So, I haven’t been in a bar or brewery in ten days. I got a nasty cold early last week and decided to lock myself indoors and park myself on a couch with bottles of NyQuil and orange juice. Honestly, it’s a small miracle last week’s newsletter got out on time. I can’t offer you a Beer of the Week in this newsletter since I haven’t really had a beer in a week. But the downtime did help me start to plan my fall brewery travels. In the before times, every fall, I planned a beer trip to a small to mid-sized Upper Midwestern city. There’s something about the crispness of fall in that region, combined with the warmth of the people there, that makes the visits there in September and October so enjoyable. In 2019, I was in Des Moines, Iowa. In 2018, I went to Grand Rapids, Michigan. And 2017 took me to Fargo, North Dakota. So I’m on the hunt for my 2021 destination. Perhaps the Quad Cities? Duluth, Minnesota? I’m open to your suggestions.
A look back at beer in the Cuomo era
Governor Kathy Hochul has taken office, and the era of Andrew Cuomo ruling New York is over. He leaves as a disgraced politician, a bully, a womanizer, an egomaniac, and… a champion of New York’s beer scene. For all of Cuomo’s awful character flaws, he did see over the largest expansion of the beer industry New York has seen since the 19th century influx of German immigrants. While a lot of that was larger market forces at work, his administration did work hard to support the industry through its growth spurt, starting in 2012 when he held the first of several Craft Beverage Summits, which led to immediate changes in regulations that made it easier for breweries to operate, down to changes that allowed brewers to pour their own beer at beer festivals for the first time. He also tasked the State Liquor Authority with improving turnaround times for licensing and creating a less adversarial relationship between the agency and its licensees.
That same year, the state legislature passed the Farm Brewery Act, which gave special privileges to breweries that sourced a portion of their raw materials from New York State. That led to a boom in beer agriculture, as hop farms, barley growers, and malt houses became necessary to support the demand. The portion that’s required to be sourced from New York is currently at 60%, and rises to 90% starting in 2023. The state provided research grants and funding to help boost beer agriculture under Cuomo, most recently with Cornell AgriTech announcing $300,000 in state funding will help them launch a hop breeding program — something long sought-after by New York’s brewers to help create new varietals unique and ideal for the state’s climate.
The disgraced former governor also had a role in celebrating the best of the state’s beer with in the New York State Beer Competition and the Governor’s Cup, which launched in 2017. The annual event, run by the New York State Brewers Association in concert with Taste NY and the New York State Fair, was a professionally-judged, categorized competition of beers from across the state, with the intention of pouring the winners at the State Fair in Syracuse each year to further promote the industry. Indeed, this year’s Taste NY Pavilion will host several of the state’s breweries, both sampling and serving their beverages for fair-goers.
Of course, much of that goodwill went out the window in Cuomo’s final year in office, when after granting sweeping new privileges to breweries in the initial onset of the Covid-19 Pandemic, the ex-governor essentially created a game of whack-a-mole with dizzying sets of Executive Orders that seemed to do nothing to protect public health, but did do plenty to frustrate brewery owners, who had to scramble to find food to serve, adjust their hours and capacity based on state rules that seemed constantly in flux, overhaul on-site service protocols, and change delivery rules with barely 24 hours’ notice.
While Cuomo’s ego will likely lead him to take credit for a boom in beer that brought the state from a few dozen breweries to over four hundred during his tenure, it’s the people who opened those breweries who should get the credit for helping grow an industry that expanded at nearly the same rate nationally as it did in New York. And with an estimated $4.8 billion impact on the state’s economy, new Governor Kathy Hochul would be wise to continue to support the beer industry — and her track record of including brewery visits on her trips around the state are a pretty good indication that she will.
Brewery Tracker
Total brewery count: 2,326
New breweries in 2021: 252
Breweries visited in California: 239
Brewery Visit of the Week
Brewery #578, 21st Amendment Brewery, San Leandro, California (Visited 9-Jun-2016)
It’s the 21st anniversary of this brewery’s founding this week, so I thought I’d recall my visit to 21st Amendment’s production facility back in 2016. When you’re a fan of a brewery for a while, you feel a sense of pride when you see them all grown up. That’s how I felt when I walked into 21st Amendment’s new taproom in San Leandro, California for the first time. Opened in 2015, the sprawling facility is just a few miles from the original brewpub in San Francisco that introduced me to the brewery for the first time. On my first visit to their brewpub, they were known almost exclusively to beer geeks in the Bay Area, but 21A would soon embark on an expansion beyond the walls of the pub in SoMa. A couple years after my first visit, I started to see their cans – brewed under contract at Cold Spring in Minnesota – at home in New York. They continued to grow over the next seven years, cracking the list of the 50 largest craft breweries in the US in 2013, and becoming the 34th largest by 2021. The new facility unleashed big opportunities for the brewery – the same way its namesake amendment unleashed beer on a dry nation.
It’s practically a tired old trope these days, but I was talking about Hell or High Watermelon to every beer geek that I knew for months after my first trip to 21st Amendment’s brewpub in the mid-2000s. “Watermelon?! In BEER,” friends would react, with either a look of interest or complete disdain. Today, the seasonal fruited beer that 21A is best known for elicits the same reactions, but it barely scratches the surface of their offerings. Brew Free or Die IPA is a long-time best-seller, and it has recently morphed into a base beer for several different IPA variations, including a Tropical and Blood Orange version. The year they expanded, 21A took a gamble on El Sully, a Mexican-style Lager that remains in their lineup today. A Hazy IPA simply called Tasty has become a core beer as well, and 21A is dabbling in hard seltzer now, too. The continued evolution of their beer lineup since then shows they’re not going away anytime soon, nor are they resting on their laurels after two decades of success.
I sampled a little of everything when I visited the massive building in San Leandro for the first time, and as I stood around, sipped, and watched the hustle and bustle of a big industrial brewery around me, I couldn’t help but smile. For the first time, I was drinking 21st Amendment beer at the source, and it wasn’t in a cramped restaurant before a Giants game at then-Pac Bell Park. Instead, I had room to walk around, see the brewery, play bocce, and sip in the sunshine outside. I’ve watched beer geeks get bothered when one of their favorite breweries gets big, but this was a sign of success for Nico Freccia and Shaun O’Sullivan, who started that little brewpub in 2000 across the bay. Sometimes, bigger is better.
Statistical Nerdity of the Week
I’m striving to grow my brewery count all the time, and sometimes I’m asked if I’m going to run out of breweries to visit. Well, that’s not looking likely anytime soon. This summer, I visited my 2000th brewery in the United States. With closures discounted, my current count stands at 1,863 active breweries that I’ve visited here. Based on the 2020 year-end statistics from the Brewers Association, I’ve now visited just over 1 in every 5 breweries in the U.S. That leaves a whopping 7,021 breweries that I haven’t visited. Sure, some of these will close, but even in 2020, brewery openings outpaced closings by a 2-to-1 margin. I’ve got a lot of work left to do.
Long Read of the Week
David Jesudason dives deep into the Colonial history of IPA and its relation to his own racial identity in this piece on Good Beer Hunting this week. The origins of the beer style are likely not what you think they are — and there is a deeper, troubled meaning around the term.
One More Thing
A reminder to check the Brew York Calendar for beer events coming up in and around NYC… there’s more on there now than there has been in a good long while. Have fun, and don’t forget your proof of vaccine!
Cheers,
Chris
Great story as always. I have a short return
Savannah trip planned for early October. Was thinking about going back to Portland Maine after that. What sounds safe to you instead of Portland?