Why Do People Care About Breweries?

My Overdue, Begrudging, and Likely Disappointingly Nuanced Take On Fort Point-HenHouse

A few weeks ago, I was on a tasting panel evaluating yogurt samples when my phone began to vibrate violently. The news had just broken that my former employer, HenHouse Brewing Company, and San Francisco’s Fort Point Beer Company had merged. Messages from friends and colleagues poured in, all asking the same thing: What do you think?

Since that morning, I have debated whether to weigh in here on Beer & Soul. For one, I’m close to many of the people involved, and I worry my take might seem biased. But more than that, I created Beer & Soul to amplify the aspects of craft beer that allow us to aspire to music: Business is not my beat.

A significant part of my success in this industry stems from knowing that the special regard beer brands hold in the minds (dare I say, hearts?) of our customers depends in no small part on our ability to talk about what we do credibly in ways that sound more like liner notes than LinkedIn posts. Discussions of “strategic partnerships,” “corporate structure,” “synergies,” and “economies of scale” undermine the core appeal of what we offer.

The things we buy exist along a spectrum. At one pole—let's call it the “commodity side”—there are things like paper clips, thumbtacks, and toenail clippers, the selection of which has no bearing on how any one of us sees ourselves. We don’t identify with these things. We just use them. At the other end—we’ll call this the “culture side”—are things like the clothes we wear, the music we listen to, and the sports teams we follow: consumer choices we allow to help shape who we are.

Thanks to the work of intrepid entrepreneurs, resolute brewers, fanatical evangelists, dedicated educators, and generous ambassadors, beer in the United States has spent the past four decades climbing from commodity towards culture. The survival of all small-scale independent brewing companies and the continued elevation of beer quality for the end consumer require that we not backslide.

In 2018, I was interviewed by Michael Kiser, the founder and host of the Good Beer Hunting podcast. At one point, Michael asked rhetorically, “Why do people care about breweries?” I was dumbfounded. How could someone with such deep knowledge and influence within our industry be unsure about what makes our work special?

Back then, the answer felt self-evident. Craft beer was a rapidly deconsolidating American manufacturing sector offering consumers higher quality, greater variety, and more personality than ever before. We enthusiastically presented novel, idiosyncratic products imbued with proximity and place. We had flipped the script on an industry that, just a few decades prior, had been as consolidated and impersonal as the airline business. How could people not care?

But in the years since, Michael’s question has stuck with me. Whether it was his intention or not, “Why do people care about breweries?”—or more often, “Why do people care about this brewery?”—is now a question I ask all the time in my work. I’ve come to realize Michael’s question was more prescient than I first understood. The answer plays out in taprooms every day.

Last week, I picked up a shift at Olfactory Brewing’s Berkeley taproom. One of the first guests I served was a woman preparing to attend her 20th college reunion in San Diego. She beamed when she said one of the events would be held at Ballast Point. She and her wife were married in Ballast Point t-shirts: “Red Velvet,” a beet-colored oatmeal stout for her, and “Victory At Sea,” an imperial porter with vanilla, for her bride.

“Why do people care about breweries?” Because beer can help mark a moment. Like a song, it can show up in our lives and gain meaning from the things happening around it. Small breweries don't simply manufacture products. Like a landmark neighborhood restaurant, we create spaces, memories, and flavors that can lodge themselves in identity. Like a local sports team, we have the potential to help people feel more rooted, more intimately affiliated, and better recognized.

A few months after that conversation with Michael, I attended the California Craft Beer Summit in San Diego. At the time, our state was closing in on 1,000 breweries, most of which produced less than 1,000 barrels of beer annually. Hundreds of brewery owners gathered for a keynote on high-level market trends like the ascendancy of seltzers and other RTD alcoholic beverages in the grocery store. And I remember thinking: this feels a bit like a room full of flower shop owners eager to be coached as though they were neo-industrialist tycoons.

That tension is telling. Even as most of the breweries in that ballroom will never move a single CE at a corporate grocer, the aggregate volume of beer sold at the grocery store dwarfs all other channels. So there is a disconnect between the interests of the few large companies and trade organizations served by segment-wide analytics and the best interests of thousands of small companies searching for their unique pathway to success.

What most of those breweries needed that day wasn’t to be warned about the rising White Claw wave. It was to be reminded that they are culture creators. “Why do people care about my brewery? How can I ensure they continue to do so? What am I providing that is meaningful?”

This brings me to Fort Point-HenHouse. The merged company will be in the same weight class as HenHouse’s Sonoma County neighbor, Russian River, and Drakes Brewing Company in San Leandro. These breweries make about 30,000 to 40,000 barrels annually. That sounds like a lot of beer. But for context, that is roughly the same volume that Sierra Nevada Brewing, the largest independent brewer on the West Coast, sells every two weeks. And Sierra’s annual volume still falls just short of what AB InBev moves globally in a single day.

Even in their new status as larger than 90% of the other breweries in the United States, Fort Point-HenHouse will not be anywhere large enough to compete on the commodity side. Their survival still depends on embedding themselves into customers’ lives and identities.

And both breweries know how to do that. Fort Point and HenHouse might be the best breweries in Bay Area history at product design, and both have accomplished ambitious and impactful things in the past. Fort Point took esoteric styles like Franconian Rotbier, Kölsch, and Italian Pilsner and made them accessible enough to land in Safeway and Target, and they are consistently present at fundraisers for San Francisco’s cultural institutions. HenHouse, meanwhile, has done more than anyone to teach consumers about the toll that time and temperature can take on the beer in their glass, and turned “Big Chicken” into a bona fide regional phenomenon.

At the same time, even before this merger, both Fort Point and HenHouse had already made some of the compromises that beer drinkers tend to fear when “mergers and acquisitions” enter the picture. Both companies contract the production of their most popular beers to Gordon Biersch in San Jose. Both have cut jobs in recent years, streamlined their portfolios, and sold their wholesale rights to large distributors. In tandem with those partnerships, HenHouse relaxed the cold-chain and freshness standards that had been one of the company’s most loudly proclaimed brand values.

This is the other side of the cultural coin. Small breweries can disappoint customers in a way that a commodity never will. You might be frustrated, even angry, when a stapler breaks or a phone charger frays, but you won’t feel betrayed by it. Brands come and go. That is nothing to get emotional about. But if that company offered you a point of view, a sense of place, a story that felt like your own, then its absence becomes a kind of cultural subtraction, a piece of your personal mosaic is fading.

This is why so many beer die-hards bristle at M&A news. We’ve seen the Ballast Point arc: sold in 2015, stripped of its value and cultural relevance by 2019. Can you imagine anyone from UCSD’s Class of 2025 getting married in Ballast Point t-shirts?

I visited HenHouse just a few days after the merger was announced and was treated to a 12oz can of Fort Point “Westfalia” that had just come off the line that morning. The beer has never tasted better. Still, the most extraordinary sip of HenHouse beer I’ve had in recent memory came from a bottle labeled “High Priestess.” It was a gin-barrel-aged sour with cherries and lime, poured alongside a thick slice of cherry-almond cake, as the final course of a Mother’s Day pop-up dinner by the James Beard-recognized Lion Dance Cafe. The combination punctuated an unforgettable evening of flavor and fellowship. About a quarter of the night’s guests asked me how they could get their hands on more of the beer.

In the years since “High Priestess” went into barrels, the brewer who filled those barrels has been let go, and the sour beer program he led has been paused. Products that make impressions don’t always make profits, and the value of such undertakings is hard to measure, but easy to mourn.

In the wake of the pandemic, Fort Point and HenHouse made cuts to stay afloat. Fort Point outsourced on the production side, while HenHouse pulled back significantly on marketing and hospitality. There’s a clear logic to combining the remaining pieces. The two companies brew their beer in the same facilities and sell it through a nearly identical roster of wholesalers. Merging means carrying a bigger stick in negotiations with those wholesalers, not to mention suppliers and co-packagers.

This is not a condemnation of sound business practices or a call to resist every change. I am happy for my friends that their businesses are now on a more solid footing, and I am glad some of my former colleagues can feel more secure in their jobs. At my most optimistic, I see this merger providing the bandwidth to indulge ambition and build back toward the things that made people care about Fort Point and HenHouse in the first place.

I hope that this merger, and the similar machinations taking place elsewhere in the industry, will give breweries breathing room to think long-term again. Because if they bring back ambitious, memory-making events like HenHouse’s annual Freshtival, or if it means that expertly-brewed “Westfalia” is always waiting for me in brewery-fresh condition at Fort Point’s Ferry Building beer garden, or if it lets me sit at a table in one of HenHouse’s tasting rooms and once again be walked through a flight of four weird beers by someone who loves what they’re presenting—then that’s worth celebrating.

And if it doesn’t? Then, sure, the merger still makes business sense. But that’s all it makes.

Corporate mutualism is an effective means of buying time, but no amount of boardroom acumen will alter the fact that a rigged game is still rigged. The cultural value that gives our beer its resonance and small breweries the power to survive despite every imaginable structural disadvantage directly correlates to the value we add to people’s lives.

The best breweries don’t succeed despite the resources they allocate to projects that don’t necessarily pencil out—often, they succeed because of it. For small companies, significance is our only bulwark against the structural advantages that come along with size. Cultural relevance isn’t a distraction from sound strategy; it is, in fact, the only effective long-term strategy.

Make things that move people, that reflect your values, that are worth gathering around. Make people care about your brewery.

If it helps, act like someone might build their wedding around your beer. Because sometimes, people do.