Barrel-Aging Programs Buck Trendy Industry

One of the realities of modern craft beer is fads and trends. There are so many breweries that it's tough to get noticed. In that scenario, a lot of consumers are fixated on what's new and shiny. Maybe this was the inevitable result of a maturing industry. Maybe.

You see the theme playing out in beer bars, bottleshops, taprooms and pubs. Customers who pass through those doors commonly ask for the newest thing, whether it's a fruit infused hazy, a kombucha pilsner or some other strange one-off.

Most brewers, whether they like it or not, have little choice in the matter. If they want to stay in business, they've got to play the game. That means spending an exorbitant amount of time focused on developing fancy new beers and the packaging that sells them. 

What suffers is the work that once went into refining beers over a period of months and years. When you're focused on keeping abreast of the coolest new trend, you don't invest the time or energy in messing around with what we once knew as reliable standards. 

It's not so hard to see why flagship beers are an endangered species. There are still quite a few of them around, but they don't have the appeal or command the sales numbers they once did. A big part of the reason established craft breweries are suffering is that people don't buy flagships anymore. That stuff is old hat, not cool. 

All of this vaguely became part of the discussion at Thursday evening's Barrel-Aged Beer and Whiskey Seminar at House Spirits/Westward Whiskey in Southeast Portland. It was one of four seminars held as part of Portland Beer Week. Breakside's Ben Edmunds led a group discussion that included Matt Lincecum, founder of Seattle's Fremont Brewing, Daniel Hynes, manager of Breakside's barrel program, and Andrew Tice of House Spirits. 

Barrel-aged beers definitely have a place in the trendiness of craft beer. They're rare and usually expensive, prerequisites for capturing the imagination of craft fans who sneer at stuff that's easy to find and cheaper. That $20 four-pack of hazy IPA isn't as good as an established IPA that sells for $12 a six-pack. But never mind. It's new and rare and spendy. Gotta have it. 

A big difference between the flood of trendy stuff being dumped on the market is that barrel-aged beers are hard to make. They require meticulous planning, time and expertise to pull off well. Even then, they sometimes bomb. Expensive equipment and a nice facility are great, but you simply cannot make these beers easily. Putting beer in a barrel can produce great or dreadful results. 

Some of the considerations involved include the type and quality of barrels used, sugar content of the beer, type of yeast, aging time, temperature, monitoring while aging to evaluate progress, knowing whether to blend vintages and so on. Barrel-aged beers are a highly artisan endeavor, requiring skills and knowledge acquired over many years. They also require a lot of patience. 

Contrast that with your average trendy beer, often a half-baked concept. They can be highly creative, but usually aren't very refined. They're here today, gone tomorrow, so they never really have a chance to mature. Barrel beers can also be creative, even half-baked, but they usually aren't a one-and-done proposition and actually do grow up in a lot of cases.

It wasn't so long ago that brewers focused on producing a few flagship beers to sell in their pubs and maybe in packaged form. There weren't a lot of choices, which meant the primary differentiating factor was the quality and evolution of the beers. We've lost a bit of that in the frenzy over what's new and trendy, I think.

But I take pleasure in knowing there are barrel aging programs out there that have something in common with the focus on quality that once dominated this industry. Maybe we'll at some point return to a situation where that's the industry norm, not the exception. Maybe.

Note: Special thanks to Ezra Johnson-Greenough, who offered me a place in the seminar and encouraged me to attend.