The rights and wrongs of contract brewing
Contract brewing has been raising waves across the Tasman. The debate started at Australian Brews News, and contract brewing was one of the topics that inspired This Way Up to look at New Zealand craft brewing last month.
Much of the Australian discussion centred on McLaren Vale Beer Company. McLaren Vale is in South Australia, and McLVBCo.’s beer is contract brewed in Sydney while a brewery is being built in McLaren Vale itself.
McLaren Vale is a wine producing region, and is named after the international motorsport team founded by New Zealander Bruce McLaren. Not everyone knows that. As a wine producing region, it jealously protects is labelling, and some have seen McVBCo.’s approach as being deceptive.
I struggle to have any problem with McVBCo.’s contract brewing. For one thing, the place where a beer is made has little influence on its taste. I’m much more interested in where the ingredients come from. US, English and New Zealand hops, for example, are all very different and don’t we love them for it. A beer made in New Zealand with US hops can accurately call itself an American Pale Ale – the fact it isn’t made in America does not make the label misleading.
I think there are some cultural differences between New Zealand and Australian beer fans, because I just don’t see any ethical problem with contract brewing. Perhaps it comes from parochialism and loyalty to their state, but I suspect there are factors to this debate that we don’t know about over here. Speaking personally, I think of all New Zealand craft brewers as being interesting. I don’t favour, say, North Island brewers over South Island ones just because I live on the North Island.
Here in New Zealand we have a healthy tradition of contract brewing in the craft beer industry. Yeastie Boys may have started the trend, and I’ve never heard anyone complain that their product is actually made in Invercargill and not in Wellington.
Contract brewing allows brewers to make use of spare capacity and get access to new ideas and recipes. It allows the contractors to brew in bulk and take advantage of the brewers’ commercial experience.
The only catch I can see is commercial, rather than ethical. Contract brewing works by paying a fee to the brewer – somewhere between 25c/l and $2.50/l depending on the deal, according to those in the industry. As production increases, it can reach a point where it would be cheaper to own your own equipment and get some economies of scale.
Rather than arguing over ethics, New Zealanders have been rushing to get into contract brewing this year. One of the most popular beers at the Matariki Festival was the contract-brewed Brewaucracy’s Punkin’ Image Ltd. Parrot Dog Brewing has just put down its first batch, contract-brewed at Mikes in Taranaki. Mikes has also linked up with Liberty to produce the very excellent indeed Taranaki Pale Ale. And of course, Yeastie Boys, 8 Wired and Epic have been using the contract brewing model for years.
Collaboration brews take contract brewing a step further, and this is a growing trend here too. Various star brewers have been visiting Galbraith’s brewery in Auckland to produce special one-off beers collaboratively, and Rescue Red is a charity fundraiser collaboration between Yeastie Boys, 8 Wired and Renaissance.
I like our approach here. The craft beer industry is too small for cutthroat competition, and collaborating to make better beer while growing the overall market is the way to go.
Cheers
© Martin Craig July 2011
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Twittering @nzbeerblog
Filed under: Beer Makers, Gushing forth | Tagged: 8 Wired, Australian Brews News, Contract Brewing, Epic, Galbraiths Ale House, McLaren Vale Beer Co, Mikes Organic Brewery, Parrot Dog, Renaissance, This Way Up, Yeastie Boys
I wonder if some of the uneasiness comes from people feeling that brewing is a dark art and that surely, if you didn’t brew it yourself, you shouldn’t be putting your own label on it.
I guess it’s a lack of appreciation of what the recipe designer does before the beer goes into large scale production.
And what do you call a company like Yeastie Boys anyway? Are they a brewery (without a brewery) or something else? Its certainly unfair to say they’re a ‘brand’. It feels like our language for these things is underdeveloped.
It doesn’t seem unreasonable to have better ways of distinguishing between these different arrangements – though personally it doesn’t worry me.
Apologies for being such a wordy bastard, but:
The APA comparison is a bit of a red herring, since “American Pale Ale” is a style; “American” becomes an adjective which lets you know what sort of pale ale you’re in for. When the geographical name has no partiuclar flavour connotations — and, for beer, the McLaren Vale is just such a place — then it pretty-strongly becomes and implied origin claim.
Now, I agree that place has little influence on taste (oridinarily, with massively-important and not-too-hard-to-find exceptions, but still). And I’m pretty much a complete Mongrel Cosmopolitan who doesn’t personally give a crap about matters of borders. But it’s a fact that a lot of people do care very much indeed about origins — irrationally or not, out of mean-spirited parochialism or misplaced patriotism or whatever. It doesn’t really matter why they think like that; the mere fact that they do puts obligations on people in the business of marketing things to them.
The Yeastie Boys are a different sort of red herring, since nothing about their ‘brand’ (I’m with Tim; that’s a gross word, but it’ll do) has anything to do with geography. Instead, they actually go out of their way to point out their status as Brewers Without a Brewery, and reference Invercargill and Steve Nally pretty-damn often.
I think it’s pretty clear, though, that there’s a crapload wrong with a beer pitched as “Wellington Lager” which is made somewhere else, by someone else, but in a way that doesn’t let anyone know. Or to target the bigger boys, it’s pretty appalling that license-brewed Becks is positively festooned in implications of a German origin, with only teeny-tiny text on the back eventually giving away its Auckland address.
Given the sensibilites of a whole stack of consumers, I think either product is ripe for a Fair Trading Act smack around the head. The moral case against both of them is pretty strong, and I think — for just the same reason — there’s reason enough to be (provisionally) grumpy with McLaren Vale.
I’m dead keen to try the beer, though. I’m like that.
The Boston Brewing company the Biggest American owned beer company and “microbrewer” only has a Pilot Brewery in its Boston location the majority of thier beer is Brewed in Ohio and Pensilvania at the companies production breweries ,
The Brooklyn Brewery is another brewery that gets the Majority of its beer made under contract at FX Matt the brewers of the Saranac brand in upstate New York .
So your problem is ?
Mine, or Martin’s? Not sure who you’re addressing. But it seems you mean me, since I’m the one with the gripe.
I just think that marketing something in a way that implies an origin which isn’t accurate is a shitty thing to do, given the empirical fact that a bunch of people seem to care about that stuff.
I’m not sure of the particulars of Boston Brewing or Brooklyn’s marketing and how implied-origin they get, but it doesn’t really matter, here: I know it’s a longstanding practice, I know it’s more common than it usually appears, and I know some big and well-regarded breweries do it. I don’t think that really changes the shittiness of it.
Like I mean to imply when I say I’m still keen to try McLaren Vale’s beer, I don’t think of it as a deal-breaker and wouldn’t “boycott” a brewery that indulged in that sort of thing. But I still think it’s pretty obviously poor form.
Boston Brewing marketing is all about Boston and Samuel Adams …one of the people who organised the Boston Tea party …so most people associate the brand with Boston …not Ohio .
Brooklyn Brewing company do some of thier specialty beers at thier Brooklyn location but the majority is brewed at FX Matt.
And many so called International Brands are brewed in Australia under licence including Guinness and the average drinker doesn’t have a clue or p\probably care.
Boston Brewing marketing is all about Boston and Samuel Adams …one of the people who organised the Boston Tea party …so most people associate the brand with Boston …not Ohio .
Brooklyn Brewing company do some of thier specialty beers at thier Brooklyn location but the majority is brewed at FX Matt.
And many so called International Brands are brewed in Australia under licence including Guinness and the average drinker doesn’t have a clue or probably care.
Boston Brewing marketing is all about Boston and Samuel Adams …one of the people who organised the Boston Tea party …so most people associate the brand with Boston …not Ohio .
Brooklyn Brewing company do some of thier specialty beers at thier Brooklyn location but the majority is brewed at FX Matt.
Then yeah, I’m grumpy with the lot of them. I don’t excuse them for just being in a crowd.
I think confusing branding and geography is a tough stand to take. If you have a recipe you are confident the beer loving community will enjoy and are willing to invest time and money to get it produced, then good on you. As a craft beer lover I care about the taste, aroma and ingredients. If they taste great I am a happy camper. I agree that no one enjoys deceptive marketing, but really most of us know where all theses beers are made. And now companies who backed themselves have reached the point that they will no longer be contract brewed. I say well done and great result.
Think about names like Bud, Coors, Corona, Miller, Tooheys, etc.
They have no place as they are just names.
The NZ All Black rugby jersey is made in China…
Get hold of a Hawaiian shirt (I bet you’ve got one of these as well. Samsung M620 Black mobile is just big enough to display four icons side by side and measures only 1. The Fujifilm Fine – Pix x100 is generally considered a professional compact rangefinder camera.
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