2019 was a challenging year for many producers of traditional barrel-aged, mixed-fermentation beers. Changing consumer preferences and the proliferation of quick-to-produce kettle sours cast a shadow over those labor- and time-intensive beers, most of which are packaged in bottles.
Wild Ale-focused breweries such as Dexter, Michigan’s Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales and Portland, Oregon’s Upright Brewing saw sales declines for their mixed-fermentation beers last year. Jolly Pumpkin’s overall IRI-tracked sales were down 20% in 2019. On the flip side, the Denver, Colorado-based Crooked Stave Artisan Beer Project, which brews most of its beers with Brettanomyces yeasts and ages them in oak, saw its best growth in its home state via a modern format: the 12oz can. Sales for its Sour Rosé Ale, (8%), St. Bretta Citrus Saison (15.4%), and Colorado WildSage Brett Saison (16%) were all up as part of the brewery's shift into six-packs, which began in 2017.
But kettle sours’ encroachment on traditional barrel-aged sours is not only a result of their packaging or the speed at which they can be brewed. Some brewers think they’re an existential threat to the category, creating consumer confusion about how sour beers are produced. “Is theirs like the IKEA sour beer and ours is the local cabinet maker?” Jolly Pumpkin co-founder Ron Jeffries asks rhetorically.
In the same breath, though, brewers credit kettle sours for introducing sour beer to more drinkers.
Alex Ganum, owner and brewer at Upright, agrees, but he’s still frustrated that drinkers conflate or confuse the barrel-aged Wild Ales he produces with quickly made kettle sours. He cites the example of his brewery’s Gose, a fairly traditional, unfruited, and only moderately acidic beer Upright had been brewing for a few years. Quickly, the rise of extremely tart, highly fruited kettle-soured Goses has changed consumers’ expectations of the beer style.
“I’m tired of having to explain why our Gose tastes like a real Gose because nobody knows what the fuck a real Gose is anymore. It’s frustrating as a brewer,” Ganum says. “We were really put off by it and were like, ‘Fuck it, we’re going to stop making our Gose until this passes.’”
“I think that has a pretty negative impact on the marketplace because you don’t want breweries doing things pretty traditionally to be in that same boat as that,” Ganum adds. “If there was a way to differentiate those beers from something like what we’re doing, that would be great.”
Of course, there are ways to distinguish barrel-aged, mixed fermentation beers, though they require a higher level of consumer engagement. How many drinkers are interested in reading a paragraph about wild yeast and barrels on the back of a label? There seems to be uncertainty among brewers of these beers as to how much evangelization should be part of their processes. On one hand, the complex, often multi-year process is what makes their beers what they are. On the other hand, few drinkers want to be subjected to a lecture—or worse, a sermon—when they’re choosing beers.
Even when it comes to the nomenclature of mixed-fermentation versus sour versus Wild Ales, “there’s no easy fix,” Walt Dickinson, co-founder of Asheville, North Carolina’s Wicked Weed Brewing, told GBH in 2018. “The consumer base is growing faster than the education of the category, and because this isn’t wine and there isn’t specific nomenclature or appellation, you have to kind of call a spade a spade.”
Jeffries says his sales and marketing team often wants the brewery to play up its barrel-aged, blending bona fides—to wax poetic about the foeders, to describe the laborious tasting and blending processes. Jeffries is hesitant, though. He feels that the distinction between his beers and kettle sours might motivate some retailers to pick up his releases, but won’t necessarily drive sales.
“People will drink what they find delicious and what fits in their weekly beer budget,” he says. “[The barrel-aging and blending process] might really help us maybe get those placements on the shelves, but what’s going to move the beer is the beer in the can, how it tastes and consumer price points.”
That’s a consideration the central Illinois brewery DESTIHL Brewery has taken note of. The brewery’s WiLD Sour series is widely available across its 36-state distribution footprint, but only small quantities of its barrel-aged sour series, Saint Dekkera, are meted out to select accounts.
“We’re trying to meet volume demands and that type of [barrel-aged] beer just takes up a lot of the brewers’ time. It’s sort of a time-versus-reward ratio,” DESTIHL’s director of sales and marketing Neil Reinhardt tells GBH. “It’s something we work with our wholesalers on to take them to those special accounts or accounts that will appreciate them and have the right clientele.”
He credits the success of the WiLD Sour series with the factors Jeffries mentioned: price, package, and flavors. (Price, package, and purees, if you like the alliteration.) The brewery’s distribution expansion has also been a boon to this series, as has its flexibility in adding or subtracting fruit flavors to keep customers interested.
“We don’t want to put up too many roadblocks to get people to try sour beer, which I think is important. I think in the recent past, a lot of the sours in the market were very esoteric, very expensive, a lot of imported stuff. We want to put it in a package format at a price point that they’re used to grabbing off the shelf,” Reinhardt says.
Breweries like Upright and Jolly Pumpkin say scrapping their oak and diving into kettle sours isn’t an option—not just for logistical reasons, but also on principle. It’s not what they do, nor is there any guarantee that kettle sours will remain something fickle consumers want years down the line. For Upright, part of the solution has been to shift attention toward clean beer styles with interesting fermentation profiles, including a London-style Porter and a 3.9% ABV Milk Stout, both brewed with Yorkshire ale yeast. Ganum says working with that yeast as well as kveik yeasts has been reinvigorating, and a way to give consumers something different while challenging his brewing team to work with new materials. He says Upright is also mulling opening another location as a way to increase sales.
“A lot of breweries out here that you think would be killing it are sort of hitting that wall of profitability or are losing profitability just like we are,” says Ganum. “A lot of people are looking to open up second or third locations, typically satellite pubs. That’s something I’m definitely stewing on right now.”
That scenario has played out at Other Half Brewing Company, who hired famed sour and Wild Ale producer Eric Salazar, formerly of New Belgium Brewing, to run a brand-new barrel program in Upstate New York at the start of 2019, only to announce the business didn't have the "separate space, barrels and aging vessels," along with the "resources needed for his job." The two parted ways after just nine months. That change came as Other Half prepared to open its third and fourth satellite taprooms in Washington, D.C. and Brooklyn (a second location in the borough) as it continues to pump out New England-style IPAs.
For Jolly Pumpkin, the solution is to put the beers it already makes in new packages; to tinker with pricing; and to increase its draft sales across its two taprooms in Dexter, Michigan and Chicago. Jeffries says he wants the brewery to be nimble, to creatively react to market pressures, but to never lose the core of what it does best: brew barrel-aged sour beers.
“I’m not really spreading a gospel myself. I’m saying, ‘This is what we do. This is what I’ve created. This is what my team does. This is our art.’ And it’s not for everyone; I hope it’s for enough people that we can stay in business. And so far it has been.”
Words by Kate Bernot