Brewing 'the new wine'

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By Gabriella Boston

"I'm a firm believer that beer is the new wine," says Hugh Sisson, founder of Clipper City, a long-established craft brewery in Baltimore. "But we're about 20 to 25 years behind wine, and we have to keep educating the consumer."

The equivalent of a graduate seminar in the craft-beer revolution was provided at Savor, a beer-and-food-pairing showcase gathering of 68 craft brewers from all around the nation at the National Building Museum on Saturday.

The festival featured stouts and ales, pilsners and porters - and none of them was of the light, yellow-tinted, mass-marketed, beer-flavored-water variety.

Instead, most were dark and high in alcohol content, rivaling wine in more ways than one, which is no coincidence, because that's part of the craft brewers' goal - to have their product considered a good alternative to wine as a dinner and dessert companion.

"Beer has much more flavor range than wine," says Eric Wallace, co-founder of Left Hand Brewing Co. in Longmont, Colo. "You smash up some grapes, and you get wine. Beer is much more complex than that."

So, table upon table at Savor was packed with such items as vegetarian samosas, steak on skewers, blue-cheese chunks and dark chocolate to show how craft beer (a term used to describe beer from independent brewers) complements food.

However, choosing craft beer is not just about flavor; it's about principle, too. That's right; what kind of beer you drink can be a political statement of sorts.

Drinking craft beer, for example, can signal that you support local business versus big business.

"For our generation, it's a way of rebelling," says Emilie Stein, while waiting in line to try a couple of Dogfish Head brews. "I would never drink a Bud Light," adds the heavily tattooed 26-year old District resident and chef.

Big beer business basically consists of two companies these days: Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors. They make up about 82 percent of the beer market. Craft brews, though just 4 percent of the market, are gaining ground, Mr. Sisson says, adding that the segment's goal is to reach 7 percent to 7.5 percent within the next five years.