The “diversification” of craft brewery portfolios with beyond beer products “is a good thing,” according to American Homebrewers Association (AHA) executive director Julia Herz, who kicked off Boston Beer Company’s annual media brunch in Denver last week during the Great American Beer Festival (GABF).
“We all already have the equipment to ferment, why not just do more than brew?” Herz asked attending media members.
“Sam[uel] Adams and their diversification, it’s a good thing, it’s a positive thing, it’s an inspiring thing,” she continued. “You know why? Because we all are crossdrinkers. The majority of fermented beverage alcohol is enjoyed by people today, just like us, that admittedly drink not just one of the beverage categories.”
Herz’s comments were timely with this year’s reimagined GABF, which featured spirits-based cocktails, hard cider, hard kombucha and other beyond beer offerings poured alongside traditional beer.
Boston Beer founder and board chairman Jim Koch told media members it was “very different, almost shocking” to walk into the first night of last week’s GABF “and see the continued evolution” of the event.
“I’ve been doing this for 40 some years, and to me, it felt fresh and interesting,” Koch said. “And, what the hell, let’s try this.”
Beer, wine and spirits all share a common hurdle: They’re trying to sell products that have an “acquired taste” and “make things that people don’t naturally like,” Koch said.
“Today, we as brewers can make lots of things,” Koch said. “And if we’re willing to stretch our brains and our equipment, we can make things that taste like anything we want them to taste.”
Koch suggested a new word to inspire the beer industry: “Osmoplasticity.” The concept is that there is “a blue ocean where we as craft brewers can bring to bear our creativity [and] our values in terms of respect for the quality, the ingredients, respect for the culture of the maker and the passion of the maker.”
“It’s hard to come up with a new craft beer style, and if you do and it takes off, you’ll have 1,000 people copy it within 12 months,” Koch said. “But there is now another ocean.
“It makes me optimistic that we will find an outlet that pleases and thrills consumers for our creativity,” he continued. “It will be driven by the creativity of us as brewers, and our closeness to our customers through taprooms and how small we are, to find and address consumer needs that nobody’s found yet.”
Dogfish Head co-founder Sam Calagione added: “We as a community have to come together as activists with our alchemy, our love of art and science, to come up with what is going to re-engage, what’s going to incite, the 22-, 34-, 38-year-old person to come into the craft beer community. And it might not be with our craft beers.
“It’s basically taking the capabilities, the technical prowess, the understanding of international brewing ingredients that we as craft brewers really honed and perfected and shined an international spotlight on, and applying them to spaces that are adjacent to traditional craft,” he continued.
Despite the aforementioned sentiments, the two innovations Boston Beer chose to highlight for media members were traditional beers.
The first was Samuel Adams American Light, the light lager brand Boston Beer launched in May in 15 markets, and is planning to take national.
Koch said he has “always been interested in making a craft light beer,” but the concept has been “an oxymoron” “for decades.”
“The idea with Sam Adams Light was figure out how do we get more flavor into a light beer, bring our craft values to it, but the flavor has to be drinkable,” Koch said. “It has to be easy drinking, which is not something craft brewers have been great at.”
Numerous craft breweries have released their own light lager competitors in the past year. However, the error many are making – according to Koch – is they’re making “cheap light beers” and trying to be “a local version of Bud, Miller [and] Coors.”
“We can’t succeed if we’re trying to make something that competes with Bud/Miller/Coors – we’ve got to raise the quality and the taste level,” Koch said. “They’re really well-made beers. Believe me, they are not easy to duplicate. I don’t know why you’d want to, but if you tried, you would find it’s very difficult, and would develop more respect for the big, mass-produced, mass-marketed beers, because it takes a lot of care and pride and control of processes to make those beers.
“If you’ve got a really good restaurant, don’t try to make a Big Mac, McDonald’s does a pretty damn good job,” he continued. “Make something different and better.”
Boston Beer is positioning American Light as a premium competitor to domestic lagers, and pricing it at about $0.50 more per serving compared to leading brands.
The first iteration of American Light was created at Boston Beer’s Cincinnati brewpub and called Tractor Beer. At the time, about three years ago, Boston Beer “didn’t think that there was a place” for the offering in the company’s national portfolio. However, consumer responses through Boston Beer’s DrinkLab consumer polling system, supported the idea that craft light lager could work on a larger scale, Calagione said.
DrinkLab is Boston Beer’s research-and-development system powered by consumer feedback. The company uses QR codes at all of its locations across all its brands to ask consumers questions about new brands, which styles and flavors they enjoy, and even what packaging formats they prefer. The system has collected comments from more than 20,000 people about more than 150 beverages so far, according to Calagione.
The second beer Boston Beer leadership highlighted is one of the “highest scoring beers” on DrinkLab, Calagione said.
Covered in Nugs was first created in 2018 to celebrate National IPA Day. The 6.7% ABV American IPA is made with Citra, Centennial, Amarillo and Simcoe hops and is 70 IBUs, creating a flavor of “dank, citrusy bliss,” according to Calagione. The offering is the final release of Dogfish Head’s 2024 Art Series.
Calagione also teased a future partnership with “one of our favorite brands that’s built an amazing community over many decades.”
Boston Beer also recognized the latest winner of the company’s Brewing the American Dream Experienceship, California-based Crowns & Hops Brewing. Crowns & Hops co-founder Beny Ashburn admitted that the brewery’s eight-year history has included a great deal of “building the plane while you’re flying it,” and that the mentorship and support from Boston Beer comes at a pivotal time for the Black-owned brewery.
“As the world changes, the economy changes, there aren’t a lot of examples for these small breweries, especially in more diverse categories, to be able to grow, to learn, to build,” Ashburn said.
“It’s exciting that we have an opportunity to work with the experts and to be able to sit down and have those hard conversations that are often very challenging to do when you’re an entrepreneur, where you have to be very honest and you have to really look at yourself in the mirror and identify what are the things that you are doing great, what are the things that you are not doing great, and ask for help,” she continued.
Crowns & Hops recently announced several “pivots,” including halting developments at its brewery-in-planning in Inglewood, California, and pulling out of Circle of Crowns, a strategic alliance it formed with Full Circle Brewing earlier this year.