Letter From North America

When Did the Leaders Become Followers?

Back in the early days of what we still then called ‘microbrewing,’ I was told an interesting story by one of east coast Canada’s pioneering brewery owners, the Granite Brewery’s Kevin Keefe. It was a tale of not just brand, but also style loyalty.

On one particular night, he explained, there was a major live music show in town, which had drawn away almost all of his brewpub’s regular clientele, save for one fellow sat despondently at the bar. When Keefe asked this gent why he wasn’t at the concert with the others, the fellow responded with first a curse, then an explanation.

“It’s all your fault,” he complained to Keefe, “It’s this beer of yours, I can’t drink anything else now.”

Said beer was an English style best bitter, not yet cask-conditioned – the hand pulls would arrive later – but still virtually unknown across the Atlantic provinces in the mid- to late 1980s. When he added a brewery to his and his brother Wilfred’s bar in 1985, Keefe had expected resistance from the locals, which certainly came, but was quickly followed by first acceptance and then loyalty.

So strong was the eventual devotion to his Best Bitter, Peculiar, and Irish Stout, in fact, that while Kevin Keefe has since retired from both bar and brewery ownership, his other brother Ron’s Granite Brewery in Toronto, opened in the early 1990s, still stands as one the city’s longest surviving breweries. So venerable is the Toronto Granite, in fact, that Ron’s daughter and son now effectively run the place, the former having become one of the city’s pre-eminent brewers.

The point of this story of striving and success is to remind you, dear reader, of a time when craft breweries were industry leaders, turning out beers that broke moulds, turned heads, and changed attitudes.

Looking around today, it’s sometimes hard to imagine that time.

Increasingly, it seems to me that the craft beer leaders have become, to a degree, at least, the Big Beer followers. If I go back in my memory twenty or thirty years, even a decade or so, I can recall any number of leading innovations, whether local to specific regions, as with Kevin Keefe’s story above, or more general, as with Russian River’s Vinnie Cilurzo’s creation of the first double IPA or the lost-to-the-annals-of-time first brewer to flavour porter or stout with coffee.

Nowadays, new releases aren’t so much innovative or unique creations as they are duplications of works already done, such as the slew of hard seltzers that so many North American craft breweries are still releasing, even long after the seltzer boom has gone bust, or at least flattened, and the steady march towards mediocrity that is the socalled ‘Mexican lager,’ a beer style so vague that brewers can’t even seem to agree as to whether it’s an ersatz Vienna lager in the style of Dos Equis or a pallid adjunct lager à la Corona.

Even the trends that come from within craft brewing proper have a strong aura of follow-the-leader surrounding them, as seen in the endless – and I do mean endless! – stream of hazy pale ales and IPAs that have flooded the market over the past few years, despite the fact that few brewers seem to genuinely take pride in creating them. Or the similarly lengthy parade of kettle sours marketed under various names, the differences between which, like seltzers, appear to reside simply in the choice of flavouring ingredients.

None of the above, not seltzer nor hazy IPA nor mainstream-ish lager, is likely to draw customers like the Granite’s concert-shunning loyalist, who will actually inconvenience themselves rather than accept a steep drop in the flavour of their beer. Far better positioned for such a result is a return to leadership.

While it could be argued that leading in the beer industry was a lot easier before seemingly everything new had been done before, my counter would be that leadership need not necessarily involve the curious and unusual. I can think of breweries that lead by constantly improving their beer style of choice, regardless of what said style might be, and others that prove their leadership by taking something already done and tweaking it so that it’s that much better.

(And if you think that leadership means throwing some oddball ingredient into the kettle for the first time, well, I’m sorry, but I cannot help you!)

Whether through originality or creativity or perfectionism, or some combination of the three, the craft beer market was built by people unafraid to take chances by trying something new, or doggedly pursuing a goal until they regularly exceed expectations.

Chances are that the way it will continue to expand will be thanks to a new generation doing more of the same.

Stephen Beaumont