Producers of traditional barrel-aged, mixed-fermentation ales are struggling to adjust to strong industry headwinds. Both changing consumer preferences and competition from other breweries have made this past year a difficult one for their labor- and time-intensive beers. If breweries can release a customer-favorite IPA in mere weeks and charge handsomely for it, there’s less business incentive than ever to focus on beers that take months or years to produce.
For Dexter, Michigan-based Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales, 2019’s numbers paint a challenging picture. Compared to the same 12-week period ending Nov. 18, 2018, last year’s sales of the brewery’s portfolio of mostly barrel-aged and mixed-fermentation beers declined by nearly a third in grocery stores, convenience stores, and other chain stores tracked by IRI, a market research firm. Those numbers, Jolly Pumpkin co-founder Ron Jeffries says, match tallies at the brewery as the year drew to a close. Jolly Pumpkin’s bottled beer sales overall, he estimates, were down roughly 30% in 2019.
“Jolly Pumpkin was hit by a number of different factors faster than we can change as a brewery that has giant foeders full of beer,” Jeffries tells GBH. “2018 wasn’t super either; we just hit a lot of market factors. It’s been a super hard struggle.”
Jeffries notes that Jolly Pumpkin’s draft beer sales, which aren’t tracked by IRI, “held their own” in 2019, and that the brewery’s offshoot North Peak Brewing Company, which produces non-sour beers like Diabolical IPA and Siren Amber Ale, grew 7% this year. But the brewery had invested heavily in infrastructure and capacity around 2015, a point at which Jolly Pumpkin had enjoyed multiple years of double-digit, year-over-year growth. It took on more tanks, more oak barrels, more foeders, and is now paying those off as growth fizzles—all while the course it had charted for itself seems less sustainable.
Even Anheuser-Busch-backed barrel-aged sours are in flux. Beginning in early 2018, Goose Island shifted focus away from its longstanding line of fruited barrel-aged sours—Halia, Juliet, Lolita, Gillian—and toward its foudre series. A spokesperson for the brewery says Halia, Juliet, Lolita, and Gillian are now considered "archived" beers, Goose Island’s portfolio has evolved "with the tastes and preferences of our fans."
The Lost Abbey, a brewery that helped popularize this type of beer in the U.S., isn’t immune to these downturns, either.
In early December, Lost Abbey co-founder Tomme Arthur announced plans for a new line of canned sour beers called Tiny Bubbles. The series is designed to appeal to new customers who aren’t buying beers from the existing Lost Abbey brand. That portfolio comprises some of the most respected barrel-aged, mixed-fermentation beers in the industry, and has won 14 Great American Beer Festival medals since 2007.
Speaking on a Brewbound panel in December, Arthur said new customers “don’t seem to have that appetite for self-education,” and that many existing education efforts from craft breweries have been “preaching to the choir.” While there is a desire among producers of mixed-fermentation beers to grow the overall sour beer category, there is hardly a consensus on how best to do so. Arthur assumes existing craft beer drinkers want to educate themselves, but more brewers—especially those making specialty, barrel-aged Wild Ales—are finding it’s harder and harder to say what customers want at all.
Like Lost Abbey, other barrel-aged sour and wild beer brewers are finding themselves forced to adapt. A few years ago, barrel-aged Saisons and mixed-fermentation beers made up 25-30% of volume for Portland, Oregon’s Upright Brewing, including a “significant part” of the company’s revenues, says owner and brewer Alex Ganum. More than that, though, these beers were at the core of the brewery’s identity. That’s changed dramatically in the past year or two as Ganum refocuses efforts to brew more “clean” (non-wild) styles of beer.
“It was a really significant part of our business and we’re basically losing that now just because the demand for the packaged beers just isn’t what it used to be, even for a tiny brewery like ours,” Ganum tells GBH. “We find ourselves selling less and producing less of the bottled beers to match that.”
DESTIHL Brewery, a central Illinois company that earned acclaim for its barrel-aged, mixed-fermentation Saint Dekkera series after a silver medal at the Great American Beer Festival in 2016, has largely “pivoted” away from those beers to focus more on its kettle-soured, not-actually-wild WiLD Sour series, according to director of sales and marketing Neil Reinhardt. The kettle-sour variety pack called WiLD Pack, which debuted at the end of 2017, is now one of the brewery’s top five SKUs, while Reinhardt admits “we just haven’t done a ton of [Saint Dekkera] in the last two years.”
Individual beers within the WiLD Sour series, generally sold as canned four-packs, have been a mixed bag for DESTIHL, with some releases gaining sales last year while others dipped. It’s Cranberry Criek Sour Ale was the only IRI-tracked brand to show growth in 2019, with its Sour Rosé Ale debuting with 126 BBLs sold last year. DESTIHL’s variety WiLD Pack more than doubled its volume sales 2018-2019, part of which is attributable to the brewery’s strategy of “aggressive expansion” into 19 new states after a new production facility came online in 2017.
DESTIHL’s trajectory isn’t unique. A confluence of factors has threatened traditional mixed-fermentation or sour beers, even as the overall sour beer category is enjoying more recognition than ever. While kettle sours (a broad category comprising beers that are produced quickly using Lactobacillus bacteria, and which generally feature simpler sour flavors) are part of that, they’re not the only explanation.
“We were hit with the kettle-sour craze, the fruit-and-lactose craze, the canning craze, and the limited-release-beers-from-small-taprooms craze,” Jeffries says. “So that combined with the 750ml bottle, our workhouse package since we opened, in the retail world has fallen off a cliff. Nobody is buying them.”
Noting that Jolly Pumpkin currently has about 2,500 barrels of beer aging in oak, Jeffries says it’s tough for a brewery like his to change direction and respond to trends on a dime. While traditional mixed-fermentation beers might take months or years to achieve the brewer’s desired flavor profiles, kettle souring can drop the pH on unfermented wort in mere hours or days. Jeffries is forced to contend with the relative speed at which other breweries can turn out kettle sours with new fruit flavors and new packaging—and, if those breweries are small enough, release them directly from their taprooms. A brewery releasing new fruited sours from its taproom every week makes Jolly Pumpkin’s pace appear glacial.
Even as Jeffries and his brewery saw the rise of cans on the horizon, he had already invested in a canning line for North Peak’s beers in 2018 that the brewery continues to pay off. He ordered a canning line for Jolly Pumpkin’s sour beers that he hoped would arrive before the end of 2019, but there was a waiting list to receive it. Further logistical and financing delays pushed back its delivery, and the canning line finally arrived two months after its original delivery date. Then, Jolly Pumpkin brewers will begin the task of figuring out how to package can-conditioned beers; Jeffries says he intends to package the beers entirely uncarbonated, then let residual yeast carbonate them in package. Even he isn’t sure how exactly it will work.
“No one is packaging completely flat beer and letting it condition,” Jeffries says. “Without the carbonation, the cans don’t have the rigidity—what if they’ll stack and just crush [themselves]? Do we need to have a million cans laid out on the floor for a week until they carbonate? Does this make us a little nervous? Yes.”
Still, he says that the switch to cans will hopefully help boost packaged beer sales in 2020, while still maintaining the quality and identity of Jolly Pumpkin’s beers. Jeffries notes that he’s been brewing fruited sour beers for 15 years, but perhaps because of that familiarity (and packaging style), his beers don’t enjoy the same attention that 16oz cans of kettle sours from hyped new breweries do.
“We’ve had a lot of wholesalers over the last year keep bringing up these lactose/fruit kettle sours,” he says, noting Ann Arbor, Michigan’s HOMES Brewery, which produces “fruit bomb” beers with blackberries, blueberries, and more. “Our local distributor kept bringing this up to us, like, ‘You guys could do this!’ I said, ‘You have blackberry raspberry Roja chain-placed in Meijer [supermarkets]. You have that.’ It just comes back to the package. Oh, it’s not in a can, so people aren’t talking about it.”
Jolly Pumpkin, itself an American innovator in the world of fruited sour beers, now finds itself threatened by a form of the beers it helped introduce 15 years ago. The brewery is adapting on the fly, moving into a potentially risky package it would have never considered years ago, with serious financial consequences looming if it can’t get this right.
It could be a business-defining moment for the brewery as the new year opens—and one Jeffries is not alone in considering.
Words by Kate Bernot