For the occasion, Lake Louie and The Grumpy Troll were on hand offering free samples of their suds before showtime. Unfortunately, I had just completed a regimen of medication on Saturday which attacked the CD4 receptors on my liver like a blitzkrieg rolling through Poland. While I should have abstained completely, I did take a small sample of The Grumpy Troll's stout amounting to about one good sip which was quite tasty. It was rather painful for me to watch everyone else in the theatre freely imbibing.
When the movie started, I found the music over the opening to be familiar. Later I found out that the song was by Milwaukee's Mercury Crossing who happen to be fronted by a friend's sister. Little time was wasted in establishing the movie's primary stylistic convention: craft brew drinkers are shown asking questions as they quaffed and brewers answer them. This format also demonstrated that the movie was aimed at a broad audience, likely to be unfamiliar with the subject matter.
Clocking in at about an hour and a half, 99 Bottles manages to cover a fair amount of ground from a variety of questions. Brewing involves a lot of chemistry and, for the most part, the movie explains concepts in a way that is appropriate for the intended audience. One question regarding "lite"/"light" beer prompts multiple answers. It can mean beer that contains less ingredients/more water or a beer that is light in color. Jim Klisch from Lakefront gives a great non-technical illustration by noting that beers such as blonde doppelbocks are relatively light in appearance because of how the grains are roasted. Dean Coffey of Ale Asylum expounds on this by noting that Belgian trippels are light in color yet have a high alcohol content while the opposite is found in porters which are dark in color and have comparatively little alcohol. Similarly, when the concept of specific gravity is broached, it is not given an explanation out of a chemistry book but rather we are told how it affects mouth-feel and alcohol content, characteristics that those with little brewing/chemistry background can understand.
There are a couple exceptions to this. When the topics of heating kettles with gas flames vs. steam and how yeast strains change over time come up, the audience gets either vague explanations or none at all. What are the advantages of using purifying flames as opposed to steam jackets? What does the caramelization engendered by the former do to the flavor of beer? How does fresh yeast affect the taste of beer as opposed to that which has been around the block?
The movie also has plenty of tales from craft brewers and their confidantes. We learn, for instance, that Deb Carey, President of New Glarus Brewing had an epiphany in England that led to the Spotted Cow name while Jacob Sutrick of Stonefly explains the origin of Mustache Ride. In one scene, George Bluvas III of Water Street Brewery weighs in on the thin vs. fat brewmaster controversy by saying that thin ones move faster. The movie then cuts to the more rotund John Harrison, brewmaster at the Delafield Brew Haus, who comes down decidedly in favor of brewers with more girth. Harrison's tale about winning a gold medal at the 2000 Great American Beer Festival was also classic.
99 Bottles addresses SB224 or the Brewpub Bill, as it came to be known, which dramatically altered the craft brewing industry in 2007. (I wrote quite a bit about it last summer – see this post.) While the movie doesn't go into much depth, it lets Dean Coffey pronounce "If this bill had passed before we started, we would have failed." I am told that the movie's makers had a very difficult time getting any of the interviewees to say much about SB224 beyond the basics of what it is and what it was meant to accomplish. It is also my understanding that the producers are looking to gather more info, potentially for a separate mini-doc on the subject. We'll have to wait for the director's cut to appear and see what bonus features are included.
The movie necessarily left out more than it put in. E.g. - Gray's was omitted altogether. Also missing is a substantial discussion of brewing history in Wisconsin and some elements of Beer 101 such as the differences between beer styles. And I wish that Deb Carey had gotten a special mention for being the first woman to found a brewery in this country. Still, there's a fair amount of information in 99 Bottles and many humorous anecdotes. I've been drinking Capital since their beers had the Garten Brau moniker, had my first New Glarus right after it hit store shelves, and was at The Great Dane on a cold, rainly opening day. Ergo it was neat to see the people responsible for some of the beers that I've been enjoying for many years and hear them talk about their craft.
However, beyond all the history, chemistry, and any romantic notions of brewers & brewing is what was on display before the movie began – people happily socializing and drinking fine beer - that is paramount. Kirby Nelson of Capital put it best: "The point of this liquid is you can come out to a beer garden on a Friday night in the summer and see a thousand plus people out there with their friends, their family, their parents, their kids, sitting out enjoying each other's company, enjoying a band, enjoying a social aspect of life with beer as part of the process."
Here's the movie's trailer:
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