The huge number of small breweries | Hacker News Reader

The huge number of small breweries

wsj.com

32 pointslxm68 comments

To me this is all very cool. If you are starting a brewery you have to have a laser focused business plan and ideas that will help you stand out. Your odds of making it big are low, but if that is a goal you should probably be aiming for that from the start. I love that small neighborhood breweries are a thing. No the universe doesn’t really need your take on an IPA, but people who enjoy craft brew will often drink a local beer over another if it is good. If you get enough of a following, maybe try and package and distribute some, but I think being a cool local tap house is way easier in the current market than trying to package and distribute right away.

Yeah, the large variety is the feature that actually creates the value. The fact you can go to almost any new town and discover a new beer you've never heard of before is the joy of discovery and the "collection" drive that powers the industry.

Yeah, there’s no reason we need all our beer made in the massive piss factories of Milwaukee Wisconsin.

Even if local beer X and the local beer Y from 50 miles away are basically the same from different breweries- why not?

Some people actually like lagers and don’t want that fruity taste and smell that all ales have. Lagers are much more expensive to brew in terms of time and equipment and benefit from industrial scale.

It is perfectly fine that I enjoy crisp piss and you like your fruitcake beers.

Commercial lagers are brewed very fast. Real lagering is a long process, sure, but the big boys don’t do any of that. They have a very fast turnaround, often less than a week.

Enjoy your lager if you like, I do from time to time, but it’s only one type of beer from a very wide spectrum. And don’t kid yourself you’re getting a cold-aged beer in the traditional style unless you’ve got evidence that’s what’s really happening.

Tank space and cooling costs the big boys very little because insulated factories and tanks the volume increases with the cube and the cost increases with the square. This is why lagers are made cheaply industrially, and ales can be made inexpensively on a much smaller scale.

The premium light lagers are tanked for a month. Try to make anything resembling a light lager faster than that. They don’t have some super secret method that no one knows about to make the style in a week. You are wholesale making that up.

I am absolutely not making that up - perhaps whatever premium light lagers you drink are better, but the UK market (which I’m more familiar with) is awash with “lager” that is barely lagered at all, and the 1-week mash to bottle or mash to tap schedule is relatively well known. I'm having trouble finding primary sources but have various secondary ones -

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/may/14/superma...

https://www.ft.com/content/e5a1417d-47f9-4245-a265-a66055ea8...

"the beers are produced in around 10 days." - https://protzonbeer.co.uk/comments/2014/02/26/after-cantona-...

And it doesn't seem to be purely a UK issue -

"I did a tour of a Polish commercial brewery (I want to say Tyskie, but it might have been Żywiec) and the guide said, with pride, that it takes them no more than two weeks from grain to store shelf."

https://www.reddit.com/r/Homebrewing/comments/o2jqy1/comment...

And there are tricks you can do, such as using faster-fermenting yeast strains (34/70 is mentioned), pressure fermentation (which suppresses ester formation and allows you to ferment warmer, therefor faster) and overpitching for speed, centrifuging and cold-crashing to clear the beer quickly etc.

Commercial lagers are also famous for using cheap adjuncts, like rice in Bud for instance, and corn in others.

Lots of small brewers do lagers and pilseners, FYI, I've had several in the last couple of weeks (from a selection pack of local brews) -

https://blackbrewingco.com.au/products/lager https://www.brighttankbrewing.com.au/2021/02/east-perth-lage... https://cowaramupbrewing.com.au/craft-beer-range/

And lots of other beer styles can take longer than a few days for fermentation and conditioning, particularly the stronger stuff. NEIPAs can take 2 weeks just in primary fermentation, for instance.

AFAICT it's you that's made up the idea that smaller oeprations can't age their beer a handful of weeks weeks but the larger operations can. Not to mention all the various barrel-aged craft beers that crop up, and things like brett-saison's that can take months to ferment out fully.

So again - maybe what you are drinking is aged with care, and is made from an all-malt base, and is well flavoured with the appropriate noble hop strains. But the mass market doesn't necessarily operate that way, and you can't just pick a random lager off the shelf and expect very much care or craft has gone into it.

I'm not saying you're wrong to enjoy lager, and there are great ones out there, but it's just one style of many, and they're not all some amazing artisan feet. A lot from the larger operators are quick-churned shite.

Most craft breweries make lagers and pilsners that are considerably better than “big beer.” Local/craft beer doesn’t exclusively produce IPAs, Fruited Sours, and Bourbon Barrel Aged Oatmeal stouts.

Craft lagers are out numbered 15:1 by ales because of the tank space and cooling required. The esterification reactions of ale yeasts are inherent to ales and the brewing temperature. All Ales smell fruity. This is really basic beer knowledge.

What exactly are we calling ales here, isn't ale just beer said another way (or, rather, the other way around)?

Speaking of lagers, good ones are hard to come by these days. I like all things beer, and I enjoy all the IPAs, fruited sours and all that, BUT I also much, much enjoy quality lagers. As it is, in the US, it's rather hard to find good ones, all the mass market ones are horrible (I guess a Stella will work if that's absolutely the best you can do, but everything else is even lower in terms of quality).

I'm in the ironic position that I actually whole-heartedly enjoy IPAs, but hate the IPA fad because it's (mostly, just due to the sheer size of the IPA market) keeping brewers from making good lagers. Can I have both please?

> isn't ale just beer said another way

No. Ales are a subset of beers.

> I hate the IPA fad because it's keeping brewers from making good lagers. Can I have both please?

Yes, of course. Seeing this so much in this thread makes me feel like it's 2012 again. I travel a lot in North America and like to check out the local breweries when I do. There are always plenty of non-IPA options.

Ale yeast and lager yeast are the two different types of beer yeasts. There are a million lines of both, but ale yeast ferments in about a week at 70f and produces esters which have a fruity odor. Lager yeast operates at roughly 55f and takes a month to ferment. Lagers have little odor which some people like.

To me, lagers are like a steak and ales are like chicken tikka. Both are good, and people preferring one or the other is reasonable. Due to tank and cooling requirements, lagers benefit from large scale production.

Something like Sam Adams is a good lager to compare against an IPA. Just smell the difference and decide which you like.

And more importantly, this is why there are a few craft lagers. It's not because they're too busy making IPAs, it's because lagers specifically aren't easy to do at smaller scale. There are plenty of craft ales that are not IPAs.

That’s fair, you clearly know more about beer than me. I mostly just drink them. I don’t care for most lagers but a good one on a summer day is nice. I was just trying to make the point that you don’t have to choose Budweiser over craft beer to get a lager. It’s clear to me now that you already know that.

I have to disagree here. Fermentation temperatures and yeast strains do, of course, have a huge impact on the final outcome, including, but not limited to, the effect of esters. It is not true, however, that all ales smell fruity. With the large variety of top fermenting "ale" yeasts available, as well as some control to be exercised over the fermentation process, it's perfectly possible to get quite a clean fermentation. Kolsch is fermented with an ale yeast, for example.

Even more so than the beer itself, having a nice space for people to meet up is often the biggest source of value. I'm thinking of Optimism Brewing in Seattle, where the beer is extremely mediocre at best, but the atmosphere is big, open, and inviting.

In my state we have a lot of breweries that essentially just operate as family friendly restaurants with bars. Like towns of a few thousand people have multiple breweries.

It turns out liquor license laws make it much cheaper to open a tasting room that serves food then a restaurant that serves beer. Some can or bottle their beer but the business model can work fine without major distribution. So people open breweries instead of pizza parlors or steak houses.

That scratches an old itch. I could not understand exactly the scenario you describe: small towns with multiple breweries. Never knew that loophole existed.

North Carolina by chance?

Montana. Good to know there are other similar states though

> In my state we have a lot of breweries that essentially just operate as family friendly restaurants with bars

I'm in Canada, but yeah similar. The taproom might sell only a few snacks or something (or maybe get a local food truck to park outside), but people are also welcome to bring in outside food: many times I'd go with friends for drinks and then order a pizza or something delivered to the brewery.

Mostly due to our liquor laws (depends on province). But you're basically required to supply food if you vend alcohol. Bring your own food is the only way to satisfy this (or selling nuts/bags of chips/random trash at the counter.. looking at you Cold Garden).

When you first open, the cost of a kitchen, storage, utensils, and staff is a significant vig on top of your brewery costs if you're not sure how many visitors you'll get/whether they're looking for food.

More and more pubs in the UK are doing this too, especially the ones that are more focused on drinks than food. It’s a way to keep more money in the business as a whole, with the added benefit that the house beers are often cheaper and extremely fresh.

WSJ thinks we'd all be more efficiently served by a few very large breweries, all owned by InBev (Budweiser, Michelob, Stella Artois, Beck's)

The article is critical of the quantity of microbreweries so it must be pro-big-beer because everything is a partisan conspiracy to slowly erode the things we like. Be afraid, be angry, and elect someone who promises a quick fix.

WSJ probably drinks wine and thinks anyone drinking beer is part of the servant class.

It's easy to dunk on the WSJ, but I doubt their writer is making that much money...

but it's ok, because they're just a temporarily embarrassed millionaire.

The world's most interesting wines are also made this way, though.

It's a common bourgeois fetish to be all about Burgundy, but Burgundy is full of small acreage growers and producers and smaller co-ops.

My father's family is in the Mainz, Rhineland area of Germany and when I've visited they've taken me out to the suburbs of Mainz where there's little small operations right in the middle of town serving it in their own little restaurants.

Why do we need global-scale conglomerates to produce our beer??? I’ve always thought that local breweries serving locals should be the default, not an exception.

Eat local is a big movement. Drink local should be just as important to those who drink. It supports the local economy. It’s more environmentally friendly. And the beer is usually way better to boot.

This smells like large breweries asking their financial journalist friends to start pushing back on small breweries eating into their margins. Dedicating an article to “are too many small breweries are a problem?” is a bit too convenient of a slant when other options are on the table. “Stop creating breweries, it’s too risky. Drink InBev” essentially.

>Drink InBev

I will honestly quit drinking altogether first. I hate these big corpos who buy up what was a good brewer and a line with several good beers and immediately start changing the recipes and the process to destroy the beers. I've suffered through it too many times now to call it anything but malicious. What is the point in damaging an established brand, tarnishing an established product which will bring in money from people happy to pay for those flavors other than spite.

In twenty plus years I've only seen a buyout happen once without it destroying the beers.

No, if my only choices are the swill that companies like InBev produce I'll find something else to drink. It's about the flavor. Take that away and I'm gone and so are a lot of people.

I don’t drink much anymore these days but I absolutely noticed this when they bought Goose Island a long time ago. The flavor changed overnight. They can’t just buy everyone to quell indie beer geekdom once and for all but they sure continue to act like corporate bullies all the same.

Goose Island was one of the examples I was thinking of. A shame. It really was an almost overnight change. And for what? To take a good series of beers and ruin them?

As I said, I'm here for the flavors. Take those away and I leave with them.

Their goal is to make money.

They believed, correctly, that at least some consumers wouldn't care about or even notice a change in recipe, maybe because people broadly associate Goose Island with good-quality craft beer and continue to buy it.

Consider this model:

Goose Island with the old recipe sold K units per year at $P profit per unit. The new recipe can sell K/l units per year at $P×i, where l is the % of customers who switch away and i is the % increase in profit. If K × P < (K/l) × (P×i) then it's profitable to switch to the new recipe.

Goose Island sold after their peak. They weren’t the best small brewer in Chicago anymore and many wanted to go do other things.

For example, one of the brewmasters moved back to his hometown in Michigan and started a pretty well-regarded hard cider place. Speaking of, the “wine trail” in Southeast Michigan is worth it - not for the wine so much (it’s not bad, but it’s not anything to write home about), but that excellent small independent distilleries and breweries have popped up and now a large group of people with a wide variety of tastes can have fun alternating between the 3.

> hate these big corpos who buy up what was a good brewer and a line with several good beers and immediately start changing the recipes and the process to destroy the beers.

<Cries in Ballast Point>.

While I'm all for drinking local beer, is there any available data on whether it's actually more environmentally friendly than beer made by larger producers? I can imagine some aspects of the brewing process that would tip the scales either way, e.g. economies of scale favoring large producers, potentially-shorter supply chains favoring small producers.

About 15 years ago, we had a great brewery that changed the game, and it felt like all of a sudden, there were so many options and relatively little difference between them. There are only so many IPAs with so many hops that a brewery can make. That got old quickly, but I still look fondly upon the days of cracking open a tall boy of Surly Furious.

I threw up my hands and chose a brewery that was local and reliably high-quality, and I suspect many consumers will feel overwhelmed with choice and short on time to peruse the dozens of offerings at their beer purveyor. I wouldn’t advise anyone to try to hop into that sector with dreams of making it big.

The first movers got a great deal by tapping a fresh market and forming early consumer followings. Those days are over. Consumers don’t need to have an allegiance to a microbrew because it’s so easy to get now, and unless your brew is God’s very own nectar, your business will be tenuous.

Some of the biggest names sold out to The Enemy (i.e. AB InBev), like Goose Island or Wicked Weed. They got rich, and then their product went to shit. I’m fairly certain I got formaldehyde poisoning from a Devil’s Backbone IPA bender (another AB InBev casualty). So in support of my body, please make great beer — just don’t quit your day jobs.

(Sorry for the two awful puns. I swear they were unintended but I left them in anyway after groaning.)

Recently a small brewery opened in my basement :) turns out home brew is better and easier than I thought. I had to keep telling myself people did this with wooden kegs and open fires, I can for sure do it with modern steel stuff.

Any words of wisdom? Trying out homebrewing is one of my goals this year.

Don’t buy glass carboys, anvil (blichmanns low cost brand) is good for equipment. Use a brewing calculator, start with extract, clean stuff well, and don’t overcomplicate it. Don’t make anything too strongly flavored, after 5 gallons you will hate it. 5 gallons is the best size for batches. Go straight for kegs (corny kegs) like they use for soda. Northern brewer is a good supplier (no affiliation just a happy customer). If you really get into it buy hops by the pound.

Edit: almost forgot, temperature is the most important ingredient in fermenting. Put your kegs and fermenter somewhere that is a constant 60-70 degrees for ales. And start with ales.

Thanks for the tips, I've made a note of these. Thanks to the other commenter as well.

Its been years since I've done any home brew. Its easy to start, and my recommendation is to just start with a minimal set up. Don't overcomplicate it. Try buying a beer kit from a local supplier, or online.

Temperature is a big part of the fermentation process, so ots good to start brewing in the winter to get most of the fermentation done when it's naturally cold.

There is tons of info available online. It really a simple thing... If you can do basic cooking or baking then you can brew beer. Just give it a go and see how it turns out.

Interesting to me how different the beer vs. wine industries are, in terms of the capital investment, the "demographics" of the number and type of wineries vs. breweries, etc. Why wineries are always located right there next to the vines, but breweries are not. How long it takes the product to age, who consumes it, etc. How it gets to market. I know there are tons of reasons behind it, but just interesting that similar things you drink can have such different dynamics behind them.

The "located next to the vines" thing is more of a new world thing ("estate winery"). As is the whole idea of a winery as a tourist destination you go visit. Here in Ontario this model is basically legislated into existence via minimum acreage requirements and regulations around winery retail stores.

In the old world it's not always like this. Varies from region to region. In some places, the wine is made by small cooperative producers buying grapes from small growers etc.

Even in the North American "estate winery" model, large quantities of the grapes are often bought from off-site independent growers who don't have a winery themselves.

> Why wineries are always located right there next to the vines, but breweries are not.

I would have figured that is because grains can be stored for relatively long periods of time, while grapes cannot.

Is there another reason??

No, exactly -- how one is a fresh fruit derived thing, the other is a stored grain thing. You don't find a lot of breweries in farming country. Are breweries mainly a city thing? Etc.

The reason we have so many is because it’s a true competitive marketplace. Regulatory burden is low, brewery license are easier to get than liquor licenses so anyone can start one. We have so few competitive sectors left in the USA that it’s surprising to many at the WSJ what a market sector might look like if competition was allowed and free market dynamics were in place.

Trying new beers and supporting local breweries is the whole point! Endless variations and ideas.

Here in Western Australia there are tons, and the only ‘glut’ to speak of is probably that the Hazy IPA market is saturated, and it can be difficult to find some other styles. Red Ales are well represented, and very sweet stouts. But a good dry Irish-style stout? A nice spicy saison? A little harder.

If people are drinking then the breweries are making money… If people didn't buy the beer, the breweries wouldn't exist.

For legal reasons it can make more sense to operate a brewery than it might do all else being equal.

In the UK for example, suppose I think this district of my city could use an establishment where people can buy booze in the evening, relax, maybe buy a meal, even listen to some live music once in a while, and I have my eye on a mid-size industrial unit in a fairly populated part of town with few nearby rivals. Easy right?

Nope, that unit is not authorised for this purpose, and all three things I want to do (sell booze, sell food, live entertainment) require licenses issued by local government. I'm going to spend a lot of money on lawyers and fixers to smooth the path to making this happen, and at any time there might be objections which blow it up completely, no refunds.

But, if I'm setting up a brewery well, that's an authorised purpose of an industrial unit, and under modern laws the brewery is allowed to sell booze. So now I can open, initially I cut a deal with a decent local food truck to park "outside" and piggyback on their food license, then if we stay afloat for a few months with no major incidents I apply for a license variation to offer food on site too, with historical practice on my side. I can have the same successful business, but at much lower risk by starting a "brewery" even if brewing booze barely breaks even.

There are ~15 breweries within two miles of my house in Seattle.

Same in Cincinnati. Far more breweries than Starbucks...and we have a LOT of Starbucks.

Perhaps every brewery branching out from uninspired IPAs would help resolve the "issues of consumer selection." I get that they're easy to make and harder to screw up, but they're literally the only thing available at a lot of places.

> they're literally the only thing available at a lot of places.

I'm surprised to see this sentiment. It certainly rang true a decade+ ago, but back then craft breweries were more novel, and there was more [over]reaction to bland, mass-produced lagers, etc.

Sours were really trendy rather than IPAs just pre-pandemic, and these days in my experience most places have a pretty varied selection of types available.

I'm in NYC and my odds of finding a craft beer that isn't an IPA (or possibly sour) are slim to none if I'm not at a beer bar like Proletariat or Burp Castle (two random examples). I've managed to find one brewery I really like in New Hampshire called Schilling Beer Co that mostly focuses on European beers and has a really good food menu as well. It's a shame more places don't have more diverse beer menus.

Personally I’d like to see more stouts that aren’t super heavy dessert stouts.

It's still mostly true. I like either piss water or toxic sludge but can't stand IPAs (I loathe the taste of hops) and my choices in microbrews are always very limited. If there are a dozen IPAs there will be maybe two lagers and single thing that pretends to be "dark".

As I understand it, it's economics and experience. IPAs are fast to brew, and there are options for adjusting the flavor if you screw it up. Lagers and stouts take longer and are very prone to simply failing with no way to "fix" it when it does.

I totally agree. There are so many good beer and ale styles. I love IPA, but please let's have some variety.

This is similar to how a lot of wine works in Europe. Tons of small producers typically making it for the love of the craft and keeping it in the family. I see this as a win.

I thought we passed peak craft beer years ago. Guess not!

My brother works for an indy brewery in the UK. It's super hard work, but he loves the job. The industry is very tough and many of the independent players don't make it. Those who do are often swallowed by one of the big names or become everything they set out not to be (looking at you, Brewdog).

I have no problem with widespread availability of great tasting, local beers. This is a feature, not a bug.

> "The long-building craft-beer boom is showing signs of slowing down"

Do they provide any stats to back this up?

> "Highland Brewing Co. [...] has gone from a basement brewery to a hilltop 40-acre destination that produces more than 40,000 barrels annually and generates around $15 million in revenue"

This statement appears to contradict the thesis...

All suffered under COVID, these stats indicate a small dip in craft beer sales in 2020, but a rebound in 2021:

https://www.brewersassociation.org/statistics-and-data/natio...

https://www.statista.com/chart/10280/americas-brewery-boom/

here to appreciate the punny title for a second :))

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