The Geography of Beer: Regions, Environment, and Societies

211 Pages·2014·18.638 MB·English

by  Mark Patterson, Nancy Hoalst-Pullen (eds.)

The Geography of Beer
Mark Patterson · Nancy Hoalst-Pullen
Editors
The Geography of Beer
Regions, Environment, and Societies
2123
Editors
Mark Patterson Nancy Hoalst-Pullen
Geography and Anthropology Geography and Anthropology
Kennesaw State University Kennesaw State University
Kennesaw Kennesaw
Georgia Georgia
USA USA
ISBN 978-94-007-7786-6 ISBN 978-94-007-7787-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-7787-3
Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg New York London
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014932211
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Foreword
The brewing industry has changed dramatically since I started working 39 years ago. The two
primary changes, the globalization and rise of the huge multi-nationals and the growth of the
very small specialty breweries may at first seem antithetical, but, I believe that the former defi-
nitely precipitated the latter. After prohibition in the mid 1930s there were over 750 breweries
in the United States, mostly smaller breweries run by the descendants of German immigrants
from the mid to late 1800s, while most large cities had at least one 1 million barrel brewery,
and a few very large breweries were starting to push their distribution boundaries beyond their
regional locations.
In 1975 I started at the lowest position, a union bottleshop employee at the Joseph Huber
Brewing Company in Monroe, Wisconsin, a brewery founded by German immigrants in 1848.
By this time the U.S. was down to only 45 brewing companies, with a few of the old smaller
regionals barely hanging on in face of the advertising expenditures and economies of scale that
the national brewers had at their disposal. It is amazing that of these multi-plant national brew-
ers, Anheuser-Busch, Schlitz, Pabst, Miller, G. Heileman, Falstaff, and Carling-National, and
the single brewery giants, Coors, Stroh, Hamm’s, Olympia, Ballantine, Rheingold, Schaeffer
and Genesee, not a single one any longer exists as a separate entity with the exception of Pabst
which has become a contract or virtual brewer. All the rest have been combined, closed or
bought by foreign multi-nationals. I would never have believed in 1975 that I would live to
see the day that the once largest brewer in the world, Anheuser-Busch, would be bought by a
Belgian/Brazilian consortium which was even bigger than they were and now together pro-
duces one quarter of all the beer in the world. They are being chased in their quest for global
dominance by SAB-Miller, the conglomerate spawned by a brewing group that started with
dominance in Africa and then went on to buy breweries in Eastern Europe as that area opened
up following the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the merged U.S. operations of Miller and Coors
and perhaps even more importantly, a 50 % ownership in CRB, the largest brewing company
in China, the producers of Snow, the single largest selling brand in the world.
China, which 7 years ago surpassed the U.S. as the largest brewing country in the world,
has in the interim grown to the point where it is now producing twice as much beer and is still
growing while the total volume in the mature North American market remains relatively stable.
Following AB-I and SAB-Miller are Heineken and Carlsberg who have both followed suit
by buying up and building breweries around the world and they, in turn are followed by the
other brewing giants including the Chinese brewers Tsingdao and Yanjing and Japanese brew-
ers, Kirin and Asahi. The Japanese brewers are looking to expand outside their shores as they
are faced with a declining population and a shrinking market. Kirin is now the owner of San
Miguel in the Philippines as well as Lion Nathan which holds a 45 % market share in Australia.
The other major player in Australia is Fosters now owned by SAB-Miller. All of these compa-
nies continue to look for acquisitions and there will, no doubt, be mergers among them as well.
The rise of the large brewers in the United States created a void as they all produced similar
styles of beer, 35 % adjunct light tasting lagers with low bitterness units as well as low calorie
beers which were even lighter in flavor and which achieved their low calorie level by reducing
both residual sugars and more importantly the alcohol which is the bulk of the calories in most
v
vi Foreword
beers. There were a few specialty beers in 1975, Yuengling Porter from the oldest brewery
in the U.S. (1829), Ballantine India Pale Ale (50 I.B.U., 6 % ABV and aged in wood for one
year), Augsburger, a German style lager from Huber Brewing, but these were anomalies, not
the norm.
To fill this vacuum came the first American micro-brewery, New Albion, in Sonoma,
California in 1977. I was working at nearby Anchor Steam at the time and witnessed first hand
their success and failure. New Albion produced an all malt hoppy and estery ale that was in
contrast to the light lagers that constituted over 99 % of the beer then produced in the U.S.
The inspiration for this style of brewing was undoubtedly Anchor Steam, which while having
a long history, was a very small brewery (11,000 bbls., 12,900 hl, in those days) producing an
iconoclastic all malt amber beer that was strongly hopped. Soon other micro breweries started
popping up in California and later across the country. Initially, quality was all over the map.
These breweries were mostly started by former home brewers who were happy to be producing
beers with an abundance of flavor without realizing in some cases that many of those flavors
were off flavors produced by poor fermentations, contamination and the rudimentary equip-
ment available to these early craft breweries. Gradually the quality of many of these breweries
grew to a professional level and with this so did the size of many craft plants. Their success
gave rise to even more breweries to the point where we now have over 2000 micro breweries
and brewpubs in the United States and two of the largest of these, Sierra Nevada and New
Belgium, have now built breweries on the East Coast to compliment their original Western
breweries. Sierra Nevada in particular is constantly doing very advanced research and R&D
that rivals that of some of the now defunct national brewers. So, in a way, brewing has come
full circle, from the multitude of small local breweries to the national breweries and back to the
local brewer in town with the difference being that these breweries now produce every style
in the world as well as new styles developed within the craft industry. At the Great American
Beer Festival, beers are judged in over 80 categories when just 40 years ago 4 or 5 styles con-
stituted almost all of the beer in the United States. In fact, as the craft movement continues to
swell and slowly eats away at the barrelage of the mainstream brewers, these brewers have also
started producing craft style beers or buying out craft breweries.
The success of the craft movement has also not gone unnoticed around the world and has
led the way to the development of small breweries producing specialty beers in Canada, Japan,
Australia, and even in the countries from whence many of these styles first originated like the
U.K., Ireland and Germany.
I would never have predicted in 1975 what has happened today but it seems that the polar
opposites of both the continued growth of the large global brewers and the rise of the local
specialty brewer will continue for the foreseeable future.
Alan Kornhauser
Brewmaster
Acknowledgments
This edited volume is a culmination of exceptional work and determination from many indi-
viduals throughout the world. As such, we would like to recognize and thank those who were
most instrumental in helping us see this volume from its inception through its completion.
We would first like to thank all of the authors for contributing their knowledge on various
topics related to the geography of beer. Their expertise and professionalism were bar none, and
we appreciate their ability to take what they know and to conform it into chapters that fit the
overarching theme and writing style of this volume, especially given the short deadlines and
sometimes extensive revisions. Additional thanks goes to all the anonymous reviewers whose
comments improved the overall cohesion of the book, and allowed the authors to expand their
writings and discover the “geographies” of their work.
We believe that geography is distinctive from other disciplines because of its inherent spa-
tial emphasis. As many of the authors are not trained geographers, we worked with a couple
very important individuals who helped incorporate the “geography” into the chapters to show-
case the spatial findings. Specifically, we wish to thank Michael D. Vest, our cartographer, who
created many of the maps that are arguably works of art, and Rebecca Mattord, our student
assistant, who helped us with many facets of this book, and who interpreted our underlying
vision with the creation of the notable figure found in the introduction chapter of this volume.
Without reserve, we wish to thank Dr. Robert K. Doe, our Publishing Editor, and his uni-
versal support and excitement for this project. The idea of this book originated from a discus-
sion during an annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers. While there is
still debate regarding which editor came up with the original idea, Robert has never failed in
championing this project and has provided patience, enthusiasm and advocacy to bring this
volume from a concept to a reality.
We wish to thank all the other members of the publishing team, including Naomi Portnoy,
our project coordinator, who kept us on task and provided timely answers to our many ques-
tions, as well as Ms. Neelu Sahu, our Project Manager at Crest Premedia Solutions, for proof-
ing the texts and compiling the chapters into the final product.
Additionally, we wish to thank the 2013 Beeronomics Conference and its associated mem-
bers (including the world’s second most interesting man) for educating us on the science,
economics, geography and taste of the many types, styles and varieties of beer.
Finally, thanks to all the brewmasters with whom we talked while conducting research.
Thank you for sharing your knowledge, passion, experience and of course, your beer. This
book is dedicated to the geographers of beer.
Water, barley, yeast
Add some hops to make bitter
Brewing is spatial
vii
Contents
1 Geographies of Beer ............................................................................................... 1
Mark W. Patterson and Nancy Hoalst-Pullen
Part I Regions
2 The Geography of Beer in Europe from 1000 BC to AD 1000 ........................... 9
Max Nelson
3 The Spatial Diffusion of Beer from its Sumerian Origins to Today ................... 23
Steven L. Sewell
4 Mapping United States Breweries 1612 to 2011 ................................................... 31
Samuel A. Batzli
5 Local to National and Back Again: Beer, Wisconsin & Scale ............................. 45
Andrew Shears
6 The World’s Beer: The Historical Geography of Brewing in Mexico ............... 57
Susan M. Gauss and Edward Beatty
7 Geographic Appellations of Beer ........................................................................... 67
Roger Mittag
Part II Environment
8 The Global Hop: An Agricultural Overview of the Brewer’s Gold ................... 77
Peter A. Kopp
9 Sweetwater, Mountain Springs, and Great Lakes:
A Hydro-Geography of Beer Brands .................................................................... 89
Jay D. Gatrell, David J. Nemeth and Charles D. Yeager
10 A Taste of Place: Environmental Geographies of the Classic Beer Styles ......... 99
Stephen Yool and Andrew Comrie
11 Sustainability Trends in the Regional Craft Beer Industry ................................ 109
Nancy Hoalst-Pullen, Mark W. Patterson, Rebecca Anna Mattord and
Michael D. Vest
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x Contents
Part III Societies
12 The Origins and Diaspora of the India Pale Ale .................................................. 119
Jake E. Haugland
13 T he Ubiquity of Good Taste: A Spatial Analysis of the
Craft Brewing Industry in the United States ........................................................ 131
Ralph B. McLaughlin, Neil Reid and Michael S. Moore
14 Too Big to Ale? Globalization and Consolidation in the Beer Industry ............. 155
Philip H. Howard
15 Microbreweries, Place, and Identity in the United States ................................... 167
Steven M. Schnell and Joseph F. Reese
16 Neolocalism and the Branding and Marketing of Place by
Canadian Microbreweries ..................................................................................... 189
Derrek Eberts
17 Offline Brews and Online Views: Exploring the Geography of Beer Tweets .... 201
Matthew Zook and Ate Poorthuis
Index ................................................................................................................................. 211
Contributors
Samuel A. Batzli Space Science & Engineering Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison,
Madison, WI, USA
Edward Beatty Department of History, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA
Andrew Comrie School of Geography and Development, University of Arizona, Tucson,
AZ, USA
Derrek Eberts Department of Geography, Brandon University, Brandon, MB, Canada
Jay D. Gatrell Bellarmine University, Louisville, KY, USA
Susan M. Gauss Department of History, University at Albany, State University of New York,
Albany, NY, USA
Jake E. Haugland Division of Continuing Education and Professional Studies, University of
Colorado-Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA
Philip H. Howard Department of Community Sustainability, Michigan State University,
East Lansing, MI, USA
Peter A. Kopp Department of History, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM, USA
Rebecca Anna Mattord Department of Geography and Anthropology, Kennesaw State Uni-
versity, Kennesaw, GA, USA
Ralph B. McLaughlin Department of Urban and Regional Planning, San José State Univer-
sity, San Jose, CA, USA
Roger Mittag School of Hospitality, Recreation & Tourism, Humber College Institute of
Technology and Advanced Learning, Toronto, ON, Canada
Michael S. Moore Urban Affairs Center and Department of Geography and Planning,
University of Toledo, Toledo, OH, USA
Max Nelson Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Department, University of Windsor,
Windsor, ON, Canada
David J. Nemeth Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toledo, Toledo, OH,
USA
Mark W. Patterson Department of Geography and Anthropology, Kennesaw State University,
Kennesaw, GA, USA
Ate Poorthuis Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA
xi