The Spirit World

A few weeks back I had a reason to celebrate. A long time friend came to visit us at our home for a few days. When he arrived I (naturally) wanted to mark the occasion by opening up a bottle of something for us to drink and to share. Now, for me, it’s natural to think “what beers do I have in the cellar that would be good for the occasion?” However, I suspect that most people might automatically dismiss beer and mentally run through the catalog of wines and champagnes they have on hand. The reason I suspect this is that we naturally want to mark joyous and important occasions not with economy, but with extravagance. Not that we wish to impress (though vanity is, no doubt part of it), but when an old friend arrives after a long trip we want to open our finest bottle of something. And as quality and price (supposedly) scale in proportion, wine or champagne or a bottle of scotch whiskey win out over beer.

While on a little beer research excursion into Manhattan I took along the March issue of All About Beer with me to read on the train. In that issue there is a reprint of an article by (the beer and whiskey world’s ) Michael Jackson from 2000 about how the beer industry hasn’t managed to convince consumers that beer is a sophisticated choice in beverages. Since a beer magazine is reprinting this article six years later, I’m assuming not much has changed since Jackson originally wrote it. Among other things, Jackson’s article identifies two factors that have contributed to keeping beer in third place (behind wine and spirits) as a consumer choice: price and consumer education.

Beer is inexpensive when compared with wine or spirits. The most expensive beers you’ll be able to find are in the twenty dollar range. While this might seem like a good thing to the individual beer consumer, the low price of beer makes it less lucrative for producers and so there are fewer producers. My counterintuitive argument is that if craft brewers charged a minimum of twenty dollars per 750 ml bottle, they would be more successful.

Here on Long Island, there are something like thirty-five wineries—thirty-five! (plus or minus). How many brewpubs and breweries are there? Four brewpubs and one brewery. What’s up with that? If anything, those numbers should be reversed. But beer culture in the US has a long way to go before it can get to where wine culture already is. The two-fold path of elevating beer culture is, as Michael Jackson said, price and consumer education.

Beer producers must be willing to make smaller quantities of more expensive beer. And in order for them to be successful beer consumers (or perhaps a whole new beer consumer) must be told why they should be drinking expensive beer (at least some of the time). My dream is to drive through the old farmlands of Long Island from microbrewery to microbrewery sampling bottles of expensive beer. So keep reading Brewsday, I’ll tell you why you should buy and drink expensive beer.