A PERSONAL JOURNEY

A PERSONAL JOURNEY TRAVELING THROUGH AMERICA’S WORLD OF CRAFT BREW

By Allan Kunigis

Allan Kunigis is a Canadian-born freelance financial writer based in Shelburne, Vermont. He is the author of A Kid’s Activity Book on Money and Finance: Teach Children About Saving, Borrowing, and Planning for the Future, published in September 2020. He also really likes beer.

A revolution has taken place. Sure, the MolsonCoors and AB InBevs still dominate sales, but their market share is shrinking.

Can you document your personal beer journey? I’m not referring to a vacation or staycation brewery tour. I’m talking about when and how and where and why you went from drinking the same old mass-produced, undistinguishable ales or lagers to today’s endless choice of delicious and distinct craftbrewed beers.

An aside: I have to confess that I have never read E.F. Schumacher’s classic, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, but I’m pretty sure it’s in my book collection in paperback form. A brief synopsis: “Named one of the Times Literary Supplement’s 100 Most Influential Books Since World War II, Small Is Beautiful presents eminently logical arguments for building our economies around the needs of communities, not corporations.”

Ironically, I copied that off the website of a rather large corporation, Amazon.com. But that doesn’t negate the point, most relevant to the beer world of the past two decades or so. A revolution has taken place. Sure, the MolsonCoors and AB InBevs still dominate sales, but their market share is shrinking.

HONEY, I SHRANK THE CORPORATION

Craft beer share of retail beer in the U.S. was roughly 10% in 2012 and represents about 25% today. And it’s happened for good reason. This article is about my personal journey. It involves anecdotes and personal stories and recollections. To me, that’s a lot of what beer is about. Excuse the bad dad-pun but it’s about “exbeerience.”

For me, the beer evolution began soon after I moved from Montreal to small-town Vermont in the early 1990s. The craft beer scene was nothing like it is today, when it seems that every town has its own small brewery and they all tend to brew really good beer.

A SKI OF BEER

I recall sitting at Stowe, Vermont’s warm and inviting The Shed restaurant/brewery and sampling a “ski of beer” right around that time. How cool: Trying and sharing tastes of four-ounce pours of five different beers, served in an old wooden ski with holes for the taste glasses.

They had everything from a blonde or golden ale to an amber to what then seemed bold to my tender palate and now tastes quite tame, the Shed Mountain Ale, a big 7.4% alcohol English strong ale, medium to full-bodied with caramel and toffee notes and moderate hoppiness. They also had a rich stout, too much for me then, but a few years later, it or a sister beer would have hit the spot!

Today, any beer lover is in for a treat just about anywhere they travel on vacation or business. You don’t need to walk into a place like Denver’s Yard House, with its encyclopedic, multi-page beer menu, listing a seemingly endless variety of beers on tap. Paralysis by analysis: I just want one good beer!

VERMONT IS RICH WITH BEER AND BEER LORE

Before I take you out west to Utah and California, I have to share some nuggets that are classic “only in Vermont.” I have heard it said that contrary to much of the rest of the world, where there are six degrees of separation, in Vermont, it’s more like one and a half. I don’t need to try hard to drop names like Bernie and Ben and Jerry. There are way too many good and funny stories involving those and other household names and the multiple paths and long lists of connections.

When it comes to beer, I have heard and shared

You don’t need to be a beer geek to appreciate the freshness and love that goes into the craft beer industry, barrel by barrel, recipe by recipe, brewer by brewer.

great stories about some of the legendary characters behind the fabulous beers that have put Vermont on the map. In one case, I both embarrassed myself and immediately gained great respect for one of the famed beer entrepreneurs, John Kimmich of The Alchemist.

Before Hurricane Irene flooded the appropriatelynamed Waterbury in 2011, The Alchemist originally was a restaurant/brewery in downtown Waterbury. I happened to be sitting at the bar on a quiet Sunday afternoon, naively chatting with Kimmich. I can still recall how insulted he was when I dared to compare the taste of Vermont’s Magic Hat Brewery’s Number 9 beer with one of The Alchemist’s. Kimmich informed me that unlike Magic Hat, he didn’t use apricot flavour. Put in my place, I appreciated his passion and devotion to the purity of his craft.

On another occasion, I made a pilgrimage to the No. 1-rated brewery in the world, according to ratebeer.com, Hill Farmstead, located in Greensboro, Vermont, where I was married a good number of years earlier by the uncle of Shawn Hill, the owner and master brewer. Hill Farmstead is noted for naming many of its beers after Hill family elders, including grandfathers and great-uncles and greataunts, emblematic of Shawn’s devotion to the land and its history.

On my visit, I lucked out and was served by none other than Shawn Hill. I will never forget his response when I informed him that his uncle Lewis Hill, a justice of the peace, had married me.

“Was the wedding in a river?”

Apparently, a lot of hippies liked getting married in rivers in Vermont’s remote Northeast Kingdom back in the day and Lewis had had some good stories to share.

POLYGAMY PORTER: BRING SOME HOME TO THE WIVES

Speaking of marriage, but moving from small-town Vermont to a small town in Utah years ago, I found a gem that made me take notice and buy not only the beer but some beer merch as well. The beer: Polygamy Porter, with its too-good-not-to-mention tagline, “Why Have Just One? Bring Some Home to the Wives.”

That was in 2007, while I was freshly inspired in my fairly new entry into beer geekdom. I had begun to brew my own beer, and I recall spending a fair bit of time researching beers online and of course, in person.

I recall that a search for smoked porter recipes and brands led me to both Alaska and San Diego. In San Diego (traveling online at the time), I came across and fell in love with the spunk, playful character and attitude behind Stone Brewery’s Arrogant Bastard Ale.

ARROGANT BASTARDS UNITE!

I can’t recall the exact tongue-in-cheeky arrogance portrayed unsubtly on their welcome page, but it was a statement of war, basically, against all the tasteless, pissy, lousy beer, and if you agreed, welcome to being an Arrogant Bastard. The website featured photos of people proudly displaying their photos of bottles of Arrogant Bastard Ale on mountain tops and beaches, and who knows where else, literally around the world.

There’s a club for me, I thought. And I revered Stone Brewery. So, it was a real treat visiting their beautiful brewery in Escondido, California, with a niece and her super beer geek hubby, Scott, a decade later.

I SPEAK FLUENT BEER GEEK

I also recall going to dinner with them at San Diego’s Blind Lady Ale House, where I was absolutely thrilled to find Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger on tap. These were epic beers I had seen online and read about. Pliny the Elder, an Imperial IPA, is rated 100 on beeradvocate.com.

Scott was late for dinner by a few minutes. I challenged him to look at the list of beers on tap and guess which one I had ordered. He sized it up and guessed right, just knowing that that had to be the one beer I was so excited to see and try. One beer geek to another.

You don’t need to be a beer geek to appreciate the freshness and love that goes into the craft beer industry, barrel by barrel, recipe by recipe, brewer by brewer. You don’t need to be anti-corporate America to appreciate how beautiful small can be and how wonderful it can taste.

Just keep an open mind and an open palate and have fun.

Cheers!