Barley Mowat 

The LDB just released their 2013 payment numbers, which includes payouts to anyone they owed money to. Since all breweries in the province must by law technically sell their product to the LDB instead of to customers (even if the LDB never physically touches the money or the beer), these numbers act as a rough approximation of brewery production size.

I sat down and did all the math on this last year based on some inside info from a couple of breweries. Looking back, though, I feel those numbers weren’t quite right. I’ve adjusted my dollars to hectolitre conversion slightly, reflecting the improvement in my knowledge of how beer is sold in BC over the past 12 months. Below, I’ve put the 2013 numbers alongside the revised 2012 numbers, along with a percentage change.

As always, the hectolitre numbers are not directly derived from simple math. For instance, if Joe’s Brewery does $2,125,894 in sales, I divide that by 400 (on average, beer sells for 3.75-4.25 per litre) to get 5,314.735 hL. That’s an absurdly precise number for such a generalization. I take that number, and add into it my knowledge that Joe sells his beer mostly on draft (draft beer is more like $3.25 per litre; packaged varies but can be $6.00 or more). So I round Joe’s number up a bit because he had to sell more beer to make his numbers. Let’s say 5,500.

Seriously, that’s how I did this. It goes without saying that these are not precise numbers. If any brewery reading this wants to give me more accurate numbers for their production from March 2012 to March 2013 I’ll be happy to update.

Some fun tidbits:

• Driftwood has slowed their unbelievable growth, and have only increased 50% since last year instead of doubling as they did every year previously.
• I have no idea why the numbers for Red Truck dropped off a cliff. Maybe they’re focusing on building a brewery instead of brewing beer?
• Yes, those numbers for Prohibition / Big Surf are correct. I checked twice.
• Rock on, Sean Hoyne! Hoyne’s numbers were based off an estimate last year, so that might impact the growth number, but even so making that much beer in a 10hL family run brewery shows major demand for product. Congrats!
• R&B is down more than I’d like. Everyone go have an East Side Bitter.

Disclaimers (repeated from 2012):

• The value that seems to best translate dollars to hectolitres for my control breweries is $400. Obviously this is a very rough guess. Draught-only producers will have their production adjusted higher, while bottle-focused producers will be lower.
• Yes, the final production numbers smell like ass because that’s precisely where I got them from.
• Because of the craziness of shadow brands and contract brewing, it’s hard to split out some of these numbers. OK Spring, in particular, also produces Sleeman locally, and those sales are blended in.
• Some breweries are missing, including: Coal Harbour, Steamworks amoung others. I have no idea why. They are likely running under either a numbered company or a name I don’t recognize.
• I have excluded Labatt’s (Kokanee) simply because it would be impossible to separate out beer produced in-province from imports.
• Likewise, I have skipped Mark Anthony Group (Turning Point/Stanley Park) because most of their money comes from wine (Mission Hill)
• Breweries with no distribution to speak of (mostly brewpubs) have been dropped from the list.

Scott over at WFLBC stirred the pot a bit yesterday by doing a side-by-each comparison between Driftwood Sartori and Hoyne Wolf Vine. The comparison itself wasn’t the controversy, and neither was the result (he liked Wolf Vine slightly more) but rather his views on the detection of diacetyl and the nuances around that caused more than a few comments.

Now, I agree that Scott took a provocative, abrasive approach to this whole topic. Let’s just say that I’m a fan of this more in-your-face style. I also think a lot of people overreacted. Dude has his own blog. He can post his opinion, even if we don’t agree with it. Heck, he could be posting nothing but pictures of his ass all day and I’d still cheer him on.

Although, I bet if he shaved it he’d get more hits.

In any event, the core issue is three fold. First, is the hype around Sartori justified? Second, is Wolf Vine actually better than Sartori? And third, does Wolf Vine have diacetyl, a buttered-popcorn off-flavour? Let me give you my opinion about all three. If you’re good, my opinion might be more than just three pictures of my ass.

Hype

Driftwood Sartori is probably the most anticipated seasonal beer release in BC. No other beer causes the local craft beer fans to, en masse, walk out of their day jobs and sprint from store to store buying their fill the second Twitter has a hint of availability (or sending non-craft beer husbands/wives clutching an order sheet and the kids, as I’ve seen more than a few times). Is this hype good or bad for craft beer in general? I’m firmly on the “good” side.

Demand creates excitement which creates interest. An independent observer noticing a bearded blogger stabbing a house husband in the neck to get the last case of a particular beer can’t help but wonder what all the fuss is about. Someone is this excited by a BEER? How can that be? Even if Sartori is gone, the newly curious might ask around and find themselves going home with a similar beer to try out. That’s a good thing. Personally, I think we should build the hype further next year and alert the media. A couple segments on the news would be great for local craft beer.

I briefly considered a Thunderdome-style competition for Sartori, but “Two beer geeks enter, both realize the stupidity of their situation and agree to share the bottle!” doesn’t have a catchy ring to it.

Is the frantic demand for Sartori justified? In 2009, Driftwood unleashed the first wet-hopped ale BC had ever seen. It blew our minds with its fantastic awesomeness. Since then it hasn’t been quite as mind-fuckingly-astonishing, perhaps because there are now wet-hopped beers everywhere, or maybe because it just isn’t as good.

Does the 2013 version change this? Is this beer worth the three hours of scrubbing blood off my hands? Nope. It’s freaking good, and a rarity, but this beer alone doesn’t live up to the huge build-up. Of course, we didn’t know that last Monday. We dropped everything and raced to our local LRS for the beer that could have been, not the one we got.

Wolf Vine vs Sartori

Okay, problem two. If Sartori isn’t all it’s built up to be, and Wolf Vine is better than its sales suggest, is Wolf Vine better than Sartori? WFLBC felt that it edged Sartori just slightly, and a look at review sites indicate the crowd is mixed. What about me? What does Chuck think? I compared them last year and declared Sartori better and Wolf Vine a “decent wet-hopped beer that has the advantage of your actually being able to buy it.”

I did a side-by-each comparison of the 2013 versions of Sartori & Wolf Vine last night. This just reinforced the consensus that comparing these beers is difficult. They are very different. WV is a Pale Ale; Sartori is an IPA. There are those that consider IPAs to be superior to Pale Ales by default, so how could this be fair? In short, it can’t, but I did try:

Hoyne Wolf Vine Fresh-hopped Pale Ale
STATS 5.8% ABV
APPEARANCE Quickly dissipating loose head over a hazy copper body
NOSE Biscuit/caramel malt dominated by fresh hops (lemon, grass, slight resins)
TASTE Solid biscuit malt sweetness that’s matched well to the fresh hops. The final result is a sweeter beer than you might anticipate given the prevalence of the west coast pseudo IPA “pale ale”
SHOULD I BUY IT? Fuck yeah.

Driftwood Sartori Harvest IPA
STATS 7.0% ABV
APPEARANCE Light amber, almost yellow gold with tight long lasting white head
NOSE Fresh PNW hops dominate here. Flowery, fresh, slight bitter citrus (grapefruit)
TASTE Builds off the nose. Beautiful hop freshness with a weaker-than-I’d-like-but-not-bad body. Smile-inducing Hop freshness builds over the course of the bottle
SHOULD I BUY IT? If you see it, buy it.

Who wins? Sartori wins. Head to head I prefer Sartori by a fair bit. However, Wolf Vine is unquestionably great and again has the distinct advantage of being a beer you can walk out of an LRS with today (although, notably, there is less supply than at this time last year).

Don’t look at me like that. I was here first.

Diacetyl

Diacetyl is a dirty word to a lot of people, and one that has been associated with Sean Hoyne’s beers since day one. However, it’s not the cut and dry defect that a lot of people seem to think it is. Sure, too much can make your beer or wine taste like buttered movie popcorn, and while I’m fairly sure my buddy Craig might like that, most folk would prefer a slightly more beer-y flavour.

In limited quantities, though, dread diacetyl can actually improve certain styles of beer by imparting a round, full bodied mouthfeel to otherwise thin beers. This is why a low level of the chemical is even considered on-style for some Pilsners.

Enough dancing around the bushes. Does Wolf Vine have any detectable diacetyl? I’m going to say yes, it has a little. I detected small amounts of diacetyl on both the nose and the mouthfeel. It should be noted that Leo from BeerThirst points out that certain malts have diacetyl-like properties, and lacking a chemistry kit, I was unable to determine if I was picking up the real thing or a pretender. Also note that just because I detected it doesn’t mean you will. Other experienced tasters did not detect it, and there is a real chance there might be some inter-batch variability with one bottle having none and the next having a bit.

In the end, though, I don’t care. The levels are not unpleasant, and the effect is very much the positive one I described above. Sure it’s not on-style, but the style was developed to describe more traditional Pale Ales, so screw the style.

And that is all I have to say about that. Ah, who am I kidding? You know I’ll never shut up about anything.

Well, I promised to keep you up to date on Steamworks’ Owner Eli Gershkovitch’s other trademark dispute–the one against US-based Left Hand Brewing over the far too generic term “Nitro.” If none of this makes any sense to you, the words “Eli” and “trademark” entered the craft beer lexicon last fall when it was revealed that Mr Gershkovitch held (and was defending) a trademark on the term “Cascadia.” I have a summary of how things went down here. Or, if you want, just skip to Part 3 where I talk about Nitro here.

In the end, Steamworks did the right thing and allowed general usage of the term Cascadia, even though they still technically hold the trademark. In the US, though, they summoned lawyers and started to prepare a defence of Nitro against Left Hand Brewing, makers of their (quite decent) “Milk Stout Nitro.”

Lawyers and documents went back and forth. Deadlines were extended, letters exchanged, and law-talking-folk made rich. A trail of PDFs in legalize the length of my arm was generated, and it read about as exciting as one might imagine. In the end (just last week) negotiations between Eli and Left Hand concluded with Mr Gershkovitch agreeing to voluntarily give up the trademark. There’s no indication of what changed hands in the background to facilitate this, if anything.

Anyway, there you go. Presumably Left Hand will now proceed to register their own trademark on the term Nitro, but perhaps they’ll exclude more generic uses of the term when they do so (like, for instance, for beers with nitrogen in them). We can only hope. To be clear: this isn’t a win for craft beer. Neither outcome would be that. This is simply an update. So, uh, happy Friday.