Ken Weaver

Desperately Seeking Session Beer: Interview with Dan Carey of New Glarus Brewing Co.

Desperately Seeking Session Beer is a collaborative effort with Lew Bryson’s The Session Beer Project™, and aims to seek out the finest lower-alcohol brews from the West Coast and beyond. For these purposes, we loosely consider a ‘session beer’ as being 4.5% ABV or less, flavorful enough to be interesting, balanced enough for multiple pints, conducive to conversation, and reasonably priced. Lew also puts it another way: “low-alcohol, but not low-taste.” These beers can be complex, effortlessly satisfying, indelible, and elusive.

There are good reasons why cardboard boxes from folks in Wisconsin I have never met keep appearing on my doorstep. It’s not (despite tendencies in that direction) because I have a cheese problem.

Dan Carey, co-owner and brewmaster of New Glarus Brewing Company in Wisconsin (and ultimately a German-style brewer at heart), makes some of this country’s finest wheat beers, fruit beers, and lagers. Skeptical? The Ratebeer style percentages don’t exactly disagree with me. Still skeptical? It doesn’t really matter. Because Dan and his wife Deb (founder & president of New Glarus, and the first female example of both in the U.S.) rock their home state’s beer scene harder than most breweries can even dream of.

I’d originally planned to interview Dan regarding his fruit beers – Apple Ale, Raspberry Tart, and Belgian Red – but the story of how New Glarus came to be so successful while keeping close to home proved more interesting. This is a story of session beer, of how one brewery thrives without being extreme.

(© Anneliese Schmidt)

KW: I guess my first question is how you go about crafting these different fruit beers. How do you approach the fruit addition; and, in the same respect, why did you decide on sort of really low-alcohol beers? Elsewhere you see like 8%, 10%, you know, gigantic sticky fruit beers, and yet you’re talking 4%, on the order of 4%, and your beers show this enormous fruit character.

DC: Well, I think the thing is that alcohol is part of an overall picture so, if you have a beer that has a lot of alcohol, that usually means there’s a lot of everything else. We don’t really think in terms of alcohol. The rest of the world does and it, to me, is sort of an English thing. This whole ABV thing is not something that I even really think about. I’m more of a German-school brewer, so I think in terms of original gravity, and alcohol to me – I don’t even like talking about alcohol. It’s like asking a butcher to measure his steaks or hamburger in terms of percent fat. Alcohol to me isn’t important. When I brew these beers it’s about flavor.

The idea to make the fruit beers was not to have an alcohol bomb. You know, on Ratebeer.com and BeerAdvocate, generally those [higher-alcohol fruit] beers do well and they do well because they’re like, you know, they’re huge. They’re like a woman with fake breasts, not something you’re going to bring home and marry.

To give you an example, somebody brought me a bourbon-barrel-aged stout, and they said “taste this beer”, and I said “wow, that’s like the best beer I’ve ever had, that tastes like chocolate cake, that’s just really wonderful.” They said “here, well, take a 12oz bottle home.” So I took it home and put it in the refrigerator. Friday night I brought it out and I let it warm up a little bit, and I got about a third of the way through the bottle and I couldn’t finish it.

The problem with Ratebeer.com and BeerAdvocate is that you get this little snapshot, that people will drink a glass of beer sitting around in their underwear in front of their computer, and you have to scream really loud to be heard, but beer is not meant to be drank that way. It’s a social beverage, and something that you sit around with friends and enjoy. So personally, I don’t want to drink a 9% alcohol beer. Anything over 5 or 6 ounces, I can’t take it, I can’t buy a 22-ounce bottle of 9% alcohol, because I’m going to dump about two-thirds of it down the drain because there’s no way I could drink it.

So the idea for these beers was, “What does fruit taste like? Fruit is sour and sweet. It’s tart and fruity, and intense, but it doesn’t need to hit you in the face. The idea for these beers is something you’d have for a Thanksgiving dinner. I would not sit down with a shot of cherry-infused vodka to celebrate my Thanksgiving dinner, but I would with Raspberry Tart or Belgian Red.

Whenever a Thanksgiving thread comes up and people are talking, “Oh, what are you going to drink for Thanksgiving dinner?” And people are talking these gigantic barrel-aged Imperial stouts, that just sounds awful, and a distraction from the food and everything else.

Exactly. I agree 100% with you. That’s why I don’t drink 16%-alcohol zinfandel. Give me a 13% Chianti, or something that’s more approachable.

The other thing that I think people that think about beer, like you (not you personally), but people who think about what they drink, they forget that a brewery has to still be able to sell the beer. So if you make something that’s so bright lights and tinsel and in your face, there’s a certain percentage of the population who will drink it simply because it’s 10,000 [bitterness] units, but they’re not going to come back to it, they’re not the people who are going to continue to drink that beer.

So the idea of making a beer that’s sessionable is important because it’s what people want to drink, it’s what is socially responsible, and it makes for a long-term investment for a company, for a brewery to make a beer that people will drink. Fortunately, that’s the way that the world works.

(© Anneliese Schmidt)

Do you consider these fruit beers “session beers”? I mean, the Raspberry Tart… you sounded like you were talking about it that way, but the Raspberry Tart, Belgian Red, Apple Ale. Do you see these as session beers?

No, I don’t consider them session beers. I consider the Apple Ale a session beer, but not the fruit beers. The fruit beers are more of a study in the taste of fruit. We do make what we call a “session beer,” but it’s a little bit out of your description. It’s more like 5% ABV, but it’s more in the spirit of what you’re thinking about. Basically what it is is it’s a little IPA. We made a beer that’s called “Moon Man”, which is actually the name of one of our brewer’s cats. It has about 2 1/3 pounds of dry hops per barrel, and the purpose of this beer was to make a session beer that had a balance: a little bit of bitterness, a little bit of maltiness, but mainly a lot of hop aroma so that people would have the experience of the American-type hop aromas without 9% alcohol and 100 IBUs. It’s been out since March, and it’s now our number 2 selling beer.

Behind Spotted Cow presumably?

Yep.

How do those beers ultimately fit into your portfolio then? Even if they’re not 4.5%, your lower-gravity beers are your biggest sellers it seems like.

Our beers are around 5%-6% by volume. It’s where most of our beers are. So this conversation is a little bit awkward for me [we both laugh here, thankfully], since I don’t consider Belgian Red and Raspberry Tart “session beers”, they just happen to fall into your criteria for alcohol, which is 4.5%. We do make some high-alcohol beers, but the reality of the situation is that they don’t sell very well.

To give you an example, we do zero marketing. When I say zero, I mean zero marketing, you have no radio, no television, no advertising, no neon signs, no nothing. So we brew the beer and it goes onto the shelf and people buy it, and I don’t control them at all. There’s no spiffs, there’s no “Put this beer on tap, and we’ll give you tickets to the Packers game.” There’s none of that. And the beers that sell are on the lower gravities. You may have people that want to write about the 10%-alcohol beer that was aged in bourbon barrels and fermented with brettanomyces, etc. etc. They may want to talk about that, but they don’t particularly drink it. So, the reason why we brew the beers that we do is not because we have a grand plan, it’s because we do what our customers tell us to do, and we live on their graces, solely on the graces of our customers.

So when people put money on the table, they pick the song that we play. I remember Bert Grant used to say back in the old days that “I brew the beer I like, and to hell with you if you don’t like it.” You know, it’s like the antithesis of the Burger King ad: have it my way, or don’t eat it at all. And that’s not how we view our customers. Our customers tell us what to brew, and so we just follow. And normally it’s a lower-alcohol beer.

(© Anneliese Schmidt)

You have two main lines of conversation most of the time now. Well, maybe one main line, which is extreme beer and things like this. You hear about the ABV race. Things going on over in Europe between Schorschbrau and Brewdog doing 40%, 43%…

That’s a blip on the radar, because all they’re doing is freezing the beer. Who can freeze the beer more? Like I said about fake breasts: it’s just more silicone. It doesn’t relate to anything that’s grounded in the long-term.

Where do you see the American craft beer industry? I mean, you look at what’s getting coverage, what’s getting newspaper time, sort of what the larger narratives of the whole industry are right now – where do you think these smaller beers fit in? I think the majority of beer being sold right now still is session beer, or something along the five, five-and-a-half level of alcohol. Where do you see the extreme beer thing fitting into that? Is it a distraction, is it a novelty?

It’s a good question, it’s a great question, and I have a definite opinion on it, but of course the jury is still out. But how I view it, and what you just asked, the question you just asked could be a book. Somebody could do like a PhD or a Master’s thesis.

Sessionability does not necessarily mean lack of complexity. So the best beer is one that you can drink, and is complex, and I think we all know what that is, because we know it when we taste it. We taste a beer and you say “Wow, THAT’S a good beer.” And it doesn’t happen very often, but from time to time, we all of us taste a beer and say that’s great, that’s a homerun.

The future of the beer business is a marriage of complexity and drinkability. You have a beer that’s 10% alcohol and 100 IBUs and dry-hopped with three pounds per barrel, or you have Busch Light, that’s the spectrum. What you want is to take the complexity of the big beer and marriage it with the drinkability of the light beer, and when you do that, brewers hit a homerun.

When you think about other beverages… do you drink wine? I’m sure you must.

Not nearly as much as I should living out in Sonoma County, but I do.

Then you know that wine is incredibly light and easy-drinking. You’ve got something that’s 12%, or 14%, or 15% alcohol, but it’s very light, and it’s very complex. And I’m always amazed by that. And then when you taste a Belgian beer that’s 6%, 7%, 8% alcohol, they’re very light and delicate and easy-drinking.

So I don’t think sessionability has to be tied to a cutoff of alcohol percent. It’s more about, a beer has to be more drinkable, you know, it has to be, you want to drink it, it tastes good to you, you want to have a second pint. That is about subtlety and finesse. Just because the Sex Pistols can turn their amps up, does not necessarily mean that their music is better than Beethoven. Subtleties in a given musician’s music is about the small things, and that’s where the future – that’s where us as brewers, the 1,500 of us around the country, as we hone our processes and get control over what we’re doing, we’re going to continue to do a better job of making a beer that has that impact but that is drinkable. It’s like if you’re learning to play the guitar, the electric guitar, and you play it really softly, you can hear all the mistakes. Well, just turn the amp up and there’s lots of feedback and it sounds cool.

I think the reason you’re asking this question is that craft brewing is on the verge [...] – we’ve already passed up Germany, now we’re getting ready to pass up Belgium, in the sense that we’re going to be able to turn our amplifiers down and you’re still going to appreciate our music. So we don’t have to be really loud, we don’t have to be the biggest, we don’t have to be, you know, the girl in the bar with the most makeup on to be attractive. I think that’s where the future’s going, towards the marriage of complexity and drinkability.

But on a separate note, I think that you’re seeing and alluding to a dichotomy in the craft brewery market. I think the future is the craft brewery market. The Anheuser-Busch is faltering, people are losing interest in boring beer, so we are the future, and you see two groups: you see those that sell 5,000 or 8,000 barrels of beer in 35 states, or people like us that sell 100,000 barrels of beer in 1 state. It depends on what your company goal is, so that you might interview other people and they’ll say, we’re going to make really the biggest, badass, boldest beer and we’re going to sell it across the country. If I made the biggest, boldest, badass beers, I would be out of business, unless I sold in 35 states. So, there’s going to be a split. They’ll be the guys making 5,000 or 8,000 barrels of beer, and then they’ll be the rest of us who are strong in our local markets.

(© Ken Weaver)

Do you think the extreme beer trend is a distraction from some of this, or is it just sort of a necessary evil?

Absolutely not at all. I am sounding pissy and negative…

I sound pissy and negative all the time.

The easiest way for me to say it is, is the extreme beers are doing an important job for the beer business by forcing the medium up. Thirty years ago, a pale ale with 30 IBUs – that was like, woah, this is woah, this is, this is like way out in left field, this is, this is crazy beer. Now we have people who are pushing 100 IBUs and god knows what percent alcohol, so what that does is it pushes the medium up. Although the average person is never going to go for a 100-IBU beer, because these people are pushing the extreme, now the average person who was raised on Coors Light is drinking a 30-IBU beer and liking it. And so I think it’s a good thing.

What are some of the brewers that you think are doing some of the best jobs of that, or some of your favorite session brewers that you actually drink?

Deschutes is an amazing brewery; they always make great beer. Of course Vinnie at Russian River, Vinnie and Natalie; they make great beer, I’m always blown away by their beer. I think, of course, Sierra Nevada is always spot on and flawless. I drink a lot of really good beer from Petrus. Westvleteren beers. Westvleteren is a good example of big, extreme beers that are eminently drinkable. Those are the big ones that come to mind.

Do you think session beer is a good measure of what else the breweries are doing, in terms of overall craftsmanship – is that one of the better places to look in terms of assessing that sort of thing?

I think the best way, in my opinion, to assess a brewery is go to the neighborhood, go within a five-mile radius of the brewery and walk into the dive-iest bar you can find and ask the guys behind the bar what they think of that brewery. And that’s the best way to know if a brewery is a good brewery.

But more to answer the question [...], I’d say yes. Because it’s harder to brew a beer that’s subtle than it is to brew a beer that’s huge.

(© Anneliese Schmidt)

Two questions left. Why are your German beers so damn good, Dan?

Oh, my German beers. Well, thanks!

I was an apprentice in Germany. I’ve been a brewer for, ah, thirty-two years now, and ever since I started brewing I’ve always been a fan of lagers and German beer and I consider myself a lager brewer. I just can’t talk enough people into drinking lager beers. I try to make something that’s drinkable. I think it’s just something that I’ve been doing for so long that I know how to do it.

Lastly, what else can we look forward to – well, “what can we look forward to” is such a funny phrase when most of us don’t live in Wisconsin – but I mean what else do you guys have coming out in the future as far as session beer, or as far as anything else that’s new? I know you guys have your calender set up, but you did the Two Women Lager thing that was entirely off the radar.

Yeah, that was something because I wanted a lager for the summer.

I wanted you to brew that for the summer, too. So it works out.

We’re making an Abt. Our next Unplugged will be an Abt, like St. Bernardus or Westvleteren 12, something like that. We’re going to be brewing that here in a few weeks, and that’ll be released in August; but that’s the antithesis of what we’ve been talking about…

We’ll still be looking forward to it. Best of luck, Dan. Thanks so much.

Thanks for talking to me.

(© Anneliese Schmidt)

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