State Your Case
Billion Bottles of Beer
Every year, Pennsylvania brews enough craft
beer to get the entire nation drunk. Twice.
It was just announced that over a billion bottles
of beer was produced in the state last year
according to data from Brewers Association.
That's enough to give every American over the
age of 21 over six drinks. In a niche industry —
which still only accounts for about 12 percent
of U.S. beer sales, — that's a lot of beer.

How do they do it? Pennsylvania produces beer
for two of the "big" players in the industry:
Yuengling and Boston Beer, the maker of
Samuel Adams.Those two companies make up
a the maority of PA's craft beer output.

Yuengling is well known nationally, claiming the
title of "America's oldest brewery."
In addition to Yuengling and Boston Beer,
Troegs is now one of the five largest craft
brewers in the state. It's joined by
Downingtown's Victory Brewing and
Philadelphia's Yards.
Traditional hotbed states with the most breweries include
#1 California — home of pioneering breweries such as
Anchor Brewing Co., and Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. —
leading the way with 520. Colorado holds the No. 2 spot
(252) and is home to New Belgium and Oskar Blues, and
Pennsylvania,  is No. 3 (236). But other states have the
most breweries per person with Oregon, which has 191
breweries including Deschutes and Rogue, boasts
4.7 breweries for every 100,000, followed by
Vermont(No. 2 at 4.6 per person), and Colorado and
Montana tied at No. 3 (4.5).

Craft beer sales at retail, including supermarkets, mass
market chains and convenience stores, have risen 6%
over the past 52 weeks, amounting to $4 billion,
And in its 2017's half-year report, the Brewers
Association says the amount of craft beer sold is
continuing to bubble up at a rate of 5% .

The city with the most breweries, based on CircleUp's
analysis: Portland, with 78, followed by Denver (63), San
Diego (61), Seattle (49), and Chicago (43).
Number 1 and More- IPAs have become even more trendy going from 21
percent to 30 percent of the craft beer market iso far this year.  Five years ago
IPAs were only 8% of craft sales.

Pay to Work- Forking out cash to pick grapes, apples and hops…working side
by side with employees who are being paid for the same job is a new vacation fad.
The priciest is at the singer Sting’s Italian Tuscan villa.  This year the star is charging
$264 a day for fans to come and pick grapes and olives on his 900-acre property .

Profit Margin-  Brewers pouring, selling cans or filling growlers at their own
tasting/ taprooms make 40 to 50 percent more than they would if they sold their
beer wholesale to a distributor. They've cut out the middleman.

Lambic Combo -  Geuze which is made by combining a young lambic and an
older one in a bottle and allowing a second fermentation to occur, is the fastest
growing Belgium beer style in the past 12 months according to BeerMarketing.org.

Goose Island Pubs- Anheuser-Busch has launched Goose Island pubs in
London, Toronto, Sao Paolo, Shanghai, Seoul and Monterrey, Mexico.  Needless to
say all are owned by Goose Island’s parent company, Anheuser-Busch.
The Hottest Cold Beer

Sour beer is the hottest cold drink of 2017.  Thirty years ago we would have thrown
these brews away, saying they were bad, now, brrewers are purposely putting
dedicated tanks in their breweries to sour beer.  Sour beer has become a go-to for craft
breweries across the country, as sales have spiked. Just 45,000 cases of sour beer were
sold in the U.S. in 2015, a that more than quintupled to over 245,000 cases in 2016
and is set to rise an additional 9% this year, The drink gets its tart taste from bacteria
like Lactobacillus and Pediococcus, which produce acids that cause it to sour.

While sour beer’s flavor is old, American brewers have only learned how to safely
produce it en masse over the past five years. Conventional beers are brewed with a
single strain of yeast to yield the same taste in every batch. Sour beer, in contrast, uses
a variety of bacteria and wild yeast, which can produce a different mix of flavors each
time, ranging from spicy and leathery to fruity and floral. The process is tricky to perfect
— one rogue microbe could potentially infect an already-sterilized beer,
causing it to ferment further than intended. Most American brewers avoided sours
for fear of losing money on the fickle brew

After years of experimenting and sharing tactics, though, many brewers have now
perfected the processes to produce enough of the brew to keep up with growing
demand. Across breweries that produce it, sour beer is quickly outselling other forms of
craft beer like pilsner, stout and lager, with sales second only to IPAs.

Sour beer comes in many varieties, which have been refined over the decades in
Germany and Belgium, where sour beer has long been popular. There’s the light and tart
Lambic beer, the fruity Flanders brew, the sea salt and coriander-influenced Gose and
the lemony wheat beer Berliner Weisse. In the U.S., beer makers often put an American
twist on the traditional recipes, with the addition of fruit or other ingredients to draw out
tart and sweet flavors.  Sours have drawn wine drinkers to beer since it's a whole new
spectrum of beers they might not have thought existed before.


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Edited by Jim Attacap

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