors around the country asking for our beer. There’s a huge demand for craft beer, especially in the southeast and we’d love to go there eventually. We’re small, but growing rapidly and it’s important for us to carefully manage our growth and ensure our beer is the best it can be.
Is it OK if I mention that you use a partner brewer? How do you ensure quality when working with another brewer?
Absolutely! Some craft beer geeks and purists may look down their nose at those who don’t brew in their own building. But look at Samuel Adams—for their first 20 years, they brewed in other people’s factories and made some of the best beer in the business.
We don’t just fax our recipe to Cold Spring and tell them to brew it for us. Shaun O’Sullivan goes out to Minnesota at least one week a month to oversee brewing and canning. Shaun is actually out at Cold Spring today brewing Monk’s Blood. He trained some of Cold Spring’s brewers to make our beer just as we would at our pub in San Francisco. We’re very proud of this.
I think we’re at the beginning of a trend where more brewers will do some or all of their production in partnership with others. For example, New Belgium brews for beer for Elysian (from Seattle). There are a lot of benefits. Both brewers can produce beers for each other's markets, while dramatically lowering costs and reducing their overall environmental footprint. Brewery expansions are very expensive, so partnering makes a lot of sense.
So what beers can we expect to see next?
Hop Crisis! will be released this spring as part of our Insurrection Series, which is our limited edition line. These are beers we release once in while—beer that’s fun and different. Monk’s Blood was the first Insurrection release.
We learned that Hell or High Watermelon Wheat Beer works best as a summer seasonal, so it will only be available from April – September. Back in Black will take its place as a year-round beer, along with Brew Free! Or Die IPA.
We’re excited to release our first winter seasonal, Fireside Chat. It’s a lightly spiced English-style Strong ale (7.9% ABV) with a hand selected blend of spices that adds a subtle aroma and flavor. The spices are very light and accentuate the mild hop bitterness and the richness of the malts. We’ve been brewing it at our pub for 10 years and it has been a customer favorite. It also won a medal at the Great American Beer Festival five years ago in the Spiced Ale category. Fireside Chat should arrive on the shelves of your better beer stores during the week of October 25.
Monk’s Blood will be on shelves in mid-December for a limited time. Next year, we expect to have five canned beers in regular rotation, along with two limited releases, plus our draft series.
In Part III of the interview, Nico reflects on 21st Amendment's first decade in the beer business. Stay tuned!
A conference for Beer Bloggers?!? What exactly would they do (other than drink beer)?
While tasting beer is a fine reason to hold a conference, those questions came to mind when I read about the 1st Annual Beer Bloggers Conference, being held November 5-7 in Boulder, Colorado.
However, after looking at the agenda, I was intrigued. So I decided to take a day off of work, fly out to Boulder, and spend the weekend at the conference. I think the organizers have planned an exciting event (agenda shown below), with excellent topics and interesting speakers. A very impressive feat for the 1st year!
I'm especially excited about the "field work", which includes visits to Oskar Blues Brewery and Boulder Beer Co. Oskar Blues is a pioneer of canned craft beer. I have a can of their Old Chub Scotch Ale in my fridge. I'll try to review it before the conference begins. Boulder Beer is the maker of Hazed & Infused, which is one of two beers to get my 5 star rating.
However, I do have a “homework” assignment. Each blogger will bring a six-pack to share. We will then sample the various beers and write (or tweet) about them. Now that's my kind of homework!
So I need your suggestions. What beer should I bring? I want to take an Oregon beer (available in bottles or cans) that isn't readily available around the country. Do you have any ideas? If so, please share using the comments section.
How did you earn the title of Chief Watermelon Officer?
We’ve been brewing a Watermelon Wheat beer at our pub for 10 years. It’s an American style wheat beer that we ferment with 100% fresh watermelon. It’s a crisp, refreshing, tart wheat beer with a kiss of fruit in the finish.
﻿﻿﻿When we first started distributing beer three years ago, we thought it would be the perfect beer to launch in a can. So we renamed it Hell or High Watermelon Wheat Beer and released it along with Brew Free! Or Die IPA as part of our launch into broad distribution.
My business partner, Shaun O’Sullivan, and I like to have fun with whatever we do. So instead of giving ourselves traditional stodgy titles like CEO or Brewmaster, we decided to call ourselves the Chief Watermelon Officer and Chief Hophead to help promote our beer.
We also learned very quickly that wearing silly watermelon hats and costumes is a lot fun and gets attention. So we usually have a posse of five people walking around beer festivals wearing watermelon clothing while singing a watermelon song.
We’re now brewing a lot of different styles, so I may re-think my title. But it was fun while it lasted.
21A crew at Oregon Brewers Fest. Nico at left. Shaun at right.
The philosophy for our company and beer is about pushing the envelope and doing things differently. We try to be trailblazers instead of followers.
Take canned beer. Two years ago, when we started distributing beer, cans were very new. Only a dozen craft brewers were canning at the time. When Shaun first approached me about canning beer, I thought it was the dumbest idea I had ever heard. People’s perception was that canned beer equals crappy beer—cheap, light, industrial lager. So we faced an uphill battle to educate consumers. But once we researched the benefits, we realized canned beer was a no-brainer because it makes so much sense on so many levels. Today, there are about 100 craft brewers that can their beer.
How have you pushed the envelope with your beer?
Hell or High Watermelon Wheat Beer supports that notion. It started out as a homebrew experiment before we opened the pub. I always enjoyed fruit beer but found that I could only drink one due to the sweetness. So I thought it would be fun to make a fruit beer that you could drink as a session beer. Initially, I didn’t think watermelon would work due to the high water content. But I found that the yeast worked very well with the watermelon sugar and we actually ended up with a beer that was drier than the wheat-only version. So instead of being sweet, cloying, and sticky on your tongue, we had a light, refreshing beer.
When we thought about what our next canned beer would be, we wanted to make a bold statement that would totally blow people’s minds. So we decided to brew a strong, dark Belgian style beer with a traditional Belgian abbey yeast—and put in a can!
So Shaun and I travelled to Belgium and visited a number of breweries. We found a local brewer and made a pilot batch of beer. Aside from Belgian malts, we used a ton of Belgian candi sugar and cinnamon in the mash. Then we added whole vanilla beans, dried black mission figs, and aged it in oak. We came back to the States last year, brewed the beer and called it Monk’s Blood. We released it in December '09 in limited quantities in a special 4-can pack and it sold out in 60 days.
Another example of pushing the envelope occurred three years ago when we had a massive world-wide hop shortage. Hop prices went from $8 a pound to $25-$30, almost overnight. Brewers couldn’t get hops unless they had contracts. It became very difficult for small brewers to brew the styles of beer that they wanted to make. We had the same problems. But instead of whining about it, we responded by making the biggest, hoppiest, craziest, double IPA that we could think of and we called it Hop Crisis! which recently won a silver medal at the Great American Brew Fest.
Back in Black is another example. Black IPA (or Cascadian Dark Ale), is a style that is gaining traction but there really isn’t a definitive example of how the style should taste. Very few brewers were making Black IPAs on a year-round basis. We wanted to establish a benchmark of the style and make it year-round. IPA lovers like Back in Black because it offers something new. It doesn’t beat you over the head with hops. It has hop aroma and bitterness but also adds something different in the malt character.
People who don’t like the scraping bitterness of IPAs enjoy Back in Black because the addition of roasted malts gives it a smoothness to character and flavor.
We're all about pushing the boundaries of style and turning people’s notions on their ears. This is the beer business. We’re not building rocket ships or making baby formula. At the end of the day, if you can’t have fun, there's no point in doing it.
In Part II of the interview, Nico tells the story of how 21st Amendment made the jump from small brewpub to the big leagues of major distribution. Stay tuned!