E-Malt.com News article: Germany & USA: Interest in American craft beer may change some day the German brewing industry

U.S. craft beer’s success at home is great and all, but reaching Hasselhoff levels of popularity in Germany is a far more impressive milestone, MarketWatch said on December 12.

Let’s start off by saying that craft beer isn’t exactly a new concept outside the U.S. The Australian craft-beer industry has grown about 13% each year since 2013. In Ireland, the burgeoning industry has tripled in size since 2011 and makes more than 50% of Ireland-produced beer exports while taking on multinational companies including Heineken and Diageo, which have bought up traditional Irish brands Guinness, Murphy’s and Beamish. The Esquire Network’s “Brew Dogs” looks at U.S. craft beer through the eyes of brewers from Scottish craft brewery BrewDog. Some of the best craft beer in the world, at least according to BeerAdvocate at RateBeer, is being brewed by Mikkel Borg Bjergsø’s Copenhagen-based Mikkeller.

However, exporting U.S. craft beer to any of those countries has been a tall order until recently. Of the more than 5.3 million barrels of beer exported from the United States in 2013, according to the Treasury Department’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, only 282,526 were craft beer. However, as the Brewers Association craft-beer industry group points out, that’s a 49% increase from 2012.

That figure is on the rise but, in Germany, it’s about to get a slight boost from U.S. craft brewers seeking their place within that nation’s brewing culture. Earlier this year, Escondido, Calif.-based craft brewer Stone Brewing Co. and its founder, Greg Koch, broke ground on a $25 million brewing facility and restaurant at an old gasworks in Berlin. The brewery will produce its first beer in 2015, with the rest opening for business in 2016.

Meanwhile, Boston Beer Co. President Jim Koch (no relation to Greg) and his Samuel Adams brand have been a presence in Germany since 1985, when Samuel Adams Boston Lager became the first American beer to pass muster under Germany’s beer-purity law. The Reinheitsgebot, drafted in 1516, maintains that a brewer can’t call its product “beer” if he doesn’t adhere to it by using only water, yeast, malt and hops. By comparison, all of Stone’s year-round beers make the cut, but other beers like its saison and milk stout would have to be called something other than beer.

“There was a German guy who had Sam Adams, loved it and said ‘I want to distribute your beer in Munich,” Jim Koch said. “Munich is very South German, very open to other influences, it’s the center of a lot of creativity in Germany, where the German film industry is and we’ve been there for 25 years.”

Jim Koch gave the keynote address at this year’s Brau Beviale global beer trade show in Nuremberg and received the Bayerischer Bierorden (Bavarian Order of Beer), given to individuals who have “rendered outstanding and innovative concepts” in the beer industry. Koch is the first non-German to receive the award in its 35-year history and used his platform at the keynote to state that “the Reinheitsgebot has served its purpose as a public-health measure and it’s almost becoming like artistic censorship.”

From most other U.S. craft brewers, that would sound like heresy. From Jim Koch, it was more of a suggestion about how to proceed with craft beer.

“That was kind of cool. Craft beer gives them some hope about a better future because their beer business has been declining for some time,” Jim Koch says. “They really are interested in what craft brewers have done in the United States to re-energize beer culture.”

Again, he’s not exaggerating. The average German drank roughly 37 gallons of beer in 1991. Last year, that consumption fell to about 28 gallons. While that’s still well more than the 19.8 gallons of beer the average American drank in 2013, it now lags behind the Czech Republic (39 gallons annually) and Austria (28.5 gallons).

Meanwhile, a few of its legacy beer brands — much like those of countries around the world — have been bought out by multinational brewers. Anheuser-Busch InBev or some earlier iteration of it has owned Brauerei Beck & Co. (Beck’s) and Hasseroder since 2002. It has owned Lowenbrau and Spaten since 2003. Furstenberg Brewery, meanwhile, has been in Heineken’s hands since 2004.

While that still leaves a whole lot of great independent breweries including Ayinger, Paulaner, Hacker-Pschorr and Erdinger, even some of those larger mainstays are starting to come around to craft styles. Giant German brewer Radeberger has branched out from its trademark pilsner to occasional wood-aged offerings. However, Germany is strewn with smaller brewers that still have a broader selection than many U.S. craft brewers. As a result, craft or microbreweries still make up less than 1% of all beer produced in Germany, compared with a nearly 8% share for craft beer in the U.S. Still, Germany’s declining beer consumption indicates that even some of that local-beer love may be lost.

“I’m not sure that they wanted to hear everything that I said,” Jim Koch said. “You’re still making the same beers you were making 100 years ago, and doing it superbly well, but it can get boring no matter how good it is.”

That’s some tough love, and the Germans have taken it much better than some of their global craft contemporaries. In Australia, brewers not only aren’t all that thrilled with U.S. craft beer, they’ve complained to the World Trade Organization about craft-beer subsidies in other countries and the effect of craft imports on their own beers. While even beers in the United Kingdom get help from a Small Breweries Relief stipulation that reduces taxes on micro brewers by as much as 50%, the Australian brewers singled out Chico, Calif.-based Sierra Nevada for getting craft status despite producing more than 900,000 barrels and opening a second facility in North Carolina.

“They’re curious,” Jim Koch says of German beer drinkers. “There are some green shoots coming up with craft beers — and they call them ‘craft beers’ in Germany. They’re labeled ‘craft,’ they pick up sort of the gritty and urban American graphics and typically the flagship is an American IPA.”


12 December, 2014