Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - sudculture (part II of II)

Episode Date: June 21, 2016

Part two of your host’s craft beer drinking adventure. As the battle over shelf space intensifies we meet a couple of brewers who are doing things differently?

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Sad Culture, Part 2. One of my favorite beers that I drank last year was a double IPA called Lambodor. So these are not bitter or bracing or there's no abrasiveness on the palate. They're just like... Gummy bear juice. Yeah, gummy bear juice. That's Lauren and Joe Grimm,

the husband and wife duo behind Grimm Artisanal Ales. One of the things that separates a beer like this is that it's really focused on fermentation-derived flavors. The traditional way to make an IPA is to make it as fermentation-neutral as possible, so it's just a clean blank canvas for hop flavors and that's not how we do it. The flavorful IPAs and sour beers that these two brew sum up so much of what is going on in craft beer right now. Well at least all the good stuff. In fact they are the main reason I decided to do this miniseries in the first place.

My first encounter with Grimm was when I came across a bottle of theirs at the beer store near my apartment. It was called Gradient, and it was the first beer bottle I ever saved. For Gradient, I immediately thought of geodes and crystal structures. On the label, there were these intricate drawings of these magical crystal formations. I remember when I saw it, I had no idea what kind of beer this would be, but I immediately knew I had to try it. Joe and Lauren both have art backgrounds. Perhaps this is why everything they do seems imbued with their artistic sensibilities. Or perhaps they're just the first to figure out how to do something amazing with a shrink-wrapped can.

When we heard about shrink-wrapped cans, I was pretty excited because, you know, it was like the entire 360 degrees of the can was available as a label. I come from a sculpture background, so thinking about things in three-dimensional space is, it's just how I think about the world. And it's been cool for me to think about how we are going to use that space. You know, labels are about marketing, and it's somebody trying to sell something. And maybe that's what's different about us. It's just we're making something that we want to look at.

I know how preposterous that sounds, but it's true. These two really are doing something refreshingly different. It's nice that people have been really into what we're doing. A lot of people are into what they're doing. My phone will start ringing off the hook early in the week for people asking when the Grim cans are going to drop and when that Grim bottle is going to get in. And every 10 minutes until the cans actually get there,

I get another phone call from someone else asking if the cans have come in yet, so they can run down here from their office in Midtown and pick up their maximum two per person. That's Zach Mack. He's the owner of ABC Beer. That's the beer shop around the corner from my apartment. And as he just said, he has to put two per person limits

on the Grimm cans and bottles, because otherwise they won't last an hour. Trading has become a huge thing in beer so a lot of these people will buy one and maybe never even drink it. They'll just go online and they'll trade it off. This is probably one of the things I hate most about craft beer. It can quickly devolve into herd mentality consumerism. I've seen guys lined up outside of shops like Zach's waiting for the delivery truck to show up so they can make sure they don't miss out on grim beer. And I've even seen some of these bros follow the delivery truck around my neighborhood to the other

shops so they can buy more. When you witness this kind of frenzy, you get why the mega brewers are willing to throw so much money at craft beer. This one here is the Snake River Zonkerstaff. But this just might be a revolution that money can't buy. There are 10 plus taps at ABC Beer, and Zach is always changing them up. His customers come in expecting to find new things. When a craft beer gets bought up by a company like AB InBev, Zach will stop carrying it. He said he would even stop carrying Grimm if they got acquired by AB InBev.

They won't, and we'll hear more from Joe and Lauren later in the show. But it's important to understand Zach's thinking here. For him, a beer doesn't become bad when it becomes corporate mega brew. It becomes irrelevant. Zach is not a beer snob. He's a businessman and his business is definitely not crafty beer. Someone owned by AB InBev doesn't need my tap space to make money. They're going to get their distribution out and they're going to get the word out without

me having to sell it for them. Our idea here is to support the little guys and to make beer drinking something exciting for people who've never really picked up a beer and been excited about it. We turn people on to new things every day here with sour beers or Belgian styles that they never had. Most of the time they say, wow, I can't believe this is what beer tastes like. And craft beer is good business. There are now six shops like Zach's within walking distance of my apartment all with 10 plus tap selling both craft beer on site and craft beer to go. This is all possible

because New York is a state with good growler laws. A growler is a large 32 or 64 ounce brown glass container and a good growler law is what allowsler is a large 32 or 64 ounce brown glass container, and a good growler law is what allows you to bring one of these containers to a brewery or a retailer and fill it up with beer to go without anyone getting fined or put in jail. The laws governing the distribution and sales of beer vary from state to state, but they're all based on what is known as the three-tier system. The basic structure of this system is that producers, beer makers, can only sell their products to wholesale distributors, who then sell them to retailers, and it is only the retailers

who are allowed to sell to consumers. This three-tier system was put in place nationally when Prohibition ended in 1933. But the powers to regulate rest with the states. So there are tons of variations and exceptions. For example, in Washington, growlers are ubiquitous. Breweries, brew pubs, and retailers are all allowed to fill and sell them. Cloudburst, the brewery we visited in episode one, is basically operating a three-tier business. Steve Luke brews the beer, he self-distributes the beer to bars in the Seattle area, and he sells the beer at his own brew pub. But in many states, like Colorado, only breweries can fill growlers to go.

Colorado, also a great beer state, has its own version of the three-tier system. It's legal here for all brewers to own distribution companies. One of the largest distributors in Colorado is Coors Distributing, so I promise that law is not going anywhere anytime soon. That's Chad Jacobson. He makes some of the most amazing sour beers that I've ever had in my life. He's also one of the only craft brewers in the country running both a craft brewery,

Crooked Stave, and a serious distribution operation, Crooked Stave Artisans, that reps brands other than his own. Both companies are based in Denver, Colorado, where I went to go talk with him. I want to drink more good beer. I want to drink more sour beer. Chad's motivation for running both ventures may be simple, but his distribution company is a complex, highly curated operation. He's brought together some of the nation's most celebrated craft brands like Hill Farmstead, Melvin, and Jolly Pumpkin. We have the smaller niche quality, more sought after brands, the ones who right now are really stepping it up. Founded in 2013, CSA now reps over a hundred beers. Chad's actually brought together some of the world's most celebrated craft brands. In many ways, he's created like an artisanal

version of Budweiser's parent company, AB and Bev. What we're doing, our goals and aspirations are actually not too different in a way than Budweiser. And I'll have to explain that because at first that's like, whoa, wait a minute. So the difference is we're not buying up brands. We are partnering with bringing our friends, all these great brands into Colorado. And what that does when you build your portfolio is it gives buyers more reason to work with you. So our sales reps are extremely knowledgeable sales reps over at CSA. They go out and they're able to shop a multitude of brands.

And what happens is as you're able to get four, five, six tap handles, as these buyers want this, they start to go with you more and more. So we're doing the same thing with Cricket Stave. There are a few bars and restaurants in the Denver area that have basically turned all of their taps over to CSA. I know of bars that have basically said throughout Colorado, yeah, this is the portfolio I want to work with and are only working with CSA. We have entire taps, 20 handles, just CSA. No other distributors in there. Now, this is the portfolio I want to work with and are only working with CSA. We have entire taps, 20 handles, just CSA. No other distributors in there. Now, this is the thing I'm having the most trouble with.

When I walk into a bar and I see all the taps controlled by one company like AB InBev or Miller Coors, I get upset. It bothers me. I don't like mono beer, and I certainly don't like monoculture. But I promise you, the next time I'm in Denver, I am going to find one of these places where they only have CSA beers on tap, and I'm going to park myself at the bar for like a day. So yeah, am I just totally deluded? Is this really a subculture, or merely a gussied up tap list for the like-minded and like-bearded? Perhaps I've just had one too many.

So right now we're drinking VA Reserva Prunus Herminiaca, which is a very long complicated name for basically apricot VA. But when I peruse the list of beers in the CSA portfolio, I'm reminded of a small music label or an indie comic book publisher or a podcast network. Some of the brands are even direct competitors for his own beers. But Chad's making it work. And as the stakes rise in this battle for shelf space,

he's demonstrating that the corporate buyout is not the only path to success for craft beer. It's a fine line between what it means to do what Joe and I do and a brand creator who gives a recipe to somebody else and basically hires them to make the beer. We're back with the Grimm's. A couple of months ago, I got up super early to meet Lauren and Joe at their home in Brooklyn so I could drive with them to the flagship brewing company

on Staten Island. The Grimm's don't have their own brewery. They make all their beer using other people's equipment and facilities. The popular term for this in craft brewing speak is gypsy brewing, but not everyone's comfortable with that term. Sometimes you'll hear it called itinerant brewing. Actually, a lot of folks don't like that term either. All of the words have some sort of a vaguely negative overtone if you think about it,

so it's a little bit awkward. The Grimms call it nomadic brewing, and for them, it's another age-old basic brewing practice that craft beer has gone and turned hip and sexy. There are hundreds of years of history of people using other people's spaces to produce their beer and to make their own creative product in some sort of a shared way. Once we did get started doing nomadic brewing, Joe and I were like, this is great. It just opens up the creativity. This was never our first choice anyway. You know, we wanted to have our own space and have complete creative control. And we realized that we just didn't have the funds to make that happen. But nomadic brewing is not the same thing as contract brewing.

That is what the big mega brewers do when they hire a production brewery to make their beer, usually massive amounts of it. Sometimes these relationships can last for decades. A good example is Brooklyn Lager, which is made in Utica. But now that provenance has become so important in the beer world, most brewers try to keep these contracts under wraps, or at least under the radar. If you're like a person who wants to just make a product,

you can just contract somebody. They'll make the beer. Maybe you just email them a recipe, or you just say, hey, you can just contract somebody, they'll make the beer, you just, maybe you just email them a recipe, or you just say, hey, make me an IPA recipe that's for this product, and they'll make it for you, and you slap your label on it and market it. I don't think that the people who do that, they aren't looking at it as a nomadic label, they actually are trying to put out an idea that the beer comes from a certain place.

90% of the breweries that are identified with New York City, if they're named after a place in New York City, they're not made there. It's basically a pulling the wool over the consumer's eyes thing. When we arrive at Flagship, Joe and Lauren get right to work. They're brewing the second half of a hoppy farm style that they started the day before. So you can see it's fermenting like crazy.

As the yeast turns the sugar into alcohol, it lets off a lot of gas. So we have this bucket that it bubbles into. Joe's always very certain about things, and I'm always like, I don't know, let's rethink this. Let's maybe take it incrementally. Lauren is measuring some different salts that will change the water profile. It's a very important part of making a beer, to get the water profile. It's a very important part of making a beer to get the water right. So she's measuring out some calcium chloride and

some gypsum and then she'll be using those things to give the right mineral profile to the water. New York's water is very very soft so it's almost like a distilled water kind of situation where it's sort of mineral-free, and that's not necessarily what you need for making beer. So we add some minerals back in to make it taste right. As you can hear, Joe and Lauren are doing all of the work themselves. They do not phone or email their recipes in to the folks at Flagship. The people we work with are great. They know what they're doing. But they, you know, if we weren't here, maybe they would be making the decisions for our beer.

And they don't necessarily know what we want our beer to taste like. So, you know, we're here making those, you know, decisions on the fly and gearing technique towards what we want the end product to be. One of the limitations of doing nomadic brewing, though, is that some of the beers Joe and Lauren are known for, these sours and live fermentations, can frighten potential brewing partners, especially the ones that don't have experience with live organisms that, if mishandled, could endanger all the other tanks in the brewery. At Flagship, Joe and Lauren aren't brewing any of their sours, but they are still doing things differently. They are using way more hops in each batch of beer than we had ever done with any of the beers we do here.

That's Patrick Morse. He's the head brewer at Flagship. Their amount of dry hops and hops going into the beer itself are sort of like more than this system can handle. Once in a while it gets me a little bit out of my comfort zone, which is natural. But obviously that's what really makes those beers, you know, what they are, the flavor of them and then the aroma and all that really good hoppiness. Joe and Lauren started making beer in art school. And in Chicago, they discovered a number of things that link the DIY music and art scene with the emerging craft beer scene.

We started a beer CSA with other students at the Art Institute of Chicago. And we were like, yeah, you PayPal us the money up front and then we'll make the beer with the ingredients that we buy with your money. And then we'll make the beer with the you know ingredients that we buy with your money and then we'll tell you when it's ready and you can come pick it up and you'll get like you know a six pack or two but then we were actually doing more stuff just we had like friends who had diy art galleries and music show kind of situations so we would just set up a little table and have a pop-up you know beer thing

at our friends art galleries i think people that are into our beer are oftentimes the same kinds of characters that would be interested in collecting esoteric records and i'm one of them yeah you know a lot of the people that I know from my days as an experimental music person are hardcore beer aficionados, and we get to have a friendship that's about both of those things. It's cool. In many ways, the Grimms are doing a few things that are new to beer, but standard practice in the art world.

In general, the art, whether it's music or visual art that I like the most, is really geared towards a very specific point in time, the time in which it was made. And it could exist at no other time. And, you know, there's, yeah, it's ephemeral and it's there and then it's gone. That is a new idea for beer. I mean, you used to have companies that wanted, you know, it's like make one you know lager and you want somebody to drink that every single time they go to a bar or every time they buy a canned beer and brand loyalty like i'm a schlitz man you know that's not the world that we're in anymore yeah and i think that's scary to a lot of like older school beer producers. They're not fully ready to embrace

the moment to moment decision making on the fly nature of it because they have a big operation. It's like a bureaucracy. It can't move that fast, right? This is just us. So we can submit a couple of new labels a month and and make a couple new recipes a month, no problem pace and it's because you have people, you know, makers really involved with their process and looking at other artwork and taking ideas from one another and that's how you get a whole movement started.

And essentially the craft beer movement that you see today is the same thing where you have people really excited about creating new beers and new flavors and experimenting and then tasting each other's beers and getting new ideas and you know kind of riffing on each other and so it's moving really quickly into the future. And it's you know it's also dangerous like maybe in the same way that a band or an artist can like be faddish in one moment and then be passe in the next in favor of the next shiny object. That's something that breweries selling direct to their consumers because you can make a lot of small batches of really interesting beers and be more experimental when you're a smaller brewery selling direct to the public. Joe and Lauren won't be doing the nomadic brewing thing for much longer.

They're planning on opening their very own brewery in New York City soon. You know, there are so many parallels you can make between the art, music, and beer worlds. And in New York, where artists are always washing up with the hopes of making something happen, these connections resonate with extra intensity. But when I tried to get Joe to play along with my game of mapping out which New York brewery would be which New York band, he kind of made fun of me. And you know, now that I'm at the end of this series, I've been thinking, perhaps I've had it backwards all along. Perhaps it's not just the mega brewers this subculture needs to be wary of.

When we first started our company, we ran into one of my teachers from the Art Institute of Chicago at the Whitney. And we were like, yeah, we're going to start a brewery. And he was like, is it art? And Joe and I said flat out, no, it's not art. No. Why would you want it to be art? If it was art, we'd have to like, it would have to be about something else, right? It's beer.

It's about flavor. It has a pure enjoyment of the experience of drinking something that tastes good. If it were art, that would not be the criteria for judgment. It would be something totally different. It wouldn't be good art if it was good beer. We want this to be thought about as a delicious beverage, right? And we want people to think critically about it within the context of how does it work as a drink. You don't want this to be art. Art is a mess.

You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Sud Culture, Part 2. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Sad Culture, Part 2. This episode was produced by myself, Benjamin Walker, with some help from Dasha Luzina. Thanks to Joe and Lauren Grimm, Zach Mack, Chad Jacobson, and everyone else who helped me with this mini-series. Extra special thanks to Matilde Biot. The Theory of Everything is a proud member of Radiotopia, home to some of the best story-driven podcasts on the web.

Thanks to the Knight Foundation, MailChimp, and listeners like you, Radiotopia is only going to get better and better. You'll find info on all of the shows at radiotopia.org. Radiotopia. From PRX.