Unless you’ve been going around with your eyes closed, it will have been impossible for you not to have noticed the veritable wave of breweries proudly promoting an often confusingly named beer they’ve just brewed as a collaborative ‘project’ with Another Person/Brewery/Celeb.
Once a rarity, collaboration brews have become an art-form both in terms of brewing and marketing, but just when did it all start, how do they work, and why?
As usual, we have to look to our cousins over the pond and to one of America’s oldest ‘craft brewers’. In 1997 Garrett Oliver, Master Brewer for Brooklyn Brewery and revered by many as the Godfather of the US Craft Brewing movement, engineered a collaborative brew with none other than Oxfordshire’s Brakspear Brewery; a fan of their beers for a number of years, he was keen to deliver a traditionally English bitter to the drinkers of New York.
Back then, the collaboration concept was very basic – I make a beer with you and you make a beer with me. The beer had a big American hop character, heavily dry-hopped with Cascade, which was a first for Brakspear. (Peter Scholey, Head Brewer of Brakspear was due to repeat the process at Brooklyn Brewery, but sadly in 2002 the Henley-on-Thames brewery closed before he was able to do so).
A few years later, Garrett was back in the UK, but this time at J.W. Lees in Manchester where he brewed Brooklyn Best Bitter with Giles Dennis. Consumers loved it and the brewery made it a Spring seasonal for several years.
But collaborative brewing doesn’t have to involve expensive air travel. Some brewers choose to separately brew the same beer at their respective breweries, following the same recipes, but with variations to yeast, malt and sometimes hops making for wildly different tasting beers.
Others stick to the same recipe and ingredients. Regardless of the process, marketing plays an important part – Twitter feeds, Facebook, Instagram, blogs, pump clips and badges which wouldn’t look out of place in the Tate Modern.
So why do brewers collaborate?
In such a congested market, it pays to stand out from the crowd and collaborations are one of the trendier ways to create noise, to grab consumer attention, get people excited about you. Collaborating with another brewer is a unique opportunity to see how others work, to openly discuss brewing techniques and recipes – what works, what doesn’t and what perhaps shouldn’t, but actually does! It’s a concept which is unique to brewing – almost no other industry would tolerate such non-competitiveness and certainly would baulk at such openness. A few to try…..