Review: Beer Wars

A one night only event featuring the emerging American craft brewery industry and their fight against the monster corporations like Anheuser-Busch.

Being quite the fan of American craft brewery, I was immediately interested. They especially spotlighted Sam Calagione, founder and owner of Dogfish Head Brewery. Sam's one of my favorite people. His brewery is in the top 50 in America, out of over 1500. The size and growth of his business is directly proportional to his customer's demand rather than misdirected capitalist know-how. The American craft brewery industry is full of companies like Sam's which are big as they want to be, not big as they can be. It seems based on their examples that it has allowed them to keep creative and quality integrity while still being finanically successful. It is the kind of breweries I am most interested in purchasing from.

In the preceding live panel featuring Sam, the director, Anat Baron, and a historian/author, Maureen Ogle among others, Ogle was kind of a pain. She was not a beer enthusiast, yet wrote about their history. She opposed breweries like Sam's because she believed that businesses will always expand and get more bottom-line focuses and become another giant like Budweiser. But Sam and co. were happy where they were. Isn't that not the American way? I truly believe that capitalist notions of "big as you want to be" has been completely misrepresented as "big as you can be," a philosophy that not only led to some of the most successful business on the market, but also for the biggest failures that were either bought out or stepped all over while the corporate giants get bigger.

It is a catch-22 of a great system that allows people to succeed, unfortunately. Thankfully, businesses like Sam's can etch out their own little sections of their respective market. Because frankly, beyond the obvious lack in taste and quality that the giants have from the crafts, they deserve to be where they are. I do not disregard that they have worked hard and used legititmate business tools to get their. But the documentary skewed on the side of crafts, depicting the giants as money-grubbing, evil villains. Far too cynical for my liking.

The documentary did uncover a huge flaw in the beer industry: The Three Tier System. It is legal, but I question its ethics. Basically the beer industry is made up of 3 seperate bodies, retail, distributors, and breweries. Working like the US government, it is three branches that work together to keep the industry going, but are completely independent from each other theoretically. What happens is Anheuser-Busch buys their own distributor, and only allows beers that they own or are in partnership with to be distributor from their. This fills the others with independent craft beers and makes it almost impossible for budding businesses to get into them. Thus this creates a fight for shelf space in local retailers. A system put into place after prohibition to prevent monopolies, but it helped continue the monopolies.

If you are a big beer drinker, especially craft beer, I suggest finding this. It was damn informative, if not a little biased, but so are most documentaries from my experience. If you can properly wade through the opinions, there are some damn interesting facts involved.

10/10.