All about micro, not the macro at workshop

Tuesday was a perfect day to drink beer.

The sun was out, the wind was blowing, everything about it said spring and for someone like me who cut their beer-drinking teeth at the biergartens of northern Bavaria, it was a perfect time for a beer.

As the Germans would say, “Gott sei Dank it is Bloomington Craft Beer Week.”

Tuesday night, The Tap on North College Avenue hosted a Brewer’s Workshop with head brewers from four Indiana breweries of various sizes. Bloomington Brewing Company founder Jeff Mease led Brugge Brasserie’s Ted Miller, Flat 12’s Rob Caputo, Sun King’s Clay Robinson and Black Acre’s Justin Miller in a conversation about the state of brewing in Indiana and their own backgrounds in brewing.

“I found naming the brewery the hardest thing to do,” Robinson said. He said before settling on Sun King, he had tried out “Solstice” as a reflection of the idea of the passing of seasons, as Sun King produces a changing slate of seasonal brews.

The brewers also discussed the changing market and how new struggles remain on the horizon for the industry. As more macrobreweries like Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors start producing so-called “crafty” beers like Blue Moon and Third Shift, more of the craft market is threatened. Even with the expanding beer market, only 2.9 percent of all beers sold in Indiana are craft brews, Ted Miller said.

All of the beer commercials in Super Bowl XLVII, Robinson pointed out, had ties to the big corporations. Corporations have looked at everything from beer names to logos and packaging of small breweries to emulate them on their larger-scale projects.

“Craft beer has soul,” Robinson said.

So what’s next?

“Sessions,” Ted Miller said.

American brewers have had their love affair with pale ales and are now trending toward sours. The market has already been saturated with heavy-hitting experimental ales that reach 10, 11, 12 percent ABV and beyond. What drinkers need now, the brewers agreed, is a solid group of low ABV beers that are easy to drink, yet remain full-bodied and flavorful.

“I want to drink beer because I love it,” Robinson said. “I don’t want to drink a beer I can only have three to five ounces of or only one of. I want to sit down and drink beer for three hours and hear all the crazy stories you have.”

He said he’s working on a collaboration for his upcoming wedding this summer with Oskar Blues Brewery in Denver that will be low ABV and hoppy, so he can drink a lot of it and still get the flavor he enjoys.

“It’s a lot easier to make an 11 percent than a good four percent,” Justin Miller said. “For us, we’re trying to bring back the lunch drinking, which is an art which has been
lost.”

­— cscudder@indiana.edu