Craft beers have plenty of followers

The craft beer community is fairly small and very friendly. But there are often bursts of fierce competition. I was reminded of that during the recent AJC Beer Bracket, when online readers chose Boulder Beer Co.’s Mojo India Pale Ale as their favorite from a field of 16 American IPAs.

In the midst of the voting, I received an e-mail from Boulder’s marketing director, Dan Weitz. “You’ve turned some heads here in Boulder,” Weitz wrote. “Our fans had a lot of Facebook time yesterday due to a statewide ‘snow day’ and we’re excited to keep voting!”

Ultimately, in final four voting, Boulder beat out hometown favorite Sweetwater, and two national craft brewery powerhouses, Dogfish Head from Delaware and Stone from California. Our original blind tasting panel picked Sweetwater as its winner, followed in order by Stone, Boulder and Highland from North Carolina.

So, while the readers and the experts were nearly in agreement, the online victory went to Boulder’s well organized aficionados —- clearly a testament to social networking among beer geeks.

“Once we found out about it, we jumped on Facebook,” Weitz said. “We sent e-mails to our national and local mailing lists, and we told them, ‘Vote early, and vote often.’ Our East Coast rep, Marvin Simpson, is originally from Georgia, so he took a lot of pride in the win.”

Boulder became Colorado’s first microbrewery in 1979. The company has only been selling beer in Georgia for two years and has an Atlanta connection that goes back to the early ’90s, when original Sweetwater partners, Freddy Bensch and Kevin McNerney (now with Five Seasons), were students at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Sweetwater opened in 1997.

Sweetwater has been very busy in recent times, becoming the premier regional craft brewery in the Southeast, and one of the fastest growing in the United States.

On April 13, the Brewers Association announced its annual list of top 50 U.S. brewing companies, based on sales volume in 2008. Sweetwater ranked No. 29 among small and independent craft brewers and No. 40 among overall brewing companies, including No. 1 Anheuser-Busch InBev and No. 2 MillerCoors.

“We’re continuing to do what we’ve always done,” Bensch said, “through slow, steady growth in the Southeast. We did about 54,000 [barrels of beer] last year, up from about 43,000, and we opened up a few new markets. Now we’re messing around with the big boys, which is pretty fun.”

btowns@bellsouth.net