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Nothing fills a bar like the promise of free beer. Jeff White is offering some unusual ones tonight. “You are going to get a little bit of bubble gum in this one and a little bit of banana,” he says. White encourages everybody in the tightly packed room to sample Wild Pitch Hefeweizen. He raises his glass to his lips and takes a drink himself.
This would appear to be a craft beer tasting. It’s not: White is senior director of strategy for Tenth and Blake Beer, a MillerCoors subsidiary. The tasting takes place in the employee pub in the brewing giant’s Chicago headquarters.
Tenth and Blake is the most serious effort yet by a large American brewer to compete in the craft market. Its best-known beer is the popular Blue Moon Belgium White. Many people assume Blue Moon is the product of a craft brewery. This is by design; there is no reference to its corporate lineage on the label.
Tenth and Blake CEO Tom Cardella is trying to create some distance between his operation and MillerCoors. He requires everybody on his staff to be a certified beer sommelier, able to serve an exotic brew in the proper glass at the correct temperature, as a wine steward would do with a fine Chablis. He encourages employees to brew their own beer in the office.
Cardella knows that craft brewers get angry at the corporate omission on Blue Moon’s labels. “At the end of the day, when people get negative on Blue Moon, what they need to remember is the story behind Blue Moon is as authentic as any in the craft business,” he insists. The creation fable: Keith Villa, a Coors brewer trained in Belgium, concocted it at the company’s Sandlot Brewery in Denver. “They were going to call it Belly Side Ale,” Cardella says. “But Keith’s secretary said, ‘A beer like this only comes along once in a blue moon.’ Isn’t that great?”
Cardella has had huge success in blurring the distinctions between his products and those of microbrewers such as New Belgium. In August, MillerCoors announced that its overall sales were flat for the first six months of the year, yet Tenth and Blake’s portfolio enjoyed “double-digit” growth. “Consumers just want great beer,” Cardella says. “They are not overly concerned about how it is made or where it is from.”
There may be some truth to that. Anheuser-Busch InBev is making inroads with its Shock Top Belgian-style ales. In August, Shock Top boasted that its sales were up almost 77 percent for the first half of 2011. Like Blue Moon, the labels on Anheuser-Busch’s craft-style beers carry no reference to their parent company.
Some craft brewers are stoic about the rise of these macrobrewed craft brands. “My outlook is, well, you’ve taught a lot of Americans that cloudy beer with spicy flavors is kind of cool,” says Garrett Oliver, brewmaster of the Brooklyn Brewery. “So who is that really good for? Is that good for MillerCoors? Maybe somewhat. Is it good for me? Absolutely.” Others are more concerned. Sam Calagione, founder of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery in Milton, Del., says, “They go into a Joe’s Bar and say, ‘Hey, we’ve got a craft beer. Instead of a keg of Dogfish Head at $140, we’ll sell you this quasi-craft beer for $90 and you can charge the same price per pint.’ They use these quasi-craft beers as pawns to clear the real craft beers off the chessboard.”
Jordan maintains that her industry’s best defense is to stay true to its roots and continue to foster the indie beer ethos that has served it so well so far. This means fermenting beers with unusual ingredients and even more unusual names. It means operating breweries using alternative energy. And it means telling and retelling the stories of pioneers like herself who rose up against the makers of Budweiser and Miller Lite and prevailed because they were authentic. “We are drawn to stories that resonate with us,” Jordan says. “Beer is ancient. We know that story viscerally, and we like it. It helps us to keep connected to that thread.”
