Almost Grown

by Dick Cantwell

I don’t run around with no mob
Got myself a little job
I’m gonna buy me a little car
Drive my girl in the park

Don’t bother me, leave me alone
Anyway I’m almost grown

--Chuck Berry “Almost Grown”

Forgive me for thinking of my children when I think of brewing, but my careers with both began at about the same time. Years from now, and well into psychoanalysis, my daughter will undoubtedly be retrieving suppressed memories of sitting there, bouncing there, playing there, while I was brewing my first batches of homebrew. I’m sure it will all be deemed my fault. But that’s all part of the game. I hope she’ll forgive me.

I also have a thirteen-year-old son, and without getting into details that could embarrass both of us, he’s pretty much doing his job. He’s two people, really (a Gemini anyway, as far as that goes), the personable, considerate and cooperative one and, well, the other one. Once again, part of the game. Forgiveness all around, I say.

But let’s look at another family album, the one maintained by the various staff photographers of the magazines and papers of the craft brewing movement. First there are the baby pictures—a young Fritz Maytag, wild-haired Ken Grossman, Bert Grant looking pretty much the way he always did. Then the tottering first steps of cases and kegs coming off the line, and the Little League jamborees of expansion, with numberless shots of horizontally-borne tanks moving across page after page, like a May Day parade in Moscow. Then comes the time of gaudy and unbridled excess, the nineties, like so many overblown Bar Mitzvahs, when everybody got a pony, or a Stratocaster.

That’s when we started growing up, and some of us more than others. Gone, for the most part, are the playground spats and poison pen note-passing. Generally speaking, however, it could be argued that these days we’re into our difficult adolescence, with all the gawkyness and incipient proficiency that comes with it. We’ve got an oversized foot in both camps, the rebellious and the mainstream. We crave the approval and notice of those who went before us, but we also feel compelled to disagree with our parents, about everything.

Getting larger, growing up, is a responsibility. As we become increasingly worldly and masterful we are faced with the necessity of forging a relationship with bigger, more established players, the very people and companies with whom in the past we’ve taken such joy in reviling. Because they’re paying attention to us; that much is obvious, as they cherry-pick and copy, r-and-d-ing their way into styles we never thought we’d see them bother with.

And what about all that? Isn’t it kind of what we all wanted, back when the world shook its collective head at what people in America called beer? We used to look at beer trays and old labels and wish we could taste Brooklyn pilsners, Kansas cream ales, best bitters brewed this side of the pond. And now we can. Purists among us are nowadays kind of troubled that Coors’s Blue Moon line is producing such a creditable witbier, but let’s take our motives into account. We’ve always said they could make good beer if they chose to, that they were driven to do what they’re best known for by following marketing strategies to the nth degree, trying to claim that slippery nano-point of market share. Well now the market share they’re after is market share that we created and claimed. We don’t want them to take it away from us, but shouldn’t we be the tiniest bit proud that we have begun to wag the dog?

Parenthetically, I take satisfaction from the wrong-end-of-the-telescope approach I see the big brewers taking when it comes to recreating old styles and mimicking new ones. Rather than riff on the examples created by all of us, they seem to feel compelled to reinvent everything. What this means is that when you taste a quirky specialty of theirs, it’s all quirk—all vanilla, all dry-hop, all pumpkin spice. But they’ll get it right if it’s worth their while, believe me, even though Mitch Steele has jumped the A-B Man-o-war for Stone.

The big domestic brewers aren’t the only ones with whom we’ve forged an uneven adolescent relationship. But somehow the Europeans have always been more indulgent of us, maintaining an attitude of bemusement even as we make our own mistakes and build our own successes. Maybe that makes them our grandparents, more willing to take us to the zoo and let us do things like throw Amarillos into their lambics. The Japanese are laughing, too, even as they go to school on what we’ve accomplished.

I’d say we’re at a crossroads, but we’ve been at a succession of crossroads for the last thirty years; our segment of the industry has been so about transition that it’s perhaps our only constant.

So how do enter our uneasy early adulthood in the company of each other, and that of brewers much larger than ourselves? We haven’t been around for a hundred and fifty years, any of us, but with two or three decades under quite a few belts, many of us are downright establishment, ready to be rebelled against ourselves. I like to think that one of our collective strengths is the ability to reinvent ourselves again and again, like the Beatles, or Madonna, or Eric Clapton’s hair. The size of our companies makes us quicker on our feet, like so many flying Lost Boys—by the time the pirate ship has come about, we’re gone, on to the next thing, the next shiny object we’ve spied. Does that mean we won’t ever really grow up?