Beer Activist

Are you going to the National Homebrewers Conference? Me too! Seven Bridges is sponsoring the conference so I’ll be staffing the booth most of the time - please stop on by and say hello. We’ll have special deals on organic homebrew supplies, I’ll be signing books, and we’ll be taking registrations for the second annual National Organic Homebrew Challenge - the biggest organic homebrew contest in the world! Plus, we’ll have a fresh home-roasted Fair Trade, organic coffee on tap.

Hope to see some Beer Activists there!

I visited the Sierra Nevada brewery last fall and spoke with founder and owner Ken Grossman about their sustainability efforts. Given the limited role sustainability plays in the company’s marketing, I was pleasantly surprised to learn how far the brewery has already traveled down the road to sustainability. Then in April I had the distinct honor and pleasure to join Ken on a panel about sustainability programs at the Craft Brewers Conference.

(Sierra Nevada’s organic hop yard abuts the visitor parking lot right next to the brewery in Chico, Ca.)

One particularly surprising fact I learned was that they have an on-site organic hop yard. Two weeks ago I ran into the Chicago-area Sierra Nevada reps at the Green Procurement Expo at Chicago’s Navy Pier convention center. I ducked over to their booth for a ‘coffee break’ during the trade show, and learned that they are soon releasing their first Estate Harvest Ale which will be brewed with the organic hops from their own yard. The bad news is that it will only be available locally around the company’s Chico, CA home.

I also just learned that Sierra Nevada has conducted a greenhouse gas emissions inventory and had the results certified by the California Climate Action Registry and has signed up with PG&E’s ClimateSmart program to offset their emissions. Here’s a short interview with Ken Grossman about both of these efforts that just appeared on the blog Beer, Maine & Me.

The world’s largest gathering of organic brewers occurs in just a couple weeks over on the left coast in my favorite city, Portland, OR.

This year’s North American Organic Beer Festival promises to showcase 75 organic beers and lagers plus live music, other sustainability-oriented vendors and plenty of local and organic food. Sounds like heaven to me.

Many of the featured brews will be locally brewed as well, but organic offerings are also arriving from Belgium, Canada, Germany and the UK.

Quoted in the Portland Beer Blog, festival organizer Abram Goldman-Armstrong claims, “Organic beer is the next step in the craft-brewing revolution.”

The event will be held at Portland’s Overlook Park June 27-29. Admission is free, a tasting glass is $5, and 4oz samples of beer are $1. For more information visit www.naobf.org.

The big news today was the proposed hostile takeover of Anheuser Busch by rival InBev. But the Washington Post ran a second, more reassuring piece on beer today that helped turn my frown upside-down.

Busboys and Poets, the Washington area bookstore-cafe with locations in Shirlington and near U St., is running an “Organic Beer Happy Hour” that, according to the article, was inspired by . . . me! Now that’s change I can believe in.

A few months back, Busboys hosted me for a book signing and talk. It seems the talk was received well enough that it inspired them to feature a weekly happy hour every Wednesday featuring specials on organic beers. According to their website, they are offering the following beers for $4:

• Wolaver’s Brown and Farmhouse Ale
• Brooklyn’s Winter Ale (hmm, this one’s not actually organic, though Brooklyn Brewing is wind-powered)
• Peak’s Amber
• Clipper City’s Winter Storm

That last one isn’t organic either, but maybe they meant Clipper City’s Oxford Organic Amber, which I’ve been helping to launch in the regional market through organic beer dinners such as the one being held at Great Sage on June 26, 2008.

Now you have two great excuses to come on out and have an organic beer here in the DC area.

InBev tries to get in bed with Anheuser-Busch
Rumors started earlier this week that InBev, already one of the world’s largest brewing concerns, was thirsty for a mega-merger with Anheuser-Busch, makers of the world’s best known industrial light lager, or what most of us quaintly call “Bud.”

Then yesterday the rumor became real. InBev offered to acquire A-B for $46.3 billion, proposing what would be the third largest foreign takeover of an American company - ever.

What’s wrong with this deal?

It is a sign of desperation.
It has been my position for years that mergers such as these are desperate acts by global brand owners who have nowhere to grow but out (I wrote about this in my book Fermenting Revolution). The market is saturated with industrial beer, so the companies selling it can only grow by acquisitions and mergers rather than market-lead growth that results from people actually wanting a company’s product. According to the logic of capitalism, the end goal of this process is a global monopoly on commodity beer (Read this AP wire article about how the Governor of Missouri agrees with me on this point).

It is likely to be hostile.
The family members that maintain whatever might be left of a heart of the already-global, publicly-traded, Anheuser-Busch corporation don’t want to relinquish the little control they still have over the direction of the company.

It will effectively end American brewing.
In actual and symbolic terms, the vast majority of beer sold in America will be foreign. Putting aside its many flaws (marketing that bolsters male chauvinism and stupidity, it tastes like fizzy water, etc.), Bud is nonetheless regarded as the quintessential “American” beer. A-B sells one out of every two beers in America (and has a stranglehold on the beer distribution system, which serves as a convenient excuse for gobbling up lots of small craft brewers (like Redhook, Goose Island, and Old Dominion) who just want fair access to the market - but, although it’s related, that’s really another story). A-B’s main domestic rival is - this name is not a joke - SABMiller Molson Coors. In other words, America’s second and third largest brewers, Miller and Coors, are actually foreign-owned already. Combine the existing sales of import brands (about 15% of the market) with SABMiller Molson Coors, and a theoretically InBev-owned A-B and what do you get? Foreign control of about 95% of the beers sold in America. So much for having a quintessential “American” beer - or any American beer for that matter, save the 5% or so produced by small, local craft brewers.

It’s just crude and low down.
Pardon my language, but InBev really wants to screw American beer drinkers. I mean it, just listen to the language they are using. In reference to the proposed hostile takeover, an InBev company official tried smooth talking his way into getting in bed with A-B, saying they’d “like to engage in a dialogue with the goal of consummating a friendly combination.”

Signs suggest that this deal is, in fact, likely to be ‘consummated’, as it were. That would mean that roughly half of the world’s commercial beer would be produced by just two giant conglomerates.

For my own part, I’ll be sticking to the beers produced by the thousands of small brewers around the world. And I’ll keep making my own beer in the kitchen.