by Bev Robertson, President, The Bushwakker Brewpub
The craft beer industry sometimes sounds a bit like Rodney Dangerfield. We complain that the mainstream media does not carry as much coverage of craft beer as is warranted by the size of the craft beer market. We point to the fact that 60%-65% of the North American population drinks beverage alcohol, depending on whose survey you read. Twenty-five percent more people claim beer as their drink of choice than those who claim wine as their drink of choice, but wine gets much more coverage in most newspapers and television programs than beer. At this point we must point out that Savour Life is a notable exception and should be congratulated for being far ahead of the curve.
There is some logic to this lack of coverage for beer. An advertising executive in a company that was selling advertising to one of Canada’s major industrial brewers was quoted in a business article a few years ago, to paraphrase, “There’s not much you can say to differentiate your client’s product from the competition because all beer is pretty much the same, so we go for the babes and the lifestyle images.”
Of course, by beer he meant industrial beer, which makes up 93% of beer sales, but 1% of beer styles. Whether he was oblivious to the existence of the other 99% of beer styles or just wasn’t interested in them, we’ll never know. From my perspective, as a beer and wine consumer, the variety of beer styles and their flavours, that are available at least somewhere in the world, far outnumber the variety of wine types and flavours.
The quantity of coverage of craft beer by the mass media seems to show a small increase, but the quality remains abysmal. This was brought to mind most recently by a segment of the Early Show on CBS TV. It was based on the observation that Portland Oregon is North America’s beer capital, with 35 craft breweries, three beer festivals that attract a total of 100,000 people, and over 1.15 million hectoliters of craft beer consumed in the state of Oregon.
The CBC News show asked Food and Wine Executive Editor Ray Isles to present and describe five beers from Portland. It immediately became evident to anyone who knows anyone about beer, which I’m certain includes all readers of this missive, that Mr. Isles knew diddly squat about beer. He assumed that lagers were light in colour and low in alcoholic strength, that ales were dark in colour and high in alcoholic strength, as a result of which he characterized a Maibock as an ale. His choices of food for pairing with beer seemed to assume that his beer audience consisted only of Joe Six-Pack. He demonstrated a complete lack of awareness of the new North American beer styles that have emerged on the west coast of Canada and the U. S., based on new hop varieties that impart a citric character to beer.
The community of beer geeks like myself has been in a flap ever since.
Last year the Consumer Reports organization did a beer tasting and reported the results in their magazine. They chose five representatives of the industrial beer style, otherwise known as American Light Lager. Given that that is the beer-style of choice by 93% of beer consumers, their choice can be understood, even though the statement by the aforementioned advertising executive applies and most beer judges do their utmost to avoid being assigned to judge this category for fear of oppressive boredom. However, the people chosen to judge the five beers by Consumer Reports knew nothing about beer. They didn’t even know that when judging beer, unlike when judging wine, one must swallow some of the beer to experience the full flavour profile of the beer. I now look at all pronouncements on consumer products by Consumer Reports with a considerably jaundiced eye.
So then, the craft beer movement is starting to get the attention of mainstream media, but media representatives either don’t yet know how to find a knowledgeable person to talk about beer or even how to find an organization that could point them in the right direction, or they just don’t care if they offend a fraction of the reading/viewing/listening public by feeding them drivel.
Should we expect that members of the media would be less knowledgeable about craft beer than the general public? Craft beer consumers represent a wide demographic but it is tilted toward people who travel widely and probably have a greater interaction with a variety of cultures. I suspect that the Bushwakker Brewpub attracts a wider socio-economic demographic and wider range of age groups than any other restaurant in Regina, and that demographic includes several representatives of the media. So then, does the poor quality of beer coverage reflect a lack of interest in accuracy, a lack of interaction with the wider world by those who work for newspapers and TV?