Re-published from the Sept. 2, 2013 edition of the Charleston Brewing Company Brewer’s Blog.
“Support Your Local Brewery.” “Drink Local.” “Brewed and Served Fresh Here.” These are all pretty clever, if simple and straightforward slogans. I like their collective sharp edge with regard to getting a point across—“we need you to buy this beer so that we can stay in business”—in a manner that also leans on the rightfully held notion that we should support our locally owned businesses. In an era where large socio-economic cross sections of society are re-examining where and how they purchase and consume products, buying beer made three miles away, rather than 3,000, seems to fit in well. Yet, purchasing that pint of locally-made beer at the brewpub or beer bar means a whole lot more than just adhering to some vaguely new-world, hipsterish, motto. Quite literally it [buying local] provides a direct benefit to the local economy. Perhaps more importantly, from the perspective of the drinker and consumer, it allows access to “better” beer.
The first point, that buying locally-made beer benefits the local economy, is a pretty well-worn and well-understood concept. Compared to national or regional chains, a huge percentage of the revenue (your consumer dollars) earned by locally-owned businesses is re-invested in the community. Said spending can take the form of paying employees’ salaries (who might in turn come and spend money at your business), local “quality of life” improvements in the community (anything from adding outdoor seating or cleaning up a park, to re-developing a vacant building) and philanthropy. Moreover, the owners and employees of these sorts of ventures are almost always local residents. Even beyond their own entrepreneurship, they want to see the area or municipality not only survive, but thrive; and are very likely to gear their business practices to facilitate this. In short, they are your neighbors, and want the neighborhood to stay nice as much as you do.
The second point seems at first to be somewhat self-serving, especially coming from what is currently the immediate area’s only local brewery. Of course the brewer there is going to say that locally-made beer is better than stuff from other places; he makes it, and his job depends on people buying it. True. However, beyond this fairly obvious self-promotion, and the rainbows and unicorns element of supporting local businesses mentioned previously, there are some very real benefits to purchasing beer made locally, versus stuff shipped across the country, or even across the state. The difference, in a nutshell, is freshness.
Beer, for the most part, does not age particularly well. Yes, there are certain styles, such as gueuze, barley wine, and Russian imperial stout that can gain tremendous complexity from months or years of proper storage. However, the vast majority of beer is meant to be consumed within weeks of its production, certainly not months or years. Dr. Charles Bamforth, brewing professor at U.C. Davis, and one of the world’s foremost authorities on the super nerdy hard science aspects of brewing, has found that beer oxidizes roughly twice as fast for every 10 degree celsius increase in its storage temperature. Unfortunately, even though any brewer worth his or her salt takes a tremendous amount of care and expense to store finished beer as cold as possible, in most cases, it is shipped from the brewery to wholesalers’ warehouses in unrefrigerated trucks. As I type this, it hovers around 90 degrees throughout the mid-Atlantic, and is a whole lot warmer than the trailer of an eighteen wheeler. Not good for your favorite IPA, even for a day or two. Moreover, refrigeration is expensive, and not necessarily the first priority of beer wholesalers. In my time as a beer buyer, we took delivery of more blood-warm kegs and cases of craft beer than I would like to remember. It was essentially like watching the beer die right in front of me. Finally, nothing is more disheartening than the “craft beer display area” in supermarkets, even those with very extensive beer selections, and supposedly passionate and knowledgeable staff. If you are super excited to see what oxidized pilsner or pale ale tastes like, go ahead and score one of those cleverly-stacked six packs sitting in the middle of the aisle, unrefrigerated.
Storage and shipment temperature is a huge issue, but also one that wholesalers are slowly beginning to understand and adequately deal with, except for the aforesaid ubiquitous unrefrigerated displays. More cold space, though expensive and energy intensive, largely solves this issue. Another problem, one that there is no solution for, is time. As stated, most beer is not meant to age. More acutely, certain styles, like the family of IPAs, pale ales, pilsners, and pale lagers, “die” quite quickly. You may have been waiting to try Russian River’s Pliny the Elder for years, however, if the bottle of it is more than two months old, you’d be better off saving your money and palate, as the beer is a shell of its former self. In an era where we can get tomatoes from California year-round and kiwi from New Zealand, it is natural to assume that beer can be shipped afar without issue. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work that way.
Indeed, I’ve been burnt so many times with old, oxidized, lifeless beer from fantastic breweries (fresh, I’m sure the beer was amazing), that I now will only buy local pale ale, pilsner and IPA, unless I can vouch for the freshness, usually from a “bottled on” date stamped on the bottle or can. It goes beyond “getting a taste of local beer” or “supporting the local brewery.” I just can’t stand oxidized, cardboardy beer. When you purchase from a local producer, especially on-site, you are almost assured that the product you are forking over hard-earned cash for is far fresher than anything to be found at a bottle shop or grocery store. It’s not self-serving, it’s a logistical fact. In that vein, I tend not to get overly excited when a West Coast brewery expands production into West Virginia, or a nearby state. I’ve witnessed first hand how different the beer is fresh at those breweries, versus two months old and oxidized in bottles here.
In the end, there are many great reasons to drink locally, whether it be beer, wine, cider, mead or distilled spirits. The country is dominated by huge business conglomerates, who seek to expand sales through not offending anyone, rather than producing soulful products. Local businesses build local economies and raise local quality of life. Most importantly (to me, anyway), locally produced stuff just tastes better, in the case of beer, due to the fact that it is generally fresher, and better cared for.
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