Faithful readers may have recall that the three largest brewers in Canada are all owned by foreign conglomerates, as the drinks industry continues consolidating towards oligopoly.
The typical news is to hear about a megabrewery acquiring a small craft brewer in order to capture that portion of the market, similar to the recent announcement of Calgary’s Wild Rose Brewing being acquired by Sleemans, which is in turn owned by Sapporo.
The wine and spirits industry are no different, with plenty of those so-called cottage wineries really being owned by conglomerates, or the centuries-old whiskey distillery being just one brand in the portfolio of a multinational.
An announcement last week was different than the norm, describing the merger of two long-running craft breweries, rather than the more common news of a whale-sized brewery swallowing up a guppy.
The press release describes the deal as a merger, but when one company is 10x the size of another in a so-called merger, it does look more like an acquisition.
In this case, the Boston Beer Company is the 2nd-largest crafter brewer in the USA, and is acquiring Delaware-based Dogfish Head, the 13th-largest craft brewer.
Long-time imbibers of crafty brews will recognize both of those names, especially the Boston Beer Company, the makers of the popular Samuel Adams line of beers.
The Boston Beer Company started operations in 1984, and is widely considered to have started the entire craft beer movement in North America. While now a public company, BBC is still majority-owned by its enigmatic founder, who has been close friends with the husband and wife team that founded Dogfish Head for decades, so this has been a very friendly $300 million merger.
While this may sound like a big deal, the newly merged company will control a mere 2% of the domestic market, and will remain the 2nd-largest craft brewer in the USA, still slightly behind Yuengling, the oldest operating craft brewer in the USA, operating since 1829.
I can still remember my first Samuel Adams beer from the BBC, their flagship Boston Lager, the brew that launched the craft beer revolution. The year was 1994, and the Klein government had just privatized liquor distribution in Alberta the previous year, which caused the availability of imported beers to skyrocket overnight.
The early 90s were still a bleak time for Alberta beer drinkers, with a scrappy young upstart called Big Rock the only shining beacon of craftiness in a sea of bland macrobrews.
Imagine my delight when I found a Samuel Adams Boston Lager at Bottlescrew Bills, the only craft beer pub in Alberta in the early 90s.
After going through a few different styles, my favourite settled on the Samuel Adams Octoberfest, a golden-hued Märzenbier originally from Bavaria that is the official beer style of a little beer festival held every October in Munich that you may have heard of.
Unlike the brews of the Boston Beer Company, which are readily available across Canada, Dogfish Head has only been sporadically available in Alberta over the last decade or so, and only in small quantities at specialty stores.
My first introduction to Dogfish Head was many years ago, a special recipe called Midas Touch, that was brewed using ingredients discovered in a 2700 year old drinking vessel at an archeological dig of the tomb of King Midas, in what is now modern-day central Turkey.
The Dogfish Head brewery collaborated with the archaeologists to painstakingly recreate the recipe of this ancient beer with biomolecular analysis using mass spectrography from a team of scientists at the University of Pennsylvania.
This ancient beverage was sort of halfway between beer and mead, as it predates the use of hops as a bittering agent. And since that was a drink in a royal tomb, it was spiced with saffron, a delicate flower that is worth more than its own weight in solid gold.
With this merger, I am looking forward to seeing Dogfish Head get access to the wider supply chain of the Boston Beer Company, if only because I have been craving their 90 Minute IPA, which I have not seen in Alberta for many years.
Enjoy a bit of craft beer history by looking for a Samuel Adams at your local bottle shop, and keep your eyes open for Dogfish Head to appear in Alberta again soon!
