Brewers Are Powerhouse Philanthropists, but They Can’t Fix This on Their Own

A journalist friend of mine, Kelsey Atherton, tells a dark joke about America: “Oh, you’re experiencing a structural problem? Have you ever considered trying different personal choices instead?”

I find myself thinking about it whenever big, awful climate-related catastrophes happen. I was overseas when Hurricane Helene hit Asheville, N.C., killing 42 people (that we know about), displacing thousands, and causing an estimated $53 billion in damage. Many of the area’s 55 breweries were knocked offline for days or weeks. Some are facing total loss.

Hurricanes aren’t structural problems per se, but the grim humor came to mind anyway. Maybe it was scientific finding that the storm dumped 10 percent more rain than it might have before climate change kicked in, or that the federal government’s flood maps for the area underestimated risks to the public by 100 percent due to years of Congressional underfunding for disaster relief, or that Republican lawmakers in the state have been wielding their gerrymandered supermajority to block flood safety regulations in Raleigh for the past 15 years. Storms may not be structural, but our ability to weather them (or not) certainly is.

I’m encouraged by reporting on the pretty good response by the North Carolina National Guard and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), though it is far from perfect, and hopeful for my personal friends and professional contacts in Asheville as they begin to rebuild. A couple weeks after the storm receded, with my feet planted firmly on domestic soil, I heard from one such contact in the brewing scene there. They told me there was a “cause” beer in the works to fund relief grants for western North Carolina breweries. The beer itself is called Higher Calling, and DSSOLVR Brewing is running point on the project and routing the money to the North Carolina Brewers Guild’s 501(c)3 foundation. Higher Calling is a Hazy India Pale Ale, which is exactly what I’d choose if I needed to raise a bunch of cash on the quick. I hope brewers reading this heed their Carolinian colleagues’ call and brew keg after keg of the stuff. (For those breweries that can’t, the guild is also running another initiative, Pouring for Neighbors, to accept donated proceeds from participating breweries nationwide.)

I rarely write about these types of efforts. This is partly an editorial choice: There are a lot of them, and though the causes are often worthy, “breweries doing charity” is dog-bites-man stuff. At a more fundamental level, though, I’m apprehensive to celebrate cause beers because they’re individual choices in the face of structural problems. They are not enough.

Many cause beers are organized around social-justice issues, which makes it difficult to quantify their relative scale to which they hope to bring awareness and resources. (Black Is Beautiful Stout and Brave Noise IPA may be commendable causes, but I’ve never really seen a reliable dollar estimate for ending police brutality or workplace harassment.) In the case of climate disasters, though, you can get a sense for the orders of magnitude that separate problem from solution. For example, half a decade ago, Sierra Nevada Brewing Company spearheaded a cause beer called Resilience IPA in the aftermath of the Camp Fire, the most destructive wildfire in California’s history. The effort raised a reported $15 million for relief efforts, which is fantastic. The costs of damages stemming from that fire — just property damages, mind you, not lost wages or broader economic impact — was estimated around $16.5 billion.

This isn’t meant as a criticism. Breweries are very good at charity, and it’s both morally and practically good when they bring that expertise to bear in disasters, particularly in the early triage stages. The sort of national outpouring of brewery philanthropy Sierra Nevada was able to muster was “critical,” the president and CEO of the North Valley Community Foundation told Good Beer Hunting in 2019, because other funding sources “oftentimes take a considerable amount of time and energy to get out in the world. With our funds here, we can get the money out quickly.”

It’s not just money, either. Breweries have logistical expertise and manpower and know their communities as well as any business could. In Asheville, still-standing breweries like Highland Brewing and Burial Beer Company have turned their facilities into resource staging areas and gathering spots for hot meals. In the face of devastation, Beer City USA is earning its name all over again.

Yes, and. No brewery or charitable organization, not even mighty Anheuser-Busch InBev, can rival the scope of a federal disaster response. For example, Helene knocked out two of Asheville’s three water treatment facilities, leaving thousands of residents without clean water. Like so many other cities across the country, Asheville’s water system has been plagued by years of deferred maintenance, which made it more vulnerable to failure. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that nationwide, the system needs $625 billion in upgrades over the next 20 years, and that’s if things go well, which they won’t. Of all the issues that are upstream of brewers, this one is the most literal, and they couldn’t even come close to fixing it if they tried.

Not to put too fine a point on it here, but I’m talking about allocating resources, which means I’m talking about politics. Of the two major political parties, only one has even made an effort. President Joe Biden’s administration managed to finagle the Inflation Reduction Act through Congress to unlock billions of dollars in green-energy investment in 2022. It’s been asking for increased FEMA funding since last year’s hurricanes. After turning “Infrastructure Week” into a four-year joke while in office, former President Donald Trump spent the weeks after Helene hit Asheville spreading dangerous lies that FEMA was illegally routing money earmarked for the storm’s victims to undocumented immigrants instead. It’s not technically true that 100 Republicans voted against FEMA funding days prior to Helene hitting Asheville, but it’s not entirely false, either. The $20 billion package passed Sept. 25 over the opposition of GOP lawmakers across both chambers as part of a stopgap funding bill, which is the only way to get anything done in Congress these days because the GOP refuses to properly fund the government on an ongoing basis.

This is just the latest cycle in a pattern that’s been playing out for three decades, as The American Prospect recently documented: “When a Democrat is in the White House, they build up competence at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and elsewhere. … But when a Republican takes their place, they destroy all that hard-won state capacity through negligence, incompetence, and corruption.” Both parties like to tout their support for small businesses, but only Democrats have even begun to grapple with how the climate crisis will affect local economies’ business owners, workers, and residents.

Plenty of people in the American brewing industry already understand this political dynamic. The rest should take note, if only selfishly. Hurricane Helene was the 397th billion-dollar disaster to befall the U.S. since 1980, according to analysis by The Washington Post of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data. The number of such incidents each year has risen steeply. Whether climate change or overdevelopment is to blame for the uptick in these costly storms (many climatologists believe the latter is currently a much bigger factor in driving up costs) is immaterial to breweries that get destroyed by one. If they do, rebuilding will require more help than cause beers and philanthropy alone can offer. They’ll need federal aid. I hope they’ll get it.

🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now

Remember earlier this year when we talked about how White Claw became the only hard seltzer that matters? Well, with the benefit of hindsight, that call is holding up pretty well. Beer Marketer’s Insights reported earlier this week that the 70-million-case marque from Mark Anthony Brands has cornered 65 percent of the malt-based seltzer segment, and around half of total alcoholic seltzers (i.e., including High Noon.) It’s up a smidge in dollars on that big base at a time when the 100 other firms still on the bubble are down 19 percent in the last four weeks. It’s all just Truly staggering.

📈 Ups…

New Glarus Brewing Co. is bucking the doom and gloom with a new $55 million expansion of its Wisconsin campus… Nonalcoholic beer brand Best Day locked in $12.5 million in its latest fundraising round… Boulevard Brewing will take a run at hard tea with a new line extension from its Quirk sub-brand, shocker… Brooklyn Brewery is issuing $10,000 grants to “makers” in five creative disciplines…

📉 …and downs

The National Basketball Association stadiums’ beer prices are here, and apologies to the Boston Celtics, but $20.32 is simply too much for a 16-ouncer… Tilray Brands’ chief exec hints at consolidating the firm’s hastily built national portfolio in its most recent earnings call… Circana has overall craft scans down ~5 percent by volume in the four weeks after Labor Day, with 21 of the top 30 brands recording declines…

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