Widmer Pours It On
When you’re No. 1, you try harder - at least in the increasingly competitive microbrew business.
Widmer’s Hefeweizen has made the Portland brewery the best-selling craft beer brand in the Northwest, but its other products haven’t exactly been flying off the shelves.
So Widmer decided to dump half its regular lineup. Gone are its Vienna, Amberbier and Blackbier. Taking their place are Hop Jack Pale Ale and Ray’s Amber Lager, both of which have started showing up in the Spokane area, and Big Ben Porter, due later this month.
Holding their ground, along with the Hefeweizen, are Widmer’s Widberry and Czech Pilsner.
The new beers, particularly the unabashedly British pale ale and and porter, further remove Widmer from its original Germanic roots.
But they are more familiar styles to Northwest beer buyers. And with microbrew sales leveling off following years of double-digit growth, breweries are scrambling for any extra edge in attracting customers.
“We decided, let’s position ourselves for the long term,” says Tim McFall, Widmer’s marketing director. “We had some brands out there that weren’t as obvious to people.”
Take the Blackbier, a traditional German-style schwarzbier. “If somebody goes to the grocery store and they’re five feet from the cooler, looking up and down the aisle, searching for something familiar, they’re looking for stout or porter and there’s Blackbier,” McFall says.
Widmer’s Vienna was a misnomer from the beginning, an ale named after a lager style. The brewery took the basic recipe, added plenty of whole Centennial hops and dubbed it Hop Jack Pale Ale to appeal to “hop fanatics and aspiring hopheads” - a growing market niche.
Ray’s Amber Lager, on the other hand, is a traditional Vienna-style lager, fairly light and malty with a touch of tangy hoppiness. It’s named after the father of brewery founders Kurt and Rob Widmer.
Big Ben Porter is modeled after a London recipe from the late 1800s that included licorice root and molasses. “We didn’t just want an ordinary porter,” says McFall.
Purists will be pleased to note that both the porter and pale ale retain some of their Teutonic heritage, fermented with a German alt yeast and conditioned at cooler temperatures for a smoother, rounder character. In the case of Hop Jack, that creates a cleaner canvas for the floral, citrusy Centennial hops, as compared to traditionally fruity, estery English-style ales.
In another departure from form, the Widmer name is not prominently displayed on the new beers’ labels, although smaller logos remain.
“Widmer is very strongly associated with Hefeweizen, because of the strength of that product,” explains McFall. “That’s both a strength and a weakness. We’ve done a good job with our Hefeweizen, but we need to give these other beers a chance.”
Hale’s storm
The first bottled beers from Hale’s Ales in Seattle have also started surfacing in Spokane area stores.
When they’re good, they’re very, very good. Some samples of the flagship Pale Ale nicely captured the fresh fruitiness of the draft version, although other bottles I tried were somewhat duller.
Hale’s easy-drinking Amber Ale is malty and mild, with hints of caramel and Mount Hood hop spiciness. The dryish Moss Bay Extra - a style not previously available in Spokane - has a pleasant hop character, but seems a little on the light side given the name and a press release’s promise of a “copious mouthful of malts and hops.”
Amid all the bottling hoopla, Hale’s has quietly mothballed its Spokane brewery. While the firm’s focus had long since shifted to the West Side, it had brewed beer in Eastern Washington ever since Mike Hale got his start in Colville, Wash., in 1983.
“With all the brewpubs opening in Spokane, we’ve lost a little ground over there,” Hale says from his Seattle headquarters. “We’re in a very aggressive environment, and we have to respond.”
But along with financial pressures, there’s a more subtle reason for the move. Because of Seattle’s softer water, says Hale, beer brewed there tastes slightly different than that made in Spokane. And with all the bottled beer coming from Seattle, he says, so should the draft beer, for consistency’s sake.
Still, plans remain on the back burner for someday expanding the Spokane brewery to accommodate bottling, if the bottled beers boost sales as Hale hopes. “We’re just kind of marking time, seeing how it goes,” he says.
Extra-sensory perception
If you’re looking for a hearty mouthful of malt and hops, Deschutes has just released its Bachelor ESB (Extra Special Bitter), a beefed-up replacement for the Bend, Ore., brewery’s previous Bachelor Bitter. The big, rich body is balanced by earthy East Kent Golding hops.
Pub crawl
On the local brewpub scene, a golden, malty Maibock is new at the Ram, with a hoppy American-style pale ale due April 22 to mark the opening of the restaurant’s new third-floor nightclub, Havana’s. Look for a lighter-bodied cream ale from the Ram’s sister brewery at C.I. Shenanigan’s.
The Fort Spokane Brewery is coming out with its first-ever hefeweizen, a fruity Bavarian-style version. Solicitor’s Corner is pouring an ESB that’s quite tame for the style, but delivers decent flavor for a lower-alcohol brew (3.5 percent by volume, compared to around 5 percent for most microbrews).
In North Idaho, the annual huckleberry wheat beer from Sandpoint’s Pend Oreille Brewing Co. is due out today on draft at the pub. It won’t be added to Pend Oreille’s new line of bottled beers until next year, but a limited supply of Rapid Lightning Red has been bottled for the Idaho market.
Casey’s in Post Falls is debuting a malty, medium-bodied Graham’s Scottish Mild, as well as bringing back the seasonal Quad Park Pilsner, available at the pub and at the softball complex by that name. And T.W. Fisher’s in Coeur d’Alene is brewing a big Imperial Stout specially for The Viking; it goes on tap May 1 at the Spokane tavern to celebrate its second anniversary under new ownership.