Simply put, Beer Wars the movie (2009) is one every fan of beer needs to see. The film, which can be downloaded directly from BeerWarsMovie.com, or streamed live (or rented) from NetFlix, was written and narrated by industry insider Anat Baron. In Beer Wars, Baron tells the story of craft brewing hero Sam Calagione, the owner of Dogfish Head, and his struggles with expansion; and of Rhonda Kallman, as she tries to get her brand of malt beverage, Moonshot – a beer brewed with caffeine – off the ground as a one-woman show.

Even though Dogfish has seen unprecedented growth and success, for Calagoine, the cost and toll of expanding the brewery’s capacity weighs heavily on not only the company’s assets, but the Calagoine family’s as well. As Sam and wife Mariah struggle with putting their home up to guarantee the loans necessary to purchase larger fermentation tanks for the brewery.

The filmmaker also follows Kallman around Boston, as she tries to convince new accounts to pick up her Moonshot drink. Kallman left a position on top of the beer world as Jim Koch’s (Sam Adams) right-hand-lady to self-fund Moonshot and bootstrap the company from the ground up. Despite a slow start and tough numbers – and a quickly-diminishing bank account – she chooses to push on despite all odds and ends the film considering selling the brand (or partnering with) one of the behemoth brewing companies like MillerCoors or Anheuser-Busch.

The film is not without criticisms or faults. Filmmaker Anat Baron set out to create a film which realistically represents the beer industry while claiming she herself is an industry insider. However, she only ever worked for gimmicky malt beverage company Mike’s Hard Lemonade and is actually allergic to alcohol, so she has no real intimate knowledge of beer.

Secondly, as noted, Rhonda Kallman’s product “Moonshot” is also a malt beverage (not a beer) brewed with caffeine. Many argue that while Kallman has the right to market the drink like anyone else, it has no place in a film which is meant to fight for the rights and awareness of the country’s small, struggling, artisanal craft breweries.

Despite these arguments, Beer Wars sheds a very important light on the bully-like ways that the country’s “Big Three” breweries – Anheuser-Busch, Miller and Coors – still control the nation’s beer landscape (one out of every two beers sold in the U.S. is an Anheuser-Busch product), creating what many consider a monopoly of the industry. Despite the laws of a three-tiered distribution system put in place to stop such monopolies after the passage of the twenty-first amendment.

Whether you are a seasoned craft beer connoisseur or a newcomer to the hobby, Beer Wars is an important film to see; chalk-full of powerful information, industry insight and feel-good stories which makes any fan of Better Beer happy to raise a glass and toast the suds we love.

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