By Dick Cantwell

Over There

Here in the USA, the land of zymurgic opportunity, where these days there truly seems to be a porter in every pot, the brewing-related Weltanschauung seems pretty A-OK. It's tempting, given domestic warmth and fuzziness, to project a worldwide suffusion of all this love, especially as stories keep coming in over the wires of jungle hamlets and other outposts of grooviness supporting multiple micros and a sophisticated beer culture. But let's spare a moment of concern for the places in the Old World from which we've taken our inspiration, places where sinister forces and problematical circumstances are making it difficult for creative and independent brewers to function as we do in the land of the figuratively free.

The sinister forces? That's easy. As sales of industrial beers continue to decline here, we've almost gotten used to thinking of the big brewers as comic villains, pratfalling and left spluttering in the mud as we little guys scatter for further mayhem. In Germany and the United Kingdom, however, they're still cackling atop the pyramid, rubbing their hands together as they plot their next iniquitous maneuver. The relative consistency of the coverage in Germany by 100,000 hectolitre local breweries with loyal regional followings has acted as something of a check on wholesale acquisition by the giants, but in England life just got tougher. Carlsberg-Tetley, that country's biggest brewery fatcat to date, has recently become even more grossly distended by merging with Bass. With the tied house system already firmly in place, where big brewery ownership of pubs severely limits the possible retail outlets for small independent brewers, the trend of mega-consolidation is sure to impede progress even further for anyone daring to operate outside the lines. Prospective new laws tightening the availability of guest taps to independants bodes even less well.

To the untrained and altruistic eye, the so-called free trade provisions of European Economic Community membership might seem a boon to variety and interest. The reverse is the case, however, with increasingly disproportionate tap and shelf space given over to the brewers most able to distribute their products long distances, i.e. the big guys. And with international mergers like the one clogging the above paragraph, small brewers throughout Europe will be finding it more difficult to sidle into the most sympathetic of free houses and gasthouses even within their own countries. If present trends continue, the archetypal pan-European beer bar will offer Guinness, Bass, Carlsberg, Stella Artois, and maybe Budweiser, which these days is being brewed in the London area and appearing at pubs everywhere.

The problems of small brewers in Europe are not entirely due to the machinations of the industrials. CAMRA has done an amazing thing expanding the awareness of a public once indifferent to the magic being wrought by brewers and gifted cellarpeople, but the fact is that not all of these people are up to the tasks necessary to pull it off successfully. On a recent trip to England I drank a lot of wonderful beer. I also drank a lot of bad beer, poorly crafted and poorly maintained. It's no wonder, with sour and lifeless beers being pulled from casks here and there across Britain, that the nitro keg now muscling its way into the marketplace is threatening the market-loyalty of real ale. The products served are without particular personality or character, but the result is more consistent and requires no special skill to maintain and serve. We in America know all about that. The inroads being made on the drinking public in Britain, with products like alcoholic lemonade and other fruit-flavored fermented soda pops, make it more and more difficult for breweries with integrity to stay out of the slime, both literally and figuratively. I toured breweries in England where wondrously quirky and traditional methods continue to be employed, but where tanker trucks were pulling in for contract bottling, cases of orange stuff were rolling off the lines, and viscous tanksful of fermenting sugar syrup were contributing a decided tang to the wonderful combined smells of all-malt brewing. In some cases I also saw water dripping from refrigeration units into open squares of fermenting beer and other unsanitary conditions resulting in off-flavors in no way related to shoddy post-packaging handling, but due to lack of care and maintenance by the brewers themselves. One has to think that not enough people have the skills necessary to operate all these venerable breweries, and in fact there is something of a brain drain, with skilled brewers deserting facitlities compromised by unfavorable marketing and commercial considerations. And where do you suppose they're going? Yup, here, where the money is, and the opportunities are most plentiful. Let's hope that we never have to organize some kind of zymurgic Operation Overlord to aid in the retaking of territories lost to goose-stepping industrial warmongers. Or is that what we're doing already?

How did we get so lucky? Why have we been able to create something out of virtually nothing, to resuscitate an industry not long ago deemed virtually monopolized? Well, it could simply be that having survived the forty days and nights of deprivation that was Prohibition, having been forced to reinvent during a time ushering in anti-trust measures as well as maintaining a largely unwarranted fear of encouraging the consumption of alcoholic beverages, we've had the good fortune to come to rest on an Ararat of opportunity. Prohibition was not, by nearly all accounts, a good thing, but it's intriguing to wonder if it wouldn't be somehow possible to selectively wash away the accumulated centuries' worth of European and British protectionism, graft, favoritism of the strong, and resistence to new ideas. Of course in order for something like that to happen, some kind of magic would have to be worked, again.