A Brooklyn Specialty Brewer Dares the French Market

PARIS — Garrett Oliver popped the cork of one of his specialty brews, swirled the amber liquid into a wine glass and took a hearty sniff.

“It smells a little like cheese — in a good way,” he said the other night at a tasting of his artisanal beers in Paris.

Mr. Oliver, the brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery, a New York craft-beer maker now trying to expand into France, has a quirky way of describing his creations. He refers to the more complex ones as “a little bit barnyard,” “having a funky nose” and “like a good sourdough bread.”

Brooklyn Brewery is counting on those earthy complexities to entice drinkers to try something new in a country where even construction workers are more likely to belly up to the bar for un petit verre of the house red than they are to ask for un demi, or small glass of beer.

This is no sure bet for Brooklyn Brewery. Beer consumption in France is Europe’s second-lowest, after Italy, with only 16 percent of French drinkers choosing beer. With nearly two-thirds preferring wine, French consumers have proved so unfriendly in the past that few American craft brewers have bothered to cross the ocean. The only American beer that has caught on to any extent is Bud, largely by dint of the distributive heft of its multinational parent, Anheuser-Busch InBev.

“France is a difficult nut to crack,” said Simon Spillane, senior adviser of the Brussels-based Brewers of Europe, which tracks beer consumption by country. Added to the brewer’s challenge is the 160 percent increase in the French beer tax that took effect Jan. 1, which is projected to raise the price of a typical half-pint of beer by 20 to 30 centimes, the equivalent of 27 to 40 U.S. cents.

And yet, among younger French men and women there are signs of changing tastes. While consumption of all alcoholic beverages in France has been dropping for 30 years, beer is nonetheless an industry with annual sales of €2 billion, or $2.7 billion. And even as overall beer sales in France fell 1.7 percent in 2010, the most recent year for which data are available, specialty beers saw a jump of 8.8 percent, according to the French Brewers’ Association.

Craft brewers, an American category for independent breweries producing fewer than six million barrels a year, and smaller microbreweries have been popping up across France. Numerically, they are the vast majority of the approximately 500 brewers now operating in the country, although their sales make up only 2 percent in a market dominated by Carlsberg, Heineken and Anheuser-Busch InBev.

“People are drinking less but they want something that’s good — they’re fed up with crappy, tasteless beer,” said Simon Thillou, a former journalist who in 2006 opened La Cave à Bulles, a specialty shop in the Marais section of Paris. The shop sells 250 craft and microbrews, now including Brooklyn Brewery’s.

Mr. Thillou and others in the French industry attribute the drop in drinking less to a health kick than to an evolution in taste. The French, they say, are now willing to spend more for a better product, be it wine or beer, even if they consume less of it. It is a trend that may bode well even for niche beers that pack a bitter punch and test a French palate predisposed to aromatic, lighter flavors.

Expanding into France is a natural evolution for Brooklyn Brewery, the largest exporter of American craft beer, with sales in 17 countries around the world. Foreign sales account for 20 percent of the privately held company’s annual sales of $50 million. Outside of New York, sales are the second-highest in Sweden, where the company plans to open a brewery by the end of the year.

“It’s a matter of focus and an investment of time,” said Eric Ottaway, Brooklyn Brewery’s general manager and, along with his father and brother, majority owner. “Selling beer in France isn’t very different than in, say, Oklahoma.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 13, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of a European brewers organization. It is the Brewers of Europe, not the Federation of Brewers in Europe.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/business/global/a-brooklyn-specialty-brewer-dares-the-french-market.html?partner=rss&emc=rss