By Dick Cantwell

Adventures in the Suds Trade Part Two: The Industry Curmudgeon

It's probably not who you're thinking of, or perhaps he or she, whoever they are, contributes some infinitesmal small-minded mini-byte to the collective personality of the type. I'm talking about Curmudgeon, capital C, the dog-in-the-manger kind of guy or gal who chooses to forecast the shitstorm to come, when everything they've striven for will crumble around them owing to the underhanded conniving and machination of "the competition," the very folks everyone else in town, or the industry, considers friends.

You know who they are. On the largest scale, they're the ones who engineer carpet-bombing advertising campaigns designed to erode and undermine, cast aspersions of elitism or lack of integrity on the hated successful enemy. On down the crabtree, on the regional and nationally-distributed contract level, they're the ones who work a single ideologically self-motivated point into the ground and repeatedly back to life. Freshness dating is one weapon in the arsenal; so is the supposedly unholy notion of contract brewing in general. Locally there's often a producer or two vocally inclined to circle the wagons and not let any of the newcoming heathen into the fold, borrowing paragraphs and pages from the dust-dry indices of protectionism penned and lived by this and other countries' brewers all the way back to the Reinheitsgebot and the waning days of gruit.

The splashiest and most public addresses of the craft brewers' conference in Seattle this past March provided an engaging Punch and Judy show for industry watchers, as Thing One and Thing Two (in power ties) badmintoned the contents of the living room back and forth in an effort to discredit each other and any others contemplating the forks in the road represented by each. Thank God for that fish in that bowl. Practically everyone else in the room was smiling. How is it they didn't notice?

That's really what I'm getting at. We're fortunate enough to be in a boom time in a growth industry, and the people who are most active in the games of power for market share of the future, the people most aspirant to the stature of the Industrials, are trying to make the rest of us feel that's what's most important is which side of line you're standing on. Have a beer, fellas. Have one of mine. I'm buying. What's most important, if you ask me, barring impending bankruptcy, is that we're having a good time doing something we love, making and selling beer to an appreciative public, spending as much time together as we can manage at festivals, events and in our own pubs, arguing about cigars, and baseball and, well, beer, I suppose.

Of course there's nothing like the small-time local curmudgeon for the amusement of those figuratively sitting around the stove in the front of the general store. There's always someone who views the enthusiasm of a beer-mad populace and the proliferation of new small breweries not as something to be applauded and enjoyed, but as something seeking to remove the food from his children's mouths. These are the ones inevitably, jowl-shakingly, predicting The Shakeout, when after a figurative forty days and nights of beer pouring from mediocre provincial breweries, only a hardy and divinely designated few will be laying their lips to the crabgrass atop their Ararat. One thing I can say for this theoretical type is that they usually garner a fair amount of media coverage. You've seen, and probably been in, some of these news reports that local, regional and even national TV or print media will devote from time to time to our pehnomenon. They inevitably start out with a shot of an open tap, a pint poured; then they'll go to one of the successful regional brewers talking about what a great thing it all is, cutiing to a few of us small guys saying pretty much the same thing, with the cunning twists and turns of market strategy or turn of phrase that make us different enough to worth including in the report. Then the pause and there he or she is, looking concerned and furrowed, saying that it's a jungle out there, tap space has never been at more of a premium, blah blah bad blah blah.