“A couple of tables a night are overwhelmed with the selection,” Dorlyn Carter, my waitress at The Brickskeller, said. “But if I just take the time to talk them through it, they usually end up with something they like.”
In ten months on the job, Dorlyn has tasted about 300 different beers—just 30 percent of the 1000 varieties of bottled beer that the Brickskeller offers. The Brickskeller, a Washington institution, boasts over 1000 varieties of bottled beer from all over the world. From Kenya to Colorado, The Brickskeller has a brew to satisfy even the most fickle of palates, and a knowledgeable waitstaff to guide the uninitiated through the endless offerings.
I initially saw places like The Brickskeller and Delerium Cafe in Brussels, which doubles the offerings of the The Bricksckeller with over 2000 beers, as nothing more than gimmicks. The gimmick works, though, because these establishments cater more to the individual consumer more than any major brewery does.
Freshman year philosophy class may have dissuaded most of us from the notion that Platonic ideals actually exist, but that has yet to translate to the alcoholic beverage industry. The food industry slowly came around to the fact that there are no universals when it comes to human taste, and today, the market demands variety to suit these different preferences. The variability in taste is the main reason why supermarkets carry thirty-six different types of Ragu spaghetti sauce for the myriad forms of pasta.
The Budweisers and Coors of the beer world, by contrast, have until recently embraced the notion of a universally perfect alcohol. Breweries, and by extension many of their consumers, believe that their beverages exist in a vertical hierarchy—the further up that hierarchy, the closer they are to the “perfect” beer. A number of different bodies and magazines even score beers on an objective scale of one to 100. What is a score of 100 if not the embodiment of the universally-accepted best beer, as if such a thing exists?
If the food industry has realized the sales value in catering to the wide spectrum of the human palate, it seems even stranger that the alcohol industry has resisted this for so long. The problem with the major breweries is tradition: every large brand emphasizes its “heritage” and “history,” tracing its lineage back to the nineteenth century, back to times when, as Malcolm Gladwell said in a 2004 lecture, “All of science, through the 19th century and much of the 20th was obsessed with universals. Psychologists, medical scientists, economists were all interested in finding out the rules that govern the way all of us behave.”
Recognizing that many bars have stepped in to fill the gap left by broad-swathe alcohol companies, the manufacturers are beginning to fight back. Since 2005, Anheuser-Busch has introduced five new types of Budweiser beer, a significant increase from the three beer varieties introduced in the twenty-three years prior.
Now that beer companies are recognizing the virtue in variety, the winner is the consumer. We don’t have to go to Wisey’s and select from the same three kinds of beer that Jack DeGioia did when he was a student here. Welcome to the world of niche alcohol markets—brought to you by the same guys who brought you Bud Light, of all people.
See if you get a 100 on Dan’s scale; e-mail him at dnewman@georgetownvoicecom.
