Picture the scene. I am in a room somewhere in Sweden standing in front of 20 people giving a talk about beer.
“So how many of you drink wine?” I ask. A surprising start. Nearly all of them raise their hand.
Yes most of us already know this. Can you be a little bit more specific?
I press on: “OK, and how many of you drink bag-in-box wine?” Less hands now but several guilty looks and people that start staring at their shoes.
“So do you know the names of the main grape varieties in some of the wines you drink? You know, like Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir….?”
From all around the room people toss grape names at me. Impressive.
“OK, that’s great. Now let’s switch to beer. First question: how many of you have drunk beer most of your adult lives?”
Every single hand shoots up into the air.
“So taking an average of, let’s say, 15 years beer drinking each that’s 300 years of accumulated beer drinking in this room.”
“Now in very broad terms hops are the grapes of beer and give it a crispness, bitter backbone and the aromatics that make it the amazingly refreshing drink it can be. So……with your 300 years of collective beer drinking experience can anyone give me the name of a single hop that has gone into making any of the countless beers you have drunk over three centuries?*”
The silence is deafening.
I’m starting to lose count of how many beer talks I give in Sweden each year but the scenario I’ve just recounted occurs in over 95% of all the talks I’ve ever done to the general drinking public.
And it is here we come face to face with one of the ugliest truths about beer, which is that it may be the most popular alcoholic drink on the planet but practically no-one has a clue about what goes into it.
So just who is to blame for this wretched state of affairs? Who is responsible for creating a product that practically everyone know nothing about and who should we now turn to to help us fill in the blanks and raise the general awareness of beer as a quality and complex drink?
The answer to all these questions is of course the brewing industry itself.
The large industrial brewing giants spent generations stripping down beer to its cheapest, most profitable form. In order to hide their ‘cost-streaming’ measures they stopped talking about what went into their beers and shielded themselves behind one of the vaguest product descriptions known to man: “water, malted barley, hops and yeast”.
Big boobs, humour (sort of) or anything else to distract us from the truth of what actually goes into the beer.
Rather than tell people exactly what goes into their beer (and conversely what doesn’t) they perfected the conjurer’s art of misdirection, throwing billions into marketing beer as “refreshing, ice-cold, probably the best in the world, the king of beers, the one and only, wouldn’t give a XXXX for anything else” – in fact anything it seems rather than tell people what it’s actually made of.
No wonder the silence was so deafening.
But that was then. Right now in 2012 craft beer is here and many smaller breweries in Sweden and throughout the world are proudly using the very best ingredients they can get their hands on to create beers with real flavour and integrity.
Surely they are proud of their beers and the often elaborate list of ingredients that go into making them? Surely they are the ones at least partly responsible for helping to educate the growing legions of ‘beer curious’ consumers who would willingly listen if anyone bothered to talk to them?
I for one believe they are. They are right now our best chance at putting things right, of setting the record straight. But how can craft breweries help us understand beer better when they’re already so busy brewing beer to an ever more demanding public?
One relatively simple way is to go back to ground zero and the moment someone picks up a bottle of beer for the first time and reads the bottle label.
It is here craft brewers can make that vital first impression and pass on information that could potentially change the way someone thinks about beer forever. It’s such an obvious opportunity and yet unbelievably it’s still one that’s often overlooked.
In Part 2 – I grab three bottles of craft beer from the shelves of the Systembolaget and examine their labels to discover what they’re really telling us about the beer inside.
*You’d be surprised how often I am met with incredulous looks and the comment “are there hops in beer?” Seriously, it happens!
