This summer, the tap lists at Stone Brewing’s World Bistro & Gardens in San Diego and Escondido, Calif., featured both expected IPAs (Delicious, Tangerine Express) and an unexpected “experimental lager.”
What was the experiment? The pale light lager lacked Stone’s favored levers of cutting-edge hops or culinary ingredients. Instead, the R&D beer was a trial batch of Sapporo Premium Beer, the classic Japanese lager.
Securing U.S. production capacity was one reason why Sapporo U.S.A., a subsidiary of the Japanese brewery, acquired Stone for $165 million last August. The parent company planned to shift lager production to Stone’s bicoastal production breweries in Escondido and Richmond, Va.
Customers caught on and flocked to the Stone-brewed Sapporo, says Sean Monahan, Stone’s chief operating officer. Stone brewed another pilot batch to meet customer demand, eventually dropping the linguistic cloak. “We started calling it Sapporo,” Monahan says.
Depending on the week, Sapporo might be a top-three seller across Stone’s taprooms. “The winking and nodding is over,” says Robert Kuntz, Stone’s senior director of brewery operations. “People are coming in looking for it.”
Before craft breweries carpeted America in IPAs, import beer deliciously contrasted domestic lager. British oatmeal stouts, German pilsners, and Belgian tripels bobbed across the Atlantic Ocean and stamped passports prior to settling in bars and bottle shops. Provenance and stories about time-creased brewing traditions sold bottles and pints.
With skyrocketing shipping costs and more than 9,000 breweries and taprooms, foreign breweries are ditching import status and producing beer stateside to better compete on
