Comment by Tiktaalik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tiktaalik | Hacker News Reader

A few years ago the City of Vancouver made a few small changes to its liquor rules to allow breweries to have "tasting lounges" where one could consume an unlimited amount of beer (ie. a bar) instead of a limited amount of 'tasters'. This tipped the scales to make a brewery a dramatically more viable business model and the amount of breweries in the city has exploded. In the quasi-industrial/residential neighbourhood of Mount Pleasant alone there are seven, while in the other industrial/residential area across town there are ten more.

The amount of growth has been astonishing, with more and more municipalities in the broader metro area following the City of Vancouver's lead and incentivizing brewery growth.

Accordingly local beer now dominates. Whereas a decade ago you had major national brands as the common choice with craft imports from Portland and Seattle as a special treat at specialty stores, now there's so much good local stuff that there's barely any room for the good Portland and Seattle options.

I see no downside to this shift from major corporate beer to smaller, local craft fare. The small local companies employ more people, the quality is dramatically better, and the money stays in the local area.

My expectation going forward is similarly to how it is not unusual at all for a town to have several mom n' pop restaurants, every town with have several mom n' pop locally serving breweries too.

> I see no downside to this shift from major corporate beer to smaller, local craft fare.

This is a model which has worked for hundreds of years in Germany. If you go to a local pub, you tend to either get a regional beer (eg hofbrau in Munich) or a micro brew from the village/town/pub itself. There's a huge amount of pride in local brewing.

Munich is perhaps a bad example since several of their breweries export globally (eg Paulaner, Franziskaner). In some cases these are very much mass produced brews, but in more rural places it's quite common to find the pub has a fermenter in the basement.

To a lesser extent this is the case in the UK, where most towns have their own brewery and will sell to all the local pubs. But the difference in Germany is that often there's no competition at all - it's the local helles or nothing.

Somewhat off-topic: Tegernseer is a very good Bavarian brewery whose beer is available at almost any currywurst cart in Munich but (regrettably) is not exported internationally.

Their brewery/pub in Tegernsee is an excellent day trip by train; far less crowded than the Munich beer gardens, and delicious food to boot. One of my fondest memories of visiting Bayern :-)

It's also interesting that Augustiner has been readily available in Berlin for a few years now (Augustiner is famous for not doing any promotion or advertisement, they just sell beer. In the 80s/90s they also sold lemonade, but stopped that due to needing all the capacity for beer, as I heard). But now Augustiner has become mainstream and not hip enough for Berlin anymore, so I've seen more and more Tegernseer there everytime I visit...

> To a lesser extent this is the case in the UK, where most towns have their own brewery and will sell to all the local pubs.

Indeed, and it's making a comeback. You see a lot more local beers (and they're a lot more popular) than you did even 5 years ago. Two of my peers in their early twenties have gone into (local) brewing. One of whom did this as an alternative to university, one of whom took this route after studying chemistry.

A similar law change led to a similar trend across all major cities here in India. I don't think I can even count the number of breweries in cities like Mumbai and Bangalore.

I wish this would happen to food production, local growers setting up small operations of good quality organic food. I can imagine multiple tiny operations enabled by automation and hydroponics growing food to supply their town. I feel like this will happen but not in my lifetime.

For something as resource intensive as agriculture, I have to disagree. Forcing land use to be less efficient would have serious consequences.

I lived in Vancouver during that time and got to visit and meet the people behind all those new breweries through the UBC Brewing Club. It was truly inspiring. People just a little bit older than us combining their passion with engineering and some business savvy to build these amazing companies, some of which are huge now (e.g. parallel 49).

In hindsight, I think those days may have been the most excited and hopeful I've seen kids from my generation be about 'Capitalism' and their ability to make it doing something they thought was cool, especially the non-overachiever, arts major kids. Even if we weren't thinking about the brewing industry in particular there was something infectious about that energy.

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