Affordable Belgian Style Beers

1) You people get some serious taxes on booze.
2) I never quite got as to why the 3-tier system is mandatory in the USA. In Belgium you can do pretty much whatever you want, you get anything from using distributors to the brewer dumping some crates at a local store.
3) Belgian breweries are a lot smaller than most people think.
Googling, I saw several sources cite Unibroue production being 180.000 hL.
Chimay makes 123.000 hL. That is a really big brewery, a brewery like the De Dolle makes 1000 hL.

€2.50-€3.00 for a Chimay in a supermaket is a bit high.

Overall I would say that beer is too expensive in the USA. If you look at the fact that a smaller Belgian brewery with the high costs of export can still price itself lower than a similar product from the USA.
Indeed, you make a good argument as to the reasons for this being outside of the grasp of the breweries.
Still special releases are overprized.

 

Ommegang. Unibroue. Allagash. All widely available with good variety & reasonably priced. Taste great too! I see Saison DuPont at about $8-9 750ml occasionally. I often sample on tap before spending a lot more on 750ml bottles. Philly has a few very good Belgian spots & more of the craft bars have Belgians readily available on tap.

 

Rodenbach- 750s are around 9.99 near me.

 

It would be a great answer if NB distributed to Pennsylvania.

 

“1) You people get some serious taxes on booze.” Yeah, no doubt. They are sometimes euphemistically referred to as a sin tax.

“2) I never quite got as to why the 3-tier system is mandatory in the USA. In Belgium you can do pretty much whatever you want, you get anything from using distributors to the brewer dumping some crates at a local store.” The three tier distribution system was established after the repeal of Prohibition. The rationale for three tiers was to ‘mitigate’ to potential for abuse by the liquor/beer producers (which occurred prior to Prohibition). The three tier system does a pretty good job of keeping the liquor/beer producers in check but at the cost of increased prices and some inefficiencies.

Cheers!

 

He's right, you know. Solid Belgian style beer produced in America. If you ever have the opportunity, visit the brewery. Knowledgeable staff, great tasting demo, clean facility, and fantastic food and drink round out this pleasurable experience. My father-in-law lives up in that area, and we make it a point to visit the brewery for a tasting, a tour, and lunch when we see him, it's that good up there. To boot- the brewery gives their unused grain mash to a local farmer, perhaps reducing their "footprint" on the environment. And no, the cows do not end up drunk as a result. But that would make cow-tipping a little easier.

 

I was scanning the thread to make sure I didn't basically duplicate someone else's post, but this exactly what I came here to say.

Boulevard's Smokestack series have some outstanding examples of Belgian styles, and they are quite reasonably priced--especially when compared to some of the Belgian style heavyweights of American brewing (Allagash, Ommegang, Russian River to name a few I've had). Their standard Smokestack 750s are around $10 depending on where you get them, and their 4-packs are only $12 or so, meaning you can get great examples of saison, quad and tripel year-round, with a dubbel seasonally (but not in 4-packs). And that doesn't even account for Saison-Brett and Bourbon Barrel Quad (BBQ), which are both very reasonably-priced aged beers.

Overall, I would tend to agree. But the bottom line is that in the States, "craft" beer is a niche/luxury market, which strikes me as different from the attitude towards beer in European countries--especially ones with great brewing traditions, like Belgium, for example. And in a niche market, pricing models are going to tend towards pricing based on the benefit provided by the product, rather than based on cost. And one of the side-effects of benefit-driven pricing is that instead of paying for the cost of making the beer + a profit margin, the consumer is paying the cost of product replacement--i.e., what they would have to pay to get a similar product elsewhere.

Even though Belgian beers are largely more expensive due to the overseas distribution, American brewers are looking at the net cost to the end consumer. They don't care that a Belgian beer may be $5 for the beer plus $5 for shipping (just an example), they are still going to price their comparable beer at $10, partly because they can, since the consumer is going to have to pay $10 no matter where they get their Belgian style beer of choice, but also because they want their beer to be seen as on par with that beer, and being cheaper often signals to a consumer that your quality is not as high.

Other areas that use this "benefit" or "cost of replacement" model of pricing are things like consumer electronics, and even pharmaceuticals. Some pharmaceutical companies actually price some of their most expensive drugs based on what surgery or medical procedure the drug is intended to prevent/replace. For example--cholesterol drugs are so expensive because the logic is that their use prevents the need for the incredibly expensive bypass surgery.

 

Maudite kills it at $8.99 per 4. Nothing comes close in that price range.

 

La Fin Du Monde in nowhere near the best tripel in the world. Westmalle, for example, is significantly better.

 

I also recommend New Belgium dubbel and trippel. 8 or 9 bucks a 6 pack and they are fairly close to some heavy hitters in flavor imo.

 

i don't know about fairly close. they are serviceable. excellent for the price. above average beers for sure, but let's not get carried away.

 

Thanks for providing insights into our Belgian friends' domestic beer market, and an important basis of comparison! However, I take issue with your conclusion that "American breweries are screwing (American beer drinkers) systematically by pricing local beers only slightly below or even higher than EU imports." Belgian ones DO cost more in the US, apparently from your statistics, often a lot more than they do in Belgium, and more than most US made Belgian style beer.

Leffe Blond 11.2 oz. - Belgium $1.085 @, US $2.50@ (here they usually come in fourpacks). I paid $2 for one bottle on sale and considered myself fortunate.
Orval 11.2 - Belgium $2.08 @, US I just bought a single last week for $5.90 and was happy to get it that cheap.
Duvel 11.2 - Belgium $1.25@, US $3.25 unless you go for the four-bottle-and-a-snifter gift pack which I've recently seen at around $18. If you count the great gilt-lettered snifter as $8, that brings the bottle price down to $2.50@

American made: Ommegang or Unibroue $2.50-$3 per 12 oz. bottle; New Belgium $1.17-2 @.

Certainly any American Belgian beer lover would be delighted to pay Belgian prices for good Belgian made beer. But then we'd be delighted to pay only $1.085-1.25 each for most of the craft beer we love, Belgian style or not. Unfortunately we can't unless it's a big nationally marketed brewery's product such as Sierra Nevada or Sam Adams, and then that's usually only possible if you buy them on sale in a twelvepack. Most craft breweries' sixpacks in the States run $8-12 (or $1.25-2 a bottle) each or more unless they are on sale. (Do not feel too sorry for us however. If we really need to go cheap, the mass produced rice and corn supplemented mainstream 4% brews like Genesee or Keystone are available in 24-30 packs for just over fifty cents a 12 ounce can.)

Of course price is at least partly determined by and dependent on living standards. Perhaps Belgium's is higher than in the States, although most Americans including yours truly would doubt that that is true. I would guess that your costs of living generally are higher, with consequently less discretionary income. And for its size, probably no other country makes more great beer. Perhaps less tax on beer production, too? So there is likely a competition factor for a smaller population and pool of extra cash which could be keeping prices down.

That said, I do agree that some American craft breweries may be doing some "screwing over." The Bruery's Bois for $35+ for 22 oz.? Certain Lost Abbey for $18/12 oz.? What you find is it usually translates to those that bring the highest prices being limited and perhaps particularly expensive production runs which appear in the BA top 250 list; and the higher up, the more can if not must be charged. But at worst that's part of the law of supply and demand, and we should not fault a good Capitalist for trying to get what he can for a product. We can just not buy it.

Thanks again for posting, I really enjoyed getting some of the Belgian market picture!

 

Fully agreed, financially obviously their strategy makes a lot of sense. I still thought the great difference in asking price was food for thought.

 

It's the best deal going, My basement is starting to get full of corked 750 tripel's and dark strong's, that cost $1 to fill, Magnums = $2.

 

Normally I tell everyone homebrewing is just an expensive hobby.. but if you know how to make a Belgian it could actually save you a few dollars. Guess that just illustrates how expensive most Belgian Beers are.. I don't think the price is justified for the locally brewed ones.. Obviously, Importing adds costs to the well-known examples, but if you want decent priced beers then Belgians are not going to deliver what you want. The best priced, though? I'd say Unibroue at Trader Joe's. $5.99 750 mls and decent prices on 4-packs.

 

“Normally I tell everyone homebrewing is just an expensive hobby.. but if you know how to make a Belgian it could actually save you a few dollars.” Homebrewing Belgian style beers save you a lot of dollars! In the past six months I have homebrewed:

· Belgian Strong Dark Ale

· Dubbel

· Saison (two batches)

· Wit

Homebrewing a Belgian style beer is no more difficult than brewing a non-Belgian style beer; for most Belgian beer styles it is as simple as purchasing the correct yeast strain for that beer style.

The Dubbel I homebrew cost me about $45 in ingredients. If I were to purchase two cases of a beer like Chimay that would cost be over $200.

Cheers!

 

we've done 61 cases of Belgians so far this year, dark strong's , tripels , and saison. Store value just a pinch over $7000.00

 

You also need to factor in the exchange rate 1 Euro=more than $1.

 

There is a new Trader Joe's beer brewed at Marten's in Belgium that works out to around $1.15 a bottle. I thought it was pretty damn good for that price.

http://beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/3517/96901