Got an email this morning from Natalie over at RRBC saying they are sold out of their barrel-aged beers. So if you weren’t able to put in an order via their gift shop, then you’ll have to hunt them down at various bars in Sonoma, Napa, and the Bay Area. Of course you could just drive up to Santa Rosa and drink a pint right from their brew pub.
I managed to put in an order for one 12oz bottle each of their Beautification, Supplication, and Temptation beers. The total cost put me over the $50 mark… for 36oz of beer! Incredible! But if you were to think about it, I’d have to pay that much in gas to drive up there, then drive back and that’s not even counting the cost of the beer once you get there. Even then, that’s a high price to pay for beer.
I like to compare beer to wine often and I would say that beer can out-shine wine in two distinct categories: price and consistency. You can go to your local BevMo or Trader Joe’s and find a world-class, classic example of a beer style for under $10 most of the time, imports included. Likewise, the process of brewing beer yields such a consistent product that your pint of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale will taste the same, year-over-year, day-after-day, keg-after-keg.
Then you get a brewery like RRBC that produces barrel-aged beers priced above the $10 price point. If you’ve tried these beers, then you know why myself and many others have rushed to buy their share of bottles before they sold out. Plainly put, they’re good. Very. Good. These are “destination” beers. These are the type of beers you may want to plan a vacation over. Am I over-reacting a bit? Maybe. All that being said, at what point does a beer cross-over from being a “beverage of the people” to a “consumable of the elite”?
In my opinion, wine is a consumable of the elite. It is a beverage, through years of marketing, that has become to represent sophistication, elitism, and often times, snobbery. Wine has “vintage” to explain away an inconsistent product. I would argue that a highly priced bottle of wine is a result not of increased craftsmanship in production but of snobbery. Despite what winemakers may say, the actual process of producing a bottle of wine is far more simple than to produce beer, distilled spirits, or sake. So, if the process is simpler, why is that product more expensive?
Going back to RRBC’s barrel-aged beers, you have a product that is a hundred times more complicated to make than your average beer. In your average beer, a brewer has to adjust four different ingredients to make a basic beer (malted barley, hops, yeast and water). Each element imparts its own unique characteristic to the final product (which is why there are over 70+ styles of beer). If that wasn’t complicated enough, aging in used wine or bourbon barrels is another level of complexity to be dealt with. In RRBC’s case, the introduction of microbiota other than yeast (brettanomyces, lactobacillus, and pediococcus) adds an exponential level of complexity to the brewing process that the brewer must carefully monitor lest these “outsiders” take over the beer and impart unwanted off-flavors. All that being said, it’s easy to see why RRBC charges so much for these products. Simply put, these products cost more to produce because of their high level of craftmanship. I haven’t even begun to mention the increased prices of brewing materials such as barely and hops!
Yet these beers are still cheaper than a comparably praised wine.
So, if you find yourself at an exceptionally good beer bar that has any of these RRBC beers on tap, please, by all means, order a pint… or two… or three. When settling your tab at the end of the night, don’t be surprised by a higher and usual tab. Take comfort in knowing that I will be extremely jealous of you and that I will not be alone.
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