The Brewers Association’s Bart Watson is no Albert Einstein. That’s not a knock on him, as that also applies to nearly 100% of humanity. But when I visited Watson's Boulder, Colorado office and commented on the stacks of papers and general disarray, he told me to Google Einstein’s desk. Sure enough, the legendary genius was a pretty messy guy too. Both Watson and Einstein had a career in academia at least. Before he took a job in craft beer as the BA’s Chief Economist, Watson earned his doctorate in political science (political economy, more specifically) at UC Berkeley. He planned on a career of teaching and researching. I spoke with him to find out how someone with his background ended up working in beer, and how he uses the numbers to speak about the current state of craft beer. Just 30 miles southeast of the BA’s headquarters, a former physicist and engineer for Lockheed Martin, Patrick Crawford, brews for Denver Beer Co. For Watson, his path bent towards beer when he was a visiting assistant professor teaching a public policy class at the University of Iowa. He happened upon the BA’s website looking for info on excise taxes for a lecture. “The BA had a job opening,” he says. “It was the only non-academic job I applied to. I did it on a lark. I thought it sounded kind of fun.” Considering he spent his dissertation doing research on a “comparative look at technology implementation in retail trade across national retailers,” a job that combines economics and beer seems like a fun outcome for his skillset.

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The intersection of beer and economics means one thing for Watson in February and March every year – the annual report. The centerpiece of this report is the top 50 breweries of the previous year based on beer sales volume. “Breweries measure themselves, and you definitely hear disappointment when someone doesn’t get to the spot they wanted,” he says. “Particularly amongst the top 50.” And he doesn’t just count the big boys. For smaller breweries, their data is published in the BA’s in-house mag The New Brewer. It’s 2017, so you might imagine that because digital records are commonplace, Watson can leisurely open a spreadsheet and magically find all the names, number of barrels brewed, and sales data for his industry within. Not quite. His office is awash in bright neon green papers filled with data mailed to him from breweries across the country. And while this year he has a temp helping him with data entry, last year he input it all himself. All in all, 5200+ breweries submit info to him via snail mail and email before being aggregated into Excel. “I’m usually either looking at a spreadsheet or email,” he says. “The emails determine which spreadsheet I’m opening. Some of it is parsing through [sales data] to help breweries. This time of year I have eight spreadsheets open, all trying to compile them into one [master] spreadsheet [for the annual report].” Without a hint of superiority in his voice, he explains, “I’m very good at Excel!” We believe him. The only difference between him and an economist in the real world might be that at 4:30pm, the BA’s in-house bar opens downstairs, and he can grab a beer and take it back to his desk. In order to return to looking at a spreadsheet.

Brewers Association There's. A. Bar. At. His. Job.