By Dick Cantwell

What Does Your Brewpub Look Like?

Mention the word brewpub to just about anyone these days and you'll see at least a glimmer of recognition. With the proliferation of small breweries in even distant corners of the empire nearly everyone can summon an awareness of the phenomenon and what such a place is liable to look like, who its clientele will consist of, and what sort of experience either a lunch or a nighttime swilling session will be. And as the ancients sought to tame the stars by figuratively lashing them together in the often arbitrary forms of the constellations, those of us watching developments in the brewing industry are sometimes struck by the shapes and patterns which here and there emerge. As the mists of the past twenty years have steadily cleared, leaving us with that many more hundreds of zymurgic points of light, it turns out that there are galaxies and nebulae forming about certain approaches to the phenomenon. Individual projects still have their own personalities, but most fall more or less into one of several fairly predictable paradigms. Try holding your favorite watering hole up to the light of examination by type. The Goat on the Roof. Just to put things in an historical perspective, let's look first at the movement's modest roots, when it was possible for a couple of beard-tugging hippies to score some old water heaters and used dairy equipment, run some hoses between them, and turn out beer which, if inconsistent, was a darned sight better (or at least more interesting) than the industrial swill to which most people in those days were accustomed. These places were sort of a throwback even when they were being conceived and executed, sometimes sharing the premises with baking and cheesemaking operations, sporting menus featuring such groundbreaking fare as leaden veggie burgers and greasy yet flavorless falafels, and offering winking allusion in their beer names and the demeanor of their staffs to disproportionate consumption of illicit substances (which in some cases constituted the source of their financing). Well, like so much else, this phenomenon has grown up, now constituting whole chains of places, where a superficially countercultural sensibility has been multiply combined with (unshod) pedestrian menu fare and indifferently executed beer to produce nothing short of a couple of empires busting at the threadbare seams.

The Old World Facsimile. Taking inspiration from the gasthäuser and pubs in old Marlene Dietrich and Basil Rathbone movies, these places seek to imbue the site of production with gemütlichkeit and cosiness, as appropriate. Boasting etched mirrors and antlered heads, cushions and brass, plank tables and umlauts scattered like birdseed, they act as vaguely nationalistic shrines on the order of what one might find at Epcot Center. Related but generally celebrating a New World take on the whole brewing thing is The Shrine to Beer. Showcasing neons functional or defunct, old beer signs and the detritus of a century's shameless marketing, this is a vaguely postmodern type which winks and joshes with the patron, poking wiseass fun at the nerdly decades previous to our own. Both of these types can seem just a touch artificial, but that can be mitigated if the beer is good.

The Money Factory. These are the places everyone has heard about, the ones that make investing in brewpubs, and breweries in general, such an irresistably attractive prospect to those with potential investment dollars burning holes in their pockets. The brewpub project that opens with twenty dollars to spare and nets twenty-eight thousand dollars its first Friday night has nearly come to achieve the stature of urban legend. Expensive furnishings that match, interesting (though not necessarily challenging) menus a yard or two long, competently executed beer and a staff that seems to know what it is serving combine to make it extremely difficult to criticize the formulas for success that the masterminds behind these places have come up with. The main problem is that this type rarely occurs singly, and has a tendency to proliferate with only subtle variation, which to those of us who visit mutliple locations out of a sense of professional duty and curiosity, smacks of callowness.

The Cozy Little Corner of the Empire. Back in the earlier days of the movement, breweries who naively held no ambitions as pubowners would dutifully wall off a corner of their breweries, install a gas jet and a Brewmeister, and open what they called a taproom or tasting area. The thing was, they soon noticed that as new accounts proved thorny in some instances to secure, the supposedly written-off space was righting the balance of the whole commercial enterprise. Not much later, as large -- no, enormous -- contract brewing operations began to feel a little self-conscious at being perpetually branded industry Satans for not owning up to the fact that they paid someone else to brew their beer, it became advantageous to open a little pub in some quaint and friendly backwater well within regional lines in order to maintain at least a logically unassailable familiarity with the processes of brewing. A cynical windfall of this arrangment turned out to be that these cunning little solid copper systems could be employed to produce lovingly tended batches of standard production products for the purposes of maintaining a handhold in the rough-and-tumble world of professional tasting panels. It's a jungle out there, after all.

The Epicurean Epicenter. A variation firmly rooted in the unashamedly excessive eighties, though here and there shaking its spores into the present decade, this type is really more of a top-flight restaurant with beer added for a trendy spin. Funky little neighborhood storefront restaurants having gone the way of Olde Frothingslosh, some of the most buffed and toned superchefs eventually took notice of the microbrewery craze and decided to assimilate it. What better accompaniment to a nest of microtomed vegetable fibers in a viscid fruit reduction than a hoppy pilsner -- or was it a malt-laced amber ale? The most visible of these projects eventually failed partly due to paying only lip service to the notion of quality beer, but certain of them spawned empires blowing the hybrid horn of food and beer. It certainly isn't that there's anything wrong with taking food seriously, and especially as wedded to beer -- some of the most successful of this type, in fact, have sprung up in the most prosaic of locales, often constituting not only some corn- or cowtown's best tavern but its finest restaurant, wresting market share from the chains. And we know that's a good thing.

The Bizzarro. This is the fun one, of course. These places are crammed into hangars and defunct car dealerships, old churches and candlepin alleys, serving ethnic mishmashes and a dozen beer styles with flavors and derivations across the board. Their brew systems are often truly a sight to behold. Sometimes they don't even look like brewpubs, but now that the phenomenon at-large is as old and familiar as it is, you don't necessarily have to hit people over the head with the concept. We wouldn't want to get too predictable, would we?