Elysian Brewing sold, This post could probably run on to book length, with as much as my stunned brain – abruptly informed of the sale of Elysian Brewing to AB/InBev yesterday as I was busy with something else – has churned up in the hours (many of them sleepless and dead quiet) since I received this…this gut-punch.
Seattle’s Elysian Brewing has been sold to the Great Satan of the beer world, Belgium/Brazil’s AB/InBev, a soulless, bean-countin’, avaricious, cut-throat, amoral international conglomerate that has gobbled up many of the world’s great breweries and now has its sights set on the craft beer movement here in the US.
For those who want a basic primer on how I feel about AB getting its malignant tentacles into ANY part of what has been, for 30 years, the most uplifting, soulful, life-affirming, humane, and decent business segment in American history, this link will take you to my piece on their acquisition of Bend’s 10 Barrel, and this link will go to my Seattle P-I post on AB’s take-over of Chicago’s legendary Goose Island. There’s no need for me to plow all that ground again but just know, if you decide to click over, that every single thing said in those posts applies here.I was confused when I heard about Goose Island.
I was angry when I heard about 10 Barrel. I’m DISGUSTED at this decision on the part of the people who own Elysian; people I had always held in high regard and trusted to make a solid product, if not always the best of its type, even locally. There are a LOT of Elysian beers that you never once saw mentioned in my seven years of writing The Pour Fool. I have always thought “Loser” was dreadful and still do. The Dragonstooth Stout is a real lowest-common-denominator version of a big American Stout. The Perseus Porter is quite pallid by comparison to even Elysian’s neighbor out I-90, Snoqualmie Brewing’s “Steam Train”, not to mention a couple dozen other West Coast Porterae. Many of their experiments elicited a big ol’ Irish “Meh” from me…but many were sublime. “Avatar” Jasmine IPA is one of the great ideas in making infused beer ever. “Peste” remains the best chili beer I’ve ever tasted. Their Peppercorn Saison is exceeded only by Ballard’s Populuxe Brewing’s version of same. And Men’s Room Black was simply inspired; a near perfect example of hoppy Darkness that wears better than your favorite jeans.
This is all gone, now.
I cannot and will not aid and abet the sworn enemy of American craft beer by being as worldly and faux-hip as those people who offer a jaunty, “It’s just business, dude. Relax and have a great beer!” That will be the mantra for Elysian, now, just as it was for Goose and 10B: “The beer won’t change!“, AB and the newly-rich owners will trumpet, “It will get even better, now that we have more resources and better distribution. More people will be able to enjoy our beer! This will be GOOD for beer lovers!”
I have no personal knowledge of this at all but I would bet anything that one of the first official acts, after a craft brewery is sold to AB, is for some transition expert from The Borg Collective comes in and says roughly the following: “Look, you need to be ready for what’s about to happen. Lots of people are going to be angry. They’ll say you sold out. They’ll say they’ll never drink Elysian again and some of those will be your best customers. You, personally, will be called whores and sell-outs. This is going to go on for a while and you’ll need a thick skin to get through it. The best move? Just smile and ignore the tough questions and Stay On Message: “The Beer will be ever better!” Make it about the beer, not about the sale. But remember, the American consumer has a short memory. Once those people who abandon Elysian calm down and taste the beers and realize that nothing has changed, they’ll come back. It’s hard to be pissed off for months and years on end. And those people who do actually follow through and boycott you will be replaced, tenfold! You’ll find an all new customer base, all those people who never saw Elysian before. You’ll be in sports arenas and grocery stores all over the country and even casual drinkers will find an Elysian they like…and we’ll help with that. We bring over 100 years of experience in targeting what American beer drinkers like and we’ll help you sand off the rough edges and make beers that appeal to everybody.”
And there goes yet another fine American craft brewery, willfully marching straight off into Hell, hand in hand with Lucifer himself.
Make no mistake here: this is just another rather modest step in AB’s eventual plan to recover what they lost when the Craft Beer Boom came along: their iron-clad control of American beer. For over 100 years, AB ran things in American brewing. Other breweries like Coors ad Miller and Pabst have endured but, despite their nigh brand visibility, neither generates more than a fraction of AB’s sales:
Combined, Molson Coors and SABMiller – with all their subsidiary brands like Blue Moon tossed in – account for 6% less than AB alone. Bud Light is still the best-selling beer in the US, surpassed globally only by two brands with captive audiences in China, Snow and Tsing Tao. (2 billion Chinese can’t be wrong…can they?)
In their everyday actions at limiting the growth and distribution of craft beers, AB/InBev shows the hollowness of their claims of being a friend of brewers everywhere and big fans of craft beer. They’re fighting craft on dozens of fronts simultaneously, from Florida’s ongoing dust-up over allowable growler sizes (Bud and its associated brands and not, of course, growler-fill items) to its bloodthirsty attempts to obfuscate the issues in South Carolina’s bid to get a Stone satellite brewery and pub in Charleston. Anyone who thinks for a second that AB’s goal in acquiring Elysian, Goose, 10B, and Blue Point is anything other than an attempt to either control or kill craft beer simply doesn’t know history or is so spiritually vacant that they can easily rationalize away all that messy fluff like business ethics and morals and customer loyalty and independence and American entrepreneurship and what’s right and wrong. For those empty meat sacks, “It’s all about the beer, man!” and they are exactly the brain-dead geese AB relies onto keep their markets profitable and their ink black.
But in Elysian’s case, this is more to me than the flash of anger that 10 Barrel’s sale evoked. The Cox brothers were just a couple of Central Oregon mover ‘n’ shaker wannebes; guys who, as dozens of my Bend friends have confirmed, were always in it for the money and prestige and Cool Factor of “being in craft beer” and whose vacuous response to dollars from AB was entirely predictable. I didn’t know them, had no personal investment.
But Elysian was, almost certainly, THE quintessential Seattle/Washington brewery. They were hard-working, which we value here in the Mildew Corner. They were adamantly, defiantly counter-cultural, with their association with SubPop and KISW’s The Men’s Room and the Fisher House and the Seattle music scene.They have a pub 200 feet from the Seahawks stadium. They invested in those hallmark Seattle neighborhoods of Georgetown, Capital Hill, Tangletown, and Pioneer Square. They did all manner of Cool Shit, like the 12 Beers of The Apocalypse, with their Charles Burns labels and Uber-Cool flavors. Save for Mac & Jack’s and Georgetown Brewing, there was no brewery that was more Seattle than Elysian. “Gut-punch“? You better believe it. There is no brewer in Washington for whom I had a higher regard than Dick Cantwell; no brewer in the Northwest I admired more than 10 Barrel’s Tonya Cornett. Now, both of them and all the little miracles they have wrought and will in the future are dead to me. Beer quality be damned, there are some things that are more important than just kickin’ back with a Cold One; some ideals and principles and allegiances and relationships and an entire communally-built culture that simply CANNOT - Can-Goddamnit-Not!! - coexist with the cynicism and bottom-line mentality and appalling business practices of a company like AB, which has shown itself capable of anything when it comes to initiating competition, seizing every advantage, stickin’ it to anyone who dares to compete, and openly scoffing at the whole notion of “a level playing field”.
Today, the owners of Elysian - Joe Bisacca, Dick Cantwell, and David Buhler – have offered all of us who bonded with their community vibe, great beers, and – for lack of a better word - Seattleness, a big ol’ hearty “Up Yours!” What they’ve said, in effect, is that our allegiance to their brand, our dollars spent on Elysian beers, our online reviews, our proudly wearing Elysian gear, the crown-driven demand for Avatar as a year-round beer, our good wishes and support were just…not enough. In the classic, predictable, utterly sad and depressing manner of businesspeople everywhere whose ambition eventually begins to outweigh their original values, they went for the easy cash. Somehow, breweries like Firestone Walker, Three Floyds, Cigar City, Deschutes, Stone, Dogfish, Sam Adams, Founders, Bell’s, Troeg’s and a hundred others worked it out to become prominent national brands on their own initiative, by their own rules and values, without resorting to crawling into the well-soiled bed with a proven enemy of everything they originally held dear. Oh, they’ll tell themselves that they did it to “grow their brand” and help them achieve their goals and please more people but what it actually did was invite into my state, my backyard, my freakin’ hometown, a virus that will and very much wants to kill craft brewing as we know it in the US.
Bisacca, Cantwell, and Buhler weren’t imaginative enough to see how they could achieve their lofty ambitions for Elysian without compromise, so they chose the easy way out, the quick ‘n’ dirty, the deal with the devil. They were lazy and greedy. Now, these unprincipled SOBs at AB own property in Washington. They can now legitimize trips to Olympia to sell their Holy Of Holies, the three-tier system, which they largely control all over the nation. They now have an entree for their well-documented shady business practices, squeezing competitors, and undermining, basically, anybody who is not AB/InBev, because that’s what they do. That’s what they have always done. It’s always been impossible for AB to sell their beers on the level-playing-field basis of quality because they have no quality to sell. They make watery, insipid, cheaply-made adjunct Pilsners and that is all they do with any facility. They’ve become world-class great at little backroom deals and dismissive marketing ploys because they had to in order to keep people from discovering just how profoundly crappy their products are.
