Tags
additives in beer, Anheuser-Busch InBev, artisanal beer, beer market, Constellation Brands, craft beers, Food Babe, four dominating global breweries, Heineken, home brewing, micro breweries, pasteurisation, SABMiller
It’s so easy to see all the areas where our food supply has been going wrong. So how about, for a change, a story which we feel is hugely encouraging?!?
Beer.
Since the lack of barcode-free beer has been one of our biggest ongoing frustrations, we dived quite deeply into the homebrewing scene, and what we found – especially in the U.S. – is extremely promising. In a market which four big industrial manufacturers have almost complete stitched up amongst themselves with bland, hardly distinguishable, pasteurised, long shelf-life products, a massive groundswell of micro-, nano- and home-breweries is creating a rich, varied, mainly local, often organic and mostly exciting offerings, which are taken up enthusiastically by increasingly discerning drinkers. Go to any bar in a larger U.S. city, and you’ll invariably find long lists of local and international brews from small outfits. The otherwise ubiquitous Miller, Bud Light, Stella Artois and Coors may or may not be mentioned at the bottom of the menu. There are no less than three different U.S. monthly printed magazines catering to the homebrewing trend, and in this month’s issue the making of seasonal pumpkin fermentations was the most hotly debated topic.
As shown in a graphic in this post, Anheuser-Busch InBev, SAB-Miller, Heineken and Constellation Brands control 86% of the beer market. While those big four sell more than 60 different brand names, their products are necessarily almost indistinguishable: because proper beer does not travel well, and one has to do horrible things to it in order to achieve a long shelf life and the consistent taste the industrial marketing officials want. A rapidly growing number of Americans are fed up with this and happily guzzle the much more varied and interesting brews from a steadily growing number of microbreweries. From over 2,000 local breweries in pre-prohibition days, the U.S. went through endless rounds of consolidation to fewer than 90 breweries in the whole country in the 90’s. Now, the number of commercial breweries is rapidly approaching 3,000. And that does not include countless homebrewers who turn their kitchen tops, garden sheds and garages into hotbeds of fermentation experiments. There is still a long way to go, of course. The diagram below shows just how small all craft beers -even grouped together- still are in comparison to the biggest of the brewing giants, AB InBev. And yet, the vibrancy and the enthusiastic expansion of the artisanal beer market in the U.S. and elsewhere makes us hopeful that other food and drink categories might, one day, see a similar popular revolt against bland, inferior, industrial, adulterated mass products and in favour of small, local producers who cater to a great variety of tastes and preferences.
We would love to get into homebrewing, but we haven’t taken the plunge yet. The equipment we fancy is quite pricey and, while we like the occasional beer, just amongst ourselves we would struggle to consume the output of 4-6 brew days per year of 19 litres each. On top of it, we need to make gluten-free beer, which complicates matters considerably. Having said that, we enthuse about the health benefits of properly fermented brews and, if we managed to produce quaffable barcode-free stuff, it could be a great currency for barter in a wine-dominated region. And we already thought of some pretty crazy names and equally funky flavour combinations. So stay tuned.
Thus is the power of the internet. Ms. Vani Hari, a popular food blogger, single-handedly raised such a stink about the shocking ingredients in barcoded beer and the surrounding secrecy, that the public uprising she caused just three months ago forced one big industrial brewer after another to promise to disclose what goes into their bottles. If you like to hear about the realities of barcoded beer (e.g. artificial caramel colouring, HFCS and fish bladders), there is no better summary than hers. It turns out that the regulator of the U.S. beer industry (the U.S. Treasury Department!!! – makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?!?) is as conflicted, incompetent and/or corrupt as other so-called food “regulators” around the world. So leave the barcoded industrial stuff on the supermarket shelves and look out for a small, local brewer, who will happily tell you what s/he put into the latest batch. And if the bottle does not carry a barcode, please drop us a line!