But beer drinkers may not know that with each drink they could be making the world a better place.
According to Chris O`Brien, author of Fermenting Revolution: How to Drink Beer and Save the World, craft brewersoften called microbrewersprovide good examples of positive business practices.
"Small breweries are perfect examples of community-based, socially and environmentally concerned small businesses," O`Brien said. "And they are doing it without any road map, without any top-down legislative pressure or external customer demands."
O`Brien said that the success of these brewers is due not only to their beer, but also to the principles of the brewmasters, most of whom started while brewing beer at home and sharing and comparing the results of their efforts with friends. While most of these brewers would say that they`re simply focused on creating a great beer, many of them are also implementing sustainable business practices that have a ripple effect on their communities.
"Small breweries are being led by people who sincerely hold the values of the social and environmental movements, without using that language," O`Brien said. "They`re simply making better products and they`re committed to the principles of small-scale, environmentally superior production practices, just through good business citizenship."
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Many craft brewers, O`Brien said, are taking back control, imprinting their personality in their beers and are firmly rooted in their communities, even if that means that they won`t grow beyond a small footprint.
"I hold the craft-brewing movement up as an example of a grassroots-led sustainability phenomenon," O`Brien explained. "It`s saving the world because it`s taking back all of the things we lost through corporate industrialization, corporate-led globalization."
But O`Brien said that even the huge industrial brewers such as SABMiller, which owns Miller Brewing Co., are good business citizens in many ways.
Because of Miller`s roots in Milwaukee, it contributes to local groups and is a major presence around town.
In addition to Miller, Milwaukee is also home to a number of craft brewers and brew-pubssuch as Lakefront Brewery Inc., Sprecher Brewing Co., Water Street Brewery and Stonefly Brewing Co. (formerly Onopa Brewing Co.)all of which provide examples that other businesses can learn from. Here are a few of the craft-brewing movement`s best practices.
Doing It Their Own Way
In many ways, the craft-brewing movement rose out of the home-brewing movement, which went legit in 1979, when Jimmy Carter lifted the Prohibition-era ban on home-brewing. "Not that the ban ever stopped anyone, but it`s nice to know that you`re doing something legal," said Russ Klisch, co-founder of Lakefront Brewery, who began brewing at home in 1982, with his brother Jim. The brothers are still brewing beer together more than two decades later.
But Stonefly`s brewmaster, Jacob Sutrick, lucked into his job. He started working the door at Riverwest`s Onopa, then bartended, and eventually learned how to brew beer on the job.
"The idea is to make really good beer that isn`t like anyone else`s beer," Sutrick said.
This do-it-yourself-attitude pervades the craft-brewing movement, in which individual brewmasters share their personal likes and dislikes, successes and mistakes, with their customers. Some of these experiments develop into new beer flavors, while others become lessons in what not to do. Regardless, the brewmaster`s ingenuity and creativity is central to the beer experience.
"One of the good things about [the early years of craft brewing] is that there was no guiding philosophy," Klisch said. "You could do anything you wanted to do and if you were small enough you could do it. There are other people who would have followed a marketing plan."
Jeff Hamilton, vice president and general manager of Sprecher Brewing Co., said that each small brewer is unique. "If there is a common thread among us, it`s the desire to create something different with flavors that people will remember," he said.
O`Brien said this hands-on individuality has connected with beer drinkers, who are often left less than inspired by corporate beers.
"Craft beer isn`t forced on anyone," O`Brien said. "It`s a response to people who want something better."
As Stonefly`s Sutrick put it, "Beers from bigger breweries kind of taste the same."
One result of a local brewer`s ingenuity is Lakefront`s New Grist, a wheat- and barley-free beer that doesn`t contain gluten, which can`t be tolerated by those with celiac disease. Klisch said he developed this one-of-a-kind beer because he and his friends knew so many celiacs who weren`t able to drink traditional beer, which is defined as a drink containing 25% barley.
But as luck would have it, Klisch was able to pursue the idea at a microbrewers` convention, where the government had a booth. He talked to the feds, all of whom knew someone with celiac disease. They explained what he needed to do to get his new kind of beer approved by the government. Now, New Grist beermade with sorghum, rice, hops and yeastis a success.
"It`s all I can make right now," he said.
But besides its popularity, Klisch is proud of offering something of value to his customers.
"It`s probably going to be the biggest contribution I`ll ever make to brewing in the U.S.," Klisch said. "I got a whole new category of beer approved by the government."
Local and Sustainable, Not Huge and Impersonal
Klisch was onto something when he noted that "if you were small enough you could do it." Unlike corporate giants, microbrewers are small enough to make the community a part of their business model.
O`Brien said that craft brewers` roots in their communities allow them to know what, exactly, their customers want, as well as provide them with community links and responsibilities. Because most small brewers only serve their local customersalthough a few are distributed regionally and sometimes nationallythey embody their community and must find ways to please it. If a brewer serves a bad beer, word gets around; if it pollutes, treats customers or employees poorly or snubs local service organizations looking for a helping hand, that`s even worse.
O`Brien said that microbreweries are "closer to the community, and they are held accountable by that local base of customers. There is social responsibility in the issue of scale, so it`s good for community control, from democracy`s standpoint."
Microbrewers are more likely to follow zero- or low-waste sustainable business practices, finding efficiencies where they can and giving back to the community when they are asked. For example, most Milwaukee microbreweries support local social-service organizations, donate beer or soda to events and provide facilities for fund-raisers. The result of these efforts is a richer experience for everyone.
"The microbreweries follow a very different model than a giant corporate beer factory that is very centralized and sends its packages across the country," he said.
He added that despite microbrewers` focus on the local, the beer industry as a whole has embraced globalization and corporate consolidation.
"I think the beer industry provides a really good case study of two divergent forces at play in the world todaycorporate-led globalization and community-led localization," O`Brien said. "The beer industry at the top end is experiencing massive consolidation at levels that are staggering. Many of the breweries that are already the largest in the world are merging with each other to create breweries that are exponentially bigger."
In contrast to microbrewers, these massive corporations are only able to profit by following this old corporate model, even if the consumer is still found wanting.
"The macro breweries haven`t been growing," O`Brien said. "Their sales have been even. They maxed out their market. They`re following the principle of untethered growth, but that kind of expansion doesn`t really add any value to customers, although it`s allowing companies to get bigger."
Looking Out for Planet Earth
Although O`Brien argues that the corporate brewery economic model is lacking, he does have positive things to say about the industry`s environmental record. Even Coors Brewing Co.a perennial target of progressives for the company`s politics and treatment of unions, gays and racial minoritiesgets O`Brien`s approval for its environmental record.
As he explained it, Coors employees were sick of seeing beer cans littering the highways in Colorado. Instead of blaming its customers, Coors developed the first recyclable aluminum can and offered their customers a penny for returning it.
"Coors began the modern curbside recycling program that we now have in almost every community across the country," O`Brien said. "There are also good financial reasons to do it, since buying new aluminum is more expensive than collecting and recycling cans."
As a result of Coors` success, other brewers and industries followed suit. Today, Anheuser-Busch is the largest recycler of aluminum cans in the world. "Every can they produce is offset by a can that they`ve collected and recycled," O`Brien said.
But microbrewers are also environmentally conscious. For example, Klisch at Lakefront Brewery said that their building is situated on a former brownfield, which the company brought back to life. The brewery has a white roof, which reflects sunlight into the atmosphere, and the company also utilizes the steam from its brewing process for energy. While he said that adding a windmill to the place is too big a project for them right now, the company does contribute to the state`s wind energy fund. What`s more, Lakefront donates its spent grains to urban farm Growing Power on Milwaukee`s North Side, which just received a grant to convert food waste into methane gas.
Klisch said that the brewery itself helped revitalize the Riverwest neighborhood, attracting more businesses and residents to the area.
"It`s kind of the Milwaukee tradition to take something old and use it in a new way," Klisch said.
Hamilton said that Sprecher`s focus is on his beer`s most important ingredientwater. "We want to be good environmental citizens," he said. "We`re a consumer of Lake Michigan water, and we support anything that would protect that resource."
Sutrick said Stonefly customers can reduce the number of bottles and cans they use by bringing in a growlera half-gallon glass jugand filling it up at the brew-pub and taking it home.
Going Organic
Part of looking after the planet involves going organic. Here, too, craft brewers are on the leading edge of this movement. And it`s necessary, since one of the main ingredients in beerbarleyis one of the most intensely sprayed crops in this country.
"The organic food movement has been around for a few decades, but it only really took off on a large scale in the last 10 years, when the U.S.D.A. codified the national standards for certifying products as organic," O`Brien said. "At that same time, there were breweries right out of the gate, before the national standards, that produced organic beers."
Klisch said that Lakefront created the first beer to be certified organic. He said he is not only doing it for the potential health benefits of consuming organic ingredients, he likes the simplicity of the growing methods. "That made sense to me," he said. "And I thought that it was something that I wanted to support."
Going organic wasn`t easy, though. Certification is difficult, and the company must track its ingredients and report back to the government. The upside, though, is knowing exactly where and how each organic beer was produced.
"You could literally trace an organic beer back to the field and the farmer that grew the ingredients," Klisch said.
He noted, however, that the organic beers may have been too unusual for his customers, who weren`t quite sure what to make of it.
"There was a lot of apprehension, and some people were even hesitant to taste it, because they weren`t educated about organic," Klisch said. "But more and more people are switching to it because they want to support the organic movement."
As O`Brien said of microbrewers` efforts to make the world a better place, whether it`s going organic, experimenting with new flavors and formulas or recycling cans, "It all comes back to local responsibility."
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Great Moments in Beer History
8000 B.C.: Farmers in Mesopotamia domesticate some of their crops, including barley and wheat. The early evidence of beer (and bread, another fermented grain product) also appears. And unlike today, most brewerscalled "brewsters"were women.
1760 B.C.: The Code of Hammurabi standardizes rules for beer and the treatment of drunks.
Biblical Times: According to some theories, Noah was a barley and beer trader who saved his stash from the Great Flood by building a large ark.
A.D. 33: Jesus has his last supper, where he may have drank beer, not wine. According to O`Brien, only the elite drank wine in those days, and Jesus was not one of them, although he could have been a good host and sprung for it for his guests.
600: The Wari Empire, a pre-Incan civilization in the Peruvian Andes, contains a large-scale brewery. Here, too, the brewers are women.
The Middle Ages: In Europe, brewing is almost completely dominated by monasteries, where monks made great advances in brewing technologies. While some nuns brewed beers, the art and craft of brewing were almost completely taken from women during this time.
1516: The Reinheitsgebot, a German purity law, sets standards for beer ingredients, and only allows beer to contain barley, hops and water. It also outlaws recipes of women home-brewers.
1517: Martin Luther, a known beer lover, protests the Catholic Church, leading to the Reformation.
Colonial America: Beer is one of the most popular beverages in the colonies, much of it home-brewed, since buying English beer was discouraged by revolutionaries.
The Industrial Revolution: Beer, like other commodities, becomes mass-produced.
Prohibition: The party`s overfor a while.
1979: President Jimmy Carter repeals the ban on home-brewing, and indirectly launches the craft-brewing movement.
December 2006: Lakefront Brewery and the Shepherd Express honor Milwaukee legend Art Kumbalek with his own beer, Focktoberfest, which will be introduced to the public in January. This classic malty brew displays a lightly toasted caramel color from its Vienna-malts and Hersbrucker hops. Smooth with a mild bitterness, this beer would have been perfect in October, butas Art Kumbalek puts it, "What the Fock?"
