It was an interesting point that Berryessa‘s Lori Nicolini brought to the surface during a chat of a wide arrangement of beers that the Sacramento-area brewery has on tap.
Being diverse for a lot of different drinkers is important, but it’s also important to use a variety of hops and grains to help maintain the supply chain. If a brewery focuses on cutting-edge hops and stops buying those older kinds, hop growers stop harvesting them instead of planting new crops. That means older hops, and in the same vein — grains, can be tossed to the wayside and some styles could shrink into history. The same could be said with replacing a beer handle with a seltzer tap.
So a beer like Berryessa’s Whippersnapper English Mild Brown — which is a multi-award-winning beer that is one of the brewery’s most popular brands at the taproom — helps in that aspect said Nicolini, a co-founder of the company.
”I think that if you walk into a brewery and it’s all seltzer [and IPAs], I want to say their CFO is running the company,” she said, indicating that monetary metrics could be dictating what is being made.
”It’s very short-sighted, in my opinion.”
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Nicolini said if you really look at the holistic side and the craft beer business as a whole, it might not be the most money for tomorrow, but it’s going to be the most for 40 years from now.
”Just keeping that diversity is important,” she said. The brewery, located 30 miles west of Sacramento in Winters, California, celebrates classic styles along with newer brands.
”It’s not only important for customers to be able to taste different beer, but as I said, it’s important for those ingredients to still be there,” she said. ”Because if nobody’s buying those ingredients, the farmers aren’t going to grow them. And we’ve already found that with some of our favorite hops too.”
Whippersnapper is an interesting beer for the brand. Although the sales staff can’t find much traction in off-premise sales, it is a top seller in the taproom. That shows that consumers may want to try it and enjoy a beer in a certain setting.
“It’s one of those beers, we feel really important to keep on, just to keep our beer offerings diverse,” Nicolini said of the 4% ABV creation that husband Chris Miller came up with during previous brewing stops in his career. “It’s just a great beer that pairs well with everybody or with everything.”
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