Beer selection: Small liqour vs larger chains

Most chains have a base where each store carries the Paulaner's, Chimay's, and BrewDog's. That leaves little room for the individual store to bring on something extra. At the other end, a small independent liquor may have a smaller overall selection, but you may find the oddball import or hard to find domestic beer.

 

I live on the NY/CT border and the craft selection is pretty decent at many large and small stores...The prices can vary considerably though, and what is available from one state to the other is sometimes limiting.

 

Oftentimes it's the mom and pop shops that have a smaller but better-curated selection. For example, there are 2-3 places near my work or home where the owner has a good relationship with some head brewers. I can rely on them to get in the latest from GI or Westbrook.

Meanwhile, the big chains have a much wider selection, but will rarely have walez.

 

Wish the small stores near me did that! There are a few, one of which still has Sierra Nevada Estate Ale from 2012 sitting on the shelves (mmmm delicious!), the other one has half a dozen different Three Floyds you could want but all are marked up 15-20% and are 6 months+ old (mmmm 6 month old Dreadnought, Gumball Head & Zombie Dust). Pre-aged IPAs & higher prices! Wooo!
The big box stores have old stock too, so I am getting very careful checking dates - my favorite Binnys, which has a great beer manager, often has quite a lot of beer that is 4-6 months old. I solve this by just chatting to one of the staff and ask what just came in and is fresh and they usually steer me to something great. Because they are so big they usually have something fresh and interesting. The smaller stores often only have 1 or 2 fresh beers to choose from and tend to have more really ancient stuff than the big box

I will hit the smaller stores when I miss out on a limited release at the big box Binnys as they usually get their delivery a few days after the big stores, but I won't shop there for regular beer. I am all for supporting the little guy, but I also refuse to pay a premium for shitty old light struck beer and have had too many experiences where I forgot to check dates and ended up drinking a 6 month old IPA that was well past prime.

I recently did an in person trade with a guy in Australia (I am there on vacation) and so I wanted to make sure I brought really fresh IPAs and DIPAs for him - I was after particular regional beers, and the grocery store had the freshest by far. They only have about 30 craft beers in their little craft section, but they move through it so quickly that it was fresher than the specialty stores and the big box places.

I would love to trust that stores have good management of their stock, but most of them don't around here

 

Big stores don't often have beer specialists. They order what will sell or what the distributors will push. Small stores often know what they are ordering and what our scene wants.

 

I'll tell you why.

Now, this is not the standard. Not all small stores have a better selection than the bigger stores but many do.

The reason is quite simply that the micro breweries can't supply the bigger stores enough stock to justify a place on their shelves. A bigger store doesn't want to order stock for it to run out a week after it has been ordered due to the brewery not being able to produce enough beer to meet demand. This is why often micro breweries through independent distributors will only supply the smaller stores as they don't mind running out of certain stock if the distributors can supply them with something different or because it allows them to sell out of existing stock while they wait for the other stock to come back in.

These bigger stores also often have set "planograms" (or shelf product placement) where stock has been committed to be placed in a certain place on the shelves for a specific time period and for products to be eligible the breweries have to satisfy the store that they can continuously supply the beer.

 

what you are saying is partially true, it also has a lot to do with smaller beer shops actually getting "it"

 

I work in a small store. It maybe true that we can not get the number of cases of the special beers that some of the larger stores can get... But, we always make it up in service. We make sure all of our staff is completely trained in all areas of beer, including beer making. This allows us to provide a service to our customers that many larger stores do not need to do.
As time goes on, the distributors get to know us smaller stores better and we soon start to get larger supplies of the better beers.

 

I actually work for Kroger and I have some stored around me like this, but my store is completely different. We carry a total of around 15 six packs of craft and that is it. I talked to the store manager about why we don't carry more and asked to request some stuff. It's much like @BarefootRock said; beers have to be approved by a district coordinator who is above out store manager. Essentially, it's impossible to get beer into my Kroger. I'm sure there are other stores around like this too.

 

This is an interesting discussion to me, as the small stores you all are talking about really don't exist here. Pretty much the only places to find a good selection of beer are Total Wine and ABC. There are some random shops and smaller chains around, but I've never found anything of much quality there.

 

For sheer variety, if you live in Chicago you simply go to Binny's - it owns the "big beer/wine/likker" store market up here, and they got onboard with craft early and with a vengeance. That said, I love going to Whole Foods and actually finding 3F/Firestone Walker reserve stuff (Parabola, Sucaba), etc. And my favorite beer store is Beer Temple down in the city: well curated, small, the owner is a cicerone, and he not only date stamps all his beers when they come in but has actually been known to dump stuff when it gets too old. There is a place for all of them, very much including CostCo if you are buying for a party.