WEB’s meet-up for May was at gracious repeat host, Cedar Links Golf Club in Medford Oregon. Kelley, his cool mom Theresa and fun server Alexis, all treated us well.

Every month Women Enjoying Beer meets at a location in the Southern Oregon area to learn about beer. The 1.5 hour meet-up revolves around a select 4 small pour beer and food pairing. We’re glad so many businesses are eager to welcome us in, we have anywhere from 10 to 30 women each time, and it’s loaded with fun, engagement and flavor exploration.

The menu we enjoyed, in order:

• Boneyard RPM IPA with lemon pie on crushed graham cracker crust
• Good Life India Brown with puff pastry and sun-dried tomatoes
• Oakshire Line Dry Rye with Thai inspired chicken pasta
• Good Life Mountain Rescue Dry Hop Pale Ale with fresh baby tomato, basil, and mozzarella

With the pattern that is the meet-ups, we had Veterans (those who had been before) and Newbies. New attendees always receive a Welcome packet of goodies. I love giving away goodies and everyone likes getting them. It’s a simple, economical, and easy “thank you for being here” gift.

We also talked about American Craft Beer Week, the 2012 Rogue Flavor guide and took a short walk around a bit of the course before the event started.

So thanks to all – who attended, hosts, and supporters.

Beer businesses: if you choose to host women + beer groups, call on us first to help you develop a proper and successful plan. It’ll get you jump started in the right direction.

A local beer store, Beerworks, recently joined forces with WEB to launch their own signature beer education classes. We dubbed them “The Works: Beer Education Classes”. Simple, easy to understand and a play on the business name.

Success was present the very first night and the seats filled right up (which goes with smart planning). Basic format of one hour in length, one topic, and a select number of seats available – first pay, first sit.

It was fitting to feature Ingredients as the topic of this inaugural class and they were easily gathered to use in the class. I already have a super helpful malted barley kit from Briess, already had some whole cone hops from Indie Hops and procured a small flask of liquid yeast from my local brewery. Water is really good in our area and it flowed straight from the tap. We even took time to taste the water, which perhaps some never do in beer education.

Education is a simple powerful animal. To create a new variation of a known quote, A mind once stretched cannot return to its original shape. Stretch those minds and it’ll benefit everyone.

Here are the beers tastes we served to compliment the lesson components: Oakshire Overcast Espresso Stout (malted barley), Good Life IPA (hops), New Belgium Lips of Faith Series Farmhouse Saison (yeast)

The Series will run once a month and each topic will focus in on another aspect of and related to beer. June 19th is the next one, topic = Glassware, and you can register at Beerworks with payment to save your seat.

• Do you already wash all your dirty glasses?
• Do you have enough glassware to service a full house (meaning there’s not a shortage of glassware)?
• Do you believe the beers  you serve to be a high quality and should be served in clean glassware?
• Do you promote and expect as much from the entire staff to do as much?

Then don’t refill an empty beer glass for a ‘refill’. AAAUUUGGGHHH!!! I saw it happen at a small brewpub in central Oregon last weekend. It’s a pub I like YET this was a huge turn off.

Clean beer glass, every pour

It’s appalling to think this is allowed, however intentional or unintentional. It’s the responsibility of the business owners to make sure they serve a fresh beer in a clean glass every time.

What if that glass was unclean to begin with (residue, film, sanitizer)? Yuck!

If you don’t have enough operating capital to wash every dirty dish appropriately, if you don’t pass along the passion of the beer to everyone who serves it, then it’s time to changes businesses.

Quality beer deserves a clean glass every time.

Do you refill a plate of food on a dirtied dish? Doubt it.

Consumers: Demand a clean glass with every pour. Your beer deserves no less than the best opportunity to please you. Clean glassware is a huge part of this.

A few of the incredible professional beer community members

Because we study and gather qualitative psychographic data, it’s interesting to read quantitative stats. Fascinating!

• As of March 2012, there were 1,989 operating breweries in the USA.
• American small and independent breweries provide well over 100,000 jobs. Think of the end number when you add the large brewery employees!
• The small and independent breweries produced somewhere in the range of 11.47 million barrels in 2011.
• Over 4000 beers were entered in the 2012 World Beer Cup competition, which included 95 styles from 56 countries judged by 215 from 29 countries.

To celebrate our American Beer landscape, look for festivals, events and other beer related goings on. WEB is involved in many focused on fun education. If you’ll be at SAVOR June 8 & 9 2012 in Washington DC, be sure to look for us there.

Stats courtesy of Brewers Association

2011 Data Says!

America’s small and independent breweries:

• Experienced an 13% volume increase, 15% increase in retail sales (over 2010), which meant a barrel increase of 1.3 million.
• Represented 5.68% of the volume of the U.S. beer market (up from 4.97% in 2010), production reached 11,468,152 barrels.
• Increased retail sales represented 9.1% of the $95.5 billion dollar US beer market.

That’s a lot of beer. Cheers to keeping the flow going ~

All stats courtesy of the Brewers Association.

“I got so much from your talk yesterday. I was just talking with my brewery partner about why beer is not more popular with women and how we want to do something about that.”

Fun & smart women enjoying beer (Eugene, OR)

This quote was from a supporter who came to see our educational session at the 2012 Craft Brewers Conference. The bonus is this person took the time following the talk to approach me, introduce themselves and chat briefly. This is always appreciated and very much liked by me.

When you get specifics ‘back’ after a presentation – comments, questions, etc. – it should tell you that something has tripped the idea trigger. That’s a good thing and a measurable outcome.

The best things in life to me at un-measurable like enthusiasm, sharing, and thinking in support. Positive dialogue, like this, is another.

Be sure to support the speakers you hear and let them know specifically what you found useful and valuable, as well as constructive feedback to help them improve their connection to the audience. Any speaker worth their microphone will appreciate it.

One of the most visceral exercises I did at the recently concluded 2012 Craft Brewers Conference happened for hundreds of others too. Enter: The Siebel Institute’s Calibration Station room.

Wow. I’ve participated in flavor sensory exercises before and they’re always mind and intelligence expanding. This one fit right in and was intense in that there were 11 stations in which to taste and experience off flavors.

The important thing to know, after you learn to determine if the beer is ‘off’ is to isolate the cause. With a cause identification comes a solution to rectify the situation. No brewer I know whats their beer to be off – a heck of a lot of sweat, passion and energy goes into each batch.

When you have opportunity or when you want to make your own opportunity happen, participate in or host an off flavor beer tasting. It’s very eye-opening and deserves to be repeated periodically.

If you’re a brewery, how do you plan to capture your community?

• If you’re already open and you’ve already asked this question and have satisfactorily reached several answers, good for you.
• If you’re already open and have never discussed this, it’s overdue and still very necessary if you want to keep the doors open.
• If you’re a brewery in planning, discuss and determine this in-depth, several times.

Who is in the community you want to capture?

Community is what supports local breweries. You first have to know why you’re doing what you’re doing (making beer). Then you have to ask how would/is the business relating to and tied to the community. Intelligent and realistic planning how to in fact capturing their support is crucial.

Maybe you’re a distributing brewery and there are a few accounts for your beer locally and you’re aiming for larger population areas to sell your beer. Maybe you’re a brewpub and you don’t have any plans to package and distribute. Maybe you’re a brewery in planning and are realizing that there’s a lot more competition that you realized to navigate. (which there is)

Tip today: knowing the women in the communities you want to be successful in is critical to your success. American women make 75 – 85% of all purchasing decisions (across category lines) and do the bulk of the actual buying as well. 

Capturing the community that will support you and help you make a living involves women. Make the assumption you need to know them, how they are involved in their communities and what the resonance is with your brand.

World Beer Cup 2012

The 2012 World Beer Cup winners are announced here. They are recently complete following the annual Craft Brewers Conference, this year held in San Diego, California. Yours truly was there with the usual anticipation and enthusiasm.

The World Beer Cup, aka WBC, happens every two years in conjunction with the CBC. It’s a reflection of the global beer community and is truly a great opportunity to meet people from all over the world and try their beers. After judging is complete, remaining beers in unopened bottles are then opened and available before and available during the WBC Gala dinner. A BIG Pints up to Chris Swersey, judges and everyone involved in pulling off this incredible happening and making it look smooth and seamless.

Cheers to Global Beer Colleagues!

The Cup is biennially and I’m guessing one reason is that it’s an enormous undertaking. Very worthwhile and an orchestration the rest of us can only guess the enormity of effort involved.

At the dinner, Emily and I sat with some colleagues from Canada, a lively group of Australians were at the next table, and everywhere you looked, there were people from across the globe.

I love that beer is sincerely global. Just ask the Icelanders who won a medal if the trip was worth it.

Cheers to community, camaraderie and quality the world round.

2012 Canny Awards

The first ever Canny Awards were held yesterday preceding the Craft Brewers Conference. Yours truly judged which was harder than it would seem. Let’s see, here are a few reasons why…

1. 7 Categories to examine
2. Dozens of entry cans
3. Learning to dismiss certain attributes while focusing on others
4. Some categories had dozens of entries
5. Varying sizes of cans lent the challenge of more compact space for (for 12 oz) graphics vs. 16 oz+ cans.
6. Picking 3 overall choices was tough

Nonetheless, it was an engaging and interesting exercise. Paul and the Mumm crew had it organized, were very friendly and we weren’t rushed at all – which was good!

It was also enjoyable to meet the other judges – some whom I knew, some were new connections.

I’ll be eager to hear of the resulting Awards selected by a well-rounded panel of judges. They’re announced at 3 pm PST today.