Crosstown Brewing Company’s Traffic IPA is the best craft beer in Memphis according to the more than 1,600 voters of the Memphis Flyer‘s 2021 Beer Bracket Challenge, sponsored by Wolf River Popcorn Co., Young Avenue Deli, and Farm Burger.
This marks the first time Crosstown Brewing has won our challenge. Their win unseats Meddlesome Brewing Company’s 201 Hoplar’s three-year reign atop the Flyer‘s annual beer bracket contest.
Clark Ortkiese, who co-founded and owns Crosstown Brewing with Will Goodwin, says the daily objectives of running a brewery can be interesting and sometimes not. He says the beer bracket is fun, though, and the victory is exciting.
Justin Fox Burks
“It’s a people’s victory,” Ortkiese says. “It’s not people from ivory towers. It’s just regular people around town. It means an awful lot.”
Traffic was born before Crosstown Brewing was a company. Ortkiese says he and Goodwin were home brewers and found themselves gravitating to a lot of beers coming from southern California. The classic West Coast IPA is typically bitter by definition, with flavors of pine and resin. The two loved the style but wanted to turn down the volume on that bitterness. Traffic is about “that hop flavor, the aroma, and those tropical fruits; there’s some mango and passion fruit. We had the idea of that beer going for a long time,” Ortkiese says.
Crosstown Brewing’s head brewer, Stephen Tate, tasted Traffic even before he worked for the company. Ortkiese says Tate later put his stamp on it when he brewed Traffic commercially and “really improved it and gave us the beer we have today.”
Completely
Different
This year was completely different for the beer bracket — and not just for COVID-19 reasons. We could not do some of our live events, of course. But this year we welcomed three new Memphis breweries into the contest — Beale Street, Grind City, and Hampline. Memphis hasn’t had that many new breweries open at the same time since 2013.
To get beers from nine breweries into a 32-slot bracket took some imagination. This year, each brewery selected three beers for definitive (and random) seeding. (I literally pulled the match-ups out of a hat.) They also submitted an additional beer to be possibly pulled for our wild-card match-up.
Gone were our four bracket divisions that have, in the past, separated our bracket into very basic beer categories — light, dark, IPA, and seasonal. This year the beers commingled — stouts vs. IPAs, for example — and one match-up even found two Meddlesome beers pitted against one another.
Justin Fox Burks
The final round featured 201 Hoplar seeking a four-peat against Traffic, with Traffic emerging as the winner in a round that had more than 770 votes.
The Memphis Flyer Beer Bracket had more than 17,000 votes this year from nearly 20 states, though most votes came from Midtown Memphis. All told, the contest had three times as many voters this year compared to 2020.
Death of the Growler
A Memphis beer era ended in late January as the Madison Growler and Bottle Shop closed its growler-filling station inside Madison’s Cash Saver. Two beer trends were responsible, according to Taylor James, vice president of sales and merchandising for Castle Retail Group, the company that owns Cash Saver. Both of them involve growlers.
That stumpy little glass jug (which you fill, drink, rinse, and bring back for a refill) sort of symbolized Memphis’ formal baptism into the local craft beer scene back in 2013. That year, lines for growler fills were long at the then newly opened Madison Growler. Growlers were one of the few ways to drink new or seasonal beers from the three new Memphis breweries that opened that year — Wiseacre, High Cotton, and Memphis Made. Madison Growler also had taps for breweries in other markets, including Nashville and St. Louis, giving Memphis a broader view of beer styles and trends outside the city.
In the ensuing years, more local breweries opened and began to can their beers. With a six-pack, unlike with a growler, there is no fear of the beer losing freshness. More local canned craft came on the market — including seasonals and the occasional one-off. No longer was the growler the go-to option for fresh, local beer.
Then, COVID-19 hit. (You knew we’d have to mention COVID, right?) That growler that used to be so socially shareable, became kinda … not.
“The craft beer package has always been very strong, but it’s even stronger right now during a pandemic where people aren’t hanging out with folks,” James said in January. “The growler is a very sociable package. You get one. You share it with your friends. We’re not really doing that right now.”
The beer business is a trend business, James said, and the Madison Growler rode the wave for a long time. Beer lovers shouldn’t worry, though; the gates of Cash Saver’s heavenly beer aisle will remain open and stocked with enough brands and styles to keep any craft beer fan busy. It’ll just be renamed the Madison Bottle Shop.
So Trendy
Talking with James about this in January got me thinking about beer trends. Why are fanny packs back? Nobody knows (maybe). Why was everyone drinking sours and goses that one summer? Nobody knows (maybe).
Turns out, I’m as trendy as an insecure teenager when it comes to beer. I drank all the sours and goses I could find that one summer. I still love hard seltzers (but more on that later). I fan-boyed all the hazy IPAs for a stretch. I really only dabble in dark stuff, but if you tell me there’s some must-try, bourbon-barrel-aged mushroom stout, I’m ready with a snifter in hand.
So I wanted to know what beer everyone would be drinking this summer. What beer trends have come and gone? What beer trends have been seen in other cities that haven’t yet made it to Memphis? For answers, I went to the place where I knew Memphis beer drinkers hang out (especially in a pandemic): the Memphis Beer Drinkers Facebook group.
Right off the bat, two members of the group told me they came to Memphis from other places and, once they had a look around the craft beer scene, felt like they’d gone back in time.
“I moved out here from Colorado in 2020 and it’s been really interesting watching the local beer trends here,” said group member Emily De Wett. “I felt like I had hit ‘rewind.'”
It was the same story from group member Jalyn Ann.
“After moving here two years ago from Iowa, I felt like I, too, hit a rewind,” Ann said. “The Memphis market is highly saturated with pilsners, lagers, light beers, which, yes, is a good thing for super-hot Memphis days. I feel like the market is missing a lot of the complexity and boldness of beers that I was accustomed to in Iowa (imperial stouts and sours with bold, creative flavors).”
C-pher Bacon Mantia, an admin for the Memphis Beer Drinkers group, said Memphis is, indeed, “back a few steps from the rest of the country.” For example, the beer selection in the Boston area, where he lived for a time, was quite different from the beers found here.
Some of this, at least, goes to a bigger question about the maturity and size of the Memphis craft beer scene. Thanks to three new recently opened breweries — Hampline, Beale Street, and Grind City — Memphis now has nine craft breweries. Nashville has north of 30. This isn’t to stir up any old Memphis/Nashville rivalry; Nashville is just the closest, most-comparable city.
Why the disparity? For this question, I turned to James. He’s worked for a craft brewery outside Memphis. He also has a high-level view of the situation as he orders beers for his company’s stores. His answer was simple:
“You take a Nashville or a [Washington, D.C.] or Seattle or Portland,” James says. “Why do they have more craft beer or local breweries? They have more people. There’s just more people and, then, you have a larger demographic of craft drinkers.”
The size of the market determines a lot, James says, when it comes to craft beer. It determines what beer brands and styles he can offer at his stores. Market size may also influence how bold local brewers will be to offer up something different, when they know it’s their IPA that keeps the lights on.
What’s Ahead?
So, what will Memphis craft beer fans be drinking this summer?
The one thing all the people I talked to for this story agreed on is that the haze craze will continue. Hazy IPAs of nearly every flavor now line the shelves wherever finer beers are sold. The soft, juicy, fruity New England IPAs are a bit easier on the palate than their bitter, aggressive West Coast counterparts. According to the Independent Craft Brewers Association’s annual survey, this makes hazy IPAs more desirable to female and younger drinkers, and that’s “a recipe for continued growth.”
Heads nodded on the haze craze when I questioned the beer people at Joe’s Wines & Liquors — associate Emily De Wett (yes, the same one), general manager Sisco Larson, and manager and beer buyer Chris Schirmer. De Wett calls them the “super hazy boys.”
In another trend with staying power, James, from Cash Saver, says we’ll again be crushing cans of seltzer around the pool this summer.
“Seltzer is not a trend,” he says. “Seltzer is a way of life.”
The market segment for those light, bubbly, fruity drinks will only get more developed, James says. Expect more regional and national varieties of seltzers soon and expect the market for them to get bigger.
Schirmer, from Joe’s, says he’s seeing non-alcoholic beers on the trend horizon, too. For that, he reckons pandemic homesteading may have made some drinkers more health-conscious, plus a Dry January that perhaps spilled into Dry February. But it may be, too, that people just want to drink more beer.
“My assistant, Jake, made a good point,” Schirmer says. “Sometimes he wants to start drinking when it’s a nice day like this at 3 in the afternoon. But you don’t want to be asleep by 6 p.m. or 7 p.m., right?”
Non-alcoholic (NA) beers have been around a long time. (Anyone fancy an O’Doul’s?) But beer companies are brewing more flavorful NAs these days. Niche craft breweries like Bauhaus, Athletic, and Surreal focus specifically on NAs. But bigger breweries are headed to the space, too. Watch shelves soon for the IPNA (non-alcoholic IPA) from Lagunitas. James says the trend could aid those who want to drink but not consume alcohol for myriad reasons.
“Craft beer has become such a part of everyone’s social life that those people can easily feel left out,” he says.
The Joe’s crew says they’re seeing beer/wine crossovers all over the place, too. Ciders are hitting hard, maybe drawing in some wine drinkers. Pet Nat (short for Pétillant Naturel), a sparkling wine, is selling well, and is a way some beer drinkers are crossing over into wine.
India Pale Lagers are “flying off the shelves,” Schirmer says. Larson says he’s starting to see low-alcohol farmhouse-style beers (like a saison) make a comeback. These trends, they say, are cyclical and come back in a way that’s like “what’s old is new again.”
One trend De Wett and I are both glad has not made it to Memphis is lactose. It’s, basically, milk added to beer to make it creamier and sweeter.
“Thank goodness,” she says. “I feel like I can really appreciate the hazy IPA because now we’re not doing, like, a strawberry milkshake IPA every other day.”
One trend De Wett hopes makes it to Memphis is more ownership diversity in the craft beer scene. Beale Street Brewing is the city’s first Black-owned brewery. The brewery and its moves, like the collaboration with 8Ball and MJG, have “brought a new type of beer customer into our store that we didn’t have before,” Larson says.
A grassroots effort to diversify the craft beer crowd is underway in Nashville. The Black Beer Experience is a Facebook group and a social club with events like panel discussions focused on inclusion in craft.
COVID-19 has kept De Wett out of the city’s many taprooms, she says. So she’s not exactly sure about the demographic makeup of their customers. But she knows Memphis is a majority Black city and that most American breweries are owned and run by white people, a fact backed up by survey results from the Brewers Association. De Wett says a group like The Black Beer Experience could bring more Black customers to local breweries.
“Black people love craft beer, too, and I think sometimes breweries are missing that,” she says. “It’s not intentional. It’s because there’s literally no representation in the brewery. So it’s like, how can we see that change?”