LIQUID ASSETS
By Don Cazentre
THE STATE OF NEW YORK BREWING
Putting craft brewers on the map

Time was, not so long ago, that many people pictured an American brewery as a large urban factory producing a generic mass-market product. Beer was offered up as a lubricant to good times and while many drinkers were loyal to their favorite brands, many also thought: “Beer is beer.”

Times have changed. Look across the United States and you’ll see a new and growing industry of craft brewed beer. About 60 small and mid-sized breweries exist across New York State, distributing worldclass product to enthusiastic and dedicated beer-drinking fans.

Where the mass-market brewers make huge volumes in one basic style (American premium lager) these smaller “craft” brewers produce
flavorful and varied pale ales and brown ales, stouts, porters, abbey ales, wheat beers, barley wines and doppelbocks.

“We have a relatively small customer base, but they are loyal,” says Marc Rubenstein, owner of Middle Ages Brewing in Syracuse. “We’re small enough to be able to respond to what the customers want. We can make some easy drinking beers for those who want that, and some more aggressively flavored beers for the ‘beer people.’”

These days what the brewers want, is the support of the “buy local” crowd, backing from New York State government to make their products more accessible to a larger audience and a greater understanding of the quality of their products when compared to mass-market beer. And they’re looking at the New York wine industry for examples of how to make it happen.

FOLLOWING THE WINE TRAIL
A few decades ago, New York was home to a number of largescale makers of not-especially-noteworthy wines. Today, it hosts
over 200 vineyards making wines that attract international attention and thousands of tourists to the different regions.

The wineries created this change by emphasizing their links to the land and farming, by celebrating their small size and by encouraging consumers to view their wines as essential to fine dining. But the most significant contribution to New York’s wine industry came in 1976 when New York State Legislature passed the Farm Winery Act. This act allowed farmers to have small wineries and tasting rooms on their farms and enabled them to sell directly to consumers, liquor stores and restaurants, instead of through a wholesaler or distributor. Three decades later, many wineries in the Finger Lakes claim over 80 percent of sales come from their tasting rooms.

Jim Tresize, director of the New York Wine & Grape Foundation, which promotes New York wines, has offered the brewers advice for this kind of growth and success based on his years of helping develop the state’s wine industry.

“The microbrewery industry is so much like the wine industry,” Tresize says. “They’re small entrepreneurs who are using New York agricultural products and competing against the giants of the world.”

“Even though we’re beer and they’re wine, we’re boutique-y in the same way,” says Dan Mitchell, owner of Ithaca Beer Company.

“We’re focused on pairing our beer with food and drawing attention to the quality in the bottle.”

In a large advantage over wine, beer can be sold in New York grocery stores and brewers have made significant inroads onto major retailers’ shelves. But beer can’t be sold at farmers’ markets where other artisanal products—even wine and hard cider—can be sampled and bought.

David Katleski, owner of Empire Brewing Company in Syracuse and the president of the New York State Brewers Association, whose mission is to improve the profile and business climate for the state’s breweries, believes that kind of image-raising, smallscale marketing is just what the state’s craft brewers need.'

“An alternative to costly marketing, advertising and wholesaler reliance is allowing small brewers in New York to participate, sample and sell their products at farmers’ markets,” he says.

Because of New York’s arcane laws regarding the farming industry, that would mean convincing state regulators to reclassify breweries as an agricultural industry instead of under the category of drugs and alcohol, where they are now.

Mitchell says the breweries may be able to achieve what the wineries did, only in reverse.

“The wineries,” he points out, “made the case that since they were already using New York agricultural products, they should be classified as farm businesses.”

“The breweries,” Mitchell continues, “should get farm business classification first, so they can then use that to leverage their ability to use more New York agricultural produce. What we’re saying is, ‘Get us access to this kind of market, so we can make our case. Then we’re in a better position to make use of New York hops or other products.’

Another way to raise the profile of the state’s craft breweries is to create a beer trail, similar to the wineries around Seneca, Cayuga, Keuka and Canandaigua. While awaiting official state designation for the trail, the New York State Brewers Association has printed up a brochure and created a web site for the New York Brewery Trail, which lists all the state craft brewers and includes a map of their locations.

But the brewers face a challenge that even government can’t do much about. The breweries are more scattered than the wineries, which tend to be geographically closer and can promote each other through common events unique to each trail. The brewers hope to overcome this through sanctioned statewide beer festivals, which bring together large numbers of brewers and craft beer enthusiasts in one place. The current festival lineup includes the Holiday Valley Brewfest in Ellicottville, the Flour City Brewing Festival in Rochester, the Empire State Brewing and Music Festival in Syracuse, the Ithaca Brewfest and the New York Brewing Festival in Manhattan.

FRESHNESS COUNTS
But in many ways, it’s beer’s image that needs improvement if the brewers want to shift American consumers from “Joe Six-Pack” to craft beer connoisseur.

In his book, The Brewmaster’s Table (HarperCollins, 2003), Garrett Oliver, the brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery and a world-renowned ambassador of craft beer, celebrates the notion that modern, full-flavored craft beer is a perfect complement to fine food. What’s more, he says, craft beer springs from the same mindset that produces slow food, with an emphasis on quality ingredients and freshness.

New York’s other craft brewers agree.

“For us, freshness is king,” says Tim Herzog of Buffalo’s Flying Bison Brewery. “It’s the one thing we always emphasize when we’re railing away on the idea that beer is food.”

That’s why most of the state’s small brewers are content to keep their operations on a manageable scale and only deliver it to markets to which they can guarantee fresh beer.

They already make use of the one of Upstate New York’s freshest resources; an abundance of clean water, the biggest single ingredient in beer. The quality of the water can significantly affect the flavor of any beer, which is why the state’s largest brewery, the Anheuser- Busch plant near Syracuse, is where it is with a giant pipeline delivering Lake Ontario water right to the brewery’s doorstep.

While many New York brewers may take the water for granted, that’s not true with other local ingredients like hops, the flower that adds spice and bitterness to beer. New York was once the nation’s leading hops grower (most American hops now come from the Pacific Northwest) and some New York brewers are trying to resurrect the state’s hop crop, reaching out to such groups as the Northeast Hop Alliance, an association of hops growers. And brewers from Empire to Brooklyn are using the state’s other agricultural produce such as pumpkins, apples and honey in their specialty fruit and flavored beers.

“That’s the philosophy for all small craft brewers,” says Rubenstein of Middle Ages. “Keep it local, and you’ll be able to deliver fresh quality beer to the customers who are searching for it.”

“What we all have in common,” says Herzog, “is an entrepreneurial spirit and a belief that the beer we make is something special and different, something to be savored, and that’s the way it should be.”
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Don Cazentre is the regional editor for The Post-Standard in Syracuse. He writes a monthly column on beer for the newspaper.

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