02 December 2009

What Do I Have To Do To Get Your Beer, Anyway?

What's the most popular and requested draft beer in Baltimore?

Well, if you just count tap handles, it's probably Bud Light.  But if you open a bar in town, you might have the big industrial brewers falling over themselves trying to "buy" their way into your place (they'll install your draft system as long as you serve their products, for example).

But is there a beer with a waiting list--a beer where someone has to die or get bumped off before you get their beer?  According to Sam Sessa's Midnight Sun post, most certainly:  Brewers Art Resurrection.  Go read the post; he got it mostly right (but didn't go into the bottling-at-Sly-Fox-in-Pennsylvania situation). 

This dilemma highlights the growing problem that confronts a great many brewpubs nationwide, but is exacerbated in urban areas and Baltimore in particular.  At one point, Baltimore had five brewpubs in the city limits; now it's down to two brewpubs and three "brewpub outlets" where the beer is brewed outside the city--and only if we still consider the Ram's Head Live complex near the Power Plant still a brewery outlet, in spite of many guest beers.  Both the remaining brewpubs, and one of the now-gone ones (Sisson's), have/had brewing systems literally crammed into back corners and basement space, and frankly, it completely dumbfounds me that ANY brewer would be willing to work long-term in those claustrophobic, cramped confines.  My Bacchus, unions were formed and arose to power to combat such working conditions, dammit!  Steve Jones of Oliver's/Pratt Street has jokingly called himself the "hunchback," and anyone who has ever been down in the brewpub's basement--a typical old-Baltimore-downtown basement--would be flabbergasted.  Brewers Art's set-up is slightly less claustrophobic, but equally cramped and "inhumane" by many labor standards.

Oliver's is lucky enough that Bill Oliver bought long-term and has lots of excess capacity in its conditioning vessels (thus allowing Jones and assistant Justin D'Amadio the opportunity to work more and expand their market to D.C. and beyond--Olivers is rapidly becoming the "default" reserve cask beer at a lot of places now).  Brewers Art doesn't have that luxury--it's either tank space or a kitchen.  Take your pick.  The brewery at the former Sisson's, last operated under the current owner Ryleigh's, was removed and sold to Mountain State Brewing's Brian Arnett, because, as I was told by the management, they ran the numbers and found that there was more money to be made from additional seating space than there was from the brewery; a similar fate for the same reason befell the brewery at the original DuClaw in Bel Air, and I suspect the only reason they haven't ripped out the brewery at the Annapolis Ram's Head Tavern is the sheer disruption the scrapping would cause.

Thanks to that stupid, fantasy-based, and even unethical real estate boom of the late 1990s and beyond, the square footage involved in running a brewpub in an urban area is anywhere from expensive to ludicrous.  Nobody in their right minds, unless they inherit the property or have a "sweetheart" deal with a property owner or the city, would open a brewpub in an inner city in America today, what with property and business taxes, license fees, and the sheer cost of the necessary real estate.  Bill Oliver, the former owner of what is now the Pratt Street Ale House, was heavily rumored, before selling the place last year, to have been seeking out  a solution similar to what DuClaw carried out: putting the actual brewing operations outside the city and operating the pubs as  "tied houses."  (Thirsty Dog/Dog Pub similarly set up shop out in the old Clay Pipe facility in the "industrial" side of Westminster, with an eye towards their expansion to other locations, but they had been serving Old Dominion beers as their "own" brands before OD pulled out of Maryland, forcing their hand at an innovative solution, one that has scored them one GABF medal so far....)

Should we have mercy on these poor souls?  Would we be all right if, just to make up fantasies, Brewers Art shut down for two weeks, disassembled their brewing equipment, and set up a new brewery with three times the capacity and a bottling line in, oh, I don't know, a business park in Owings Mills or Glen Burnie?  And PSAH/Olivers relocated to a back corner of an abandoned industrial building in Highlandtown or a pier in Canton, brewing up beers in a nice Pugsley system sourced from Shipyard or Wild Goose?

Hey--it would mean we'd get a bit more Resurrection, Cerebus, or Le Canard, right?

Incidentally, since Sam let the cat out of the bag in his post, so to speak, I'll point out that there are still a scant few tickets left for their annual holiday beer tasting on Dec. 12th, noon to 4 p.m.  20% of the gross is donated to a chosen local charity; about a dozen of the region's breweries will be on hand with their holiday beers, and Brewers Art sets out a buffet of their excellent food to accompany it all--and that's usually the first "keg to kick." Tickets, advance only, are $40 plus a processing fee; go here for tickets, and don't call the brewpub.

5 comments:

Caederus said...

When you start listening/reading interviews from brewers from brewpubs, this is an issue across the country. The more successful (monetarily) operations will have centralized locations where they brew and ship to their locations.

Many also go with partner brewing (Contract brewing) where they don't own the stainless, but their brewers use the partners stainless. An example of this is 21st Amendment. Those cans that have been flooding the nation are brewed in the upper mid west, not San Francisco. (I don't know if Brewers art just contracts or partners)

If you doubt the wisdom of this just think of the quote from D. L. Geary (Founder Geary brewing Portland Maine) about Jim Koch "We started off with approximately the same amount of money. He put all of his into Marketing. I put all of mine into Stainless Steel... Jim's is a better model"

stevejones said...

Not sure that I like our beer being referred to as "default reserve casks". Oliver cask conditioned ales are popular in their own right because they are quality, authentic English style ales that are fined properly to give a bright, well conditioned beer. Obviously people are excited when local bars present casks from national or international breweries, as am I, but I think that our casks sell on their own merit, not as a "reserve"!

Alexander D. Mitchell IV said...

It's a fair response, Steve, and I apologize if I left a bad impression. But part of the whole "cask cult" mystique, in my experience, has been bars and patrons seeing how rare a firkin or from how distant a brewery you could score. You could be pouring the most spectacular cask beer in captivity, and because you're a "home town" brewery or just down the road, folks are always going to regard the beer dismissively as "been there, done that." Clipper City suffers from the exact same problem here in Baltimore (remember my photo of an abandoned, ignored, self-service full firkin of dry-hopped Heavy Seas Loose Cannon at one of the Timonium beer fests?); Brewers Art doesn't have enough production to do many firkins; and metropolitan D.C. doesn't have a brewery or brewpub cranking out enough cask beer to have a "home town" routine cask source for beer bars like RFD and ChurchKey, as far as I know--unless Rock Bottom and Cap City are selling firkins to DC bars and I haven't heard.

The real challenge will come around late spring and summer, when fewer cask ale producers are wiling to take the considerable gamble to ship firkins ANY distance, thanks to soaring temperatures and unsupervised shipping. I would predict that Oliver's will start selling a LOT more casks come next summer!

The Oriole Way said...

Nobody in their right minds, unless they inherit the property or have a "sweetheart" deal with a property owner or the city, would open a brewpub in an inner city in America today...

Really? I don't think Portland and Denver have this problem. It all comes down to the space. Of course you won't open a brew pub in Harbor East, but what if you get creative with a long abandoned warehouse just to the north? I don't think many people thought a bowling alley would be a good choice in such a location, so why couldn't a brewpub work? If the right brewer comes along and finds the right space, I absolutely think the brewpub model can still work.

Alexander D. Mitchell IV said...

Really? I don't think Portland and Denver have this problem. It all comes down to the space. Of course you won't open a brew pub in Harbor East, but what if you get creative with a long abandoned warehouse just to the north? I don't think many people thought a bowling alley would be a good choice in such a location, so why couldn't a brewpub work? If the right brewer comes along and finds the right space, I absolutely think the brewpub model can still work.

You're welcome to try. But the reality is that in MOST of the country, if the real estate is affordable enough to build a brewery/brewpub, it's far enough "off the beaten path" that it's not going to attract the critical mass of patronage necessary to sustain a restaurant/bar. Using Baltimore as an example, I would have been happy to see brewpubs open up in, for example, the old buildings along Fort Avenue where the Merritt gym and Wine Market are now, or at the Globe Brewing location along Key Highway (so much wasted potential there), or off in Canton in the Can Company complex or in the Brewers Hill development in Highlandtown. But even there, the numbers just won't work--they're asking way too much NOW for the square footage for a brewpub to survive. You're NOT going to sustain a brewpub in the "bad" areas of town where people might give you the real estate cheap but your patrons would be mugged or have to walk around drug dealers on the corners. The chin-stroker would be an area like Roland Park, Hampden, or Belvedere--and once again, you run into high priced square footage. And I'm not even counting the cost of doing business in the People's Democratic Republic of Baltimore--taxes, licenses, permits, taxes, more taxes, etc.

As I am to understand it, Denver and Portland's brewpubs also either predate the late 1990's/2000's real estate uptick and/or have benefited from being early "pioneers" into up-and-coming areas--do any of you remember when Fells Point was a seedy bunch of dives and the building that is now the Pratt Street Ale House was too far away from the Inner harbor to draw enough people, before the stadiums went in and the Convention Center was expanded to put the main entrance across the street?