The Bruery: explain how they've done it.

fair enough. i can't agree more. statistics is a grossly undervalued field that should be a minimum requirement in all scientific professions. it seems that scientists are taught how to design experiments, not how to interpret them.

huh? don't change the subject.

seriously though, no more derailing on my part.

i agree about the bruery's capital being the big thing. apparently they had in the range of $1 mil startup funding. add in great timing (right when today's craft boom was taking off), infrastructure they could leverage (no need to create their own distribution setups), and america's love for sweet sweet things, and boom they took off.

 

Correlation versus causation is certainly an interesting topic and is worth noting in this thread, but this isn't even remotely about beer anymore. The best we can do here is mention correlations that we believe are the causes of the Bruery's success and note that we are doing this. Can we leave it at that?

 

The thread was srarted May 30th - not much left to discuss.

On topic: Breweries led by people named Patrick seem to do well.

 

really intelligent and forward thinking business model right from the start. i think patrick predicted the current development of craft beer, and also (as, if i recall, was made clear from his posts around the time the bruery was opening) he's been shooting for getting stuff like black tuesday and knock your socks off barrel aged type beers to be bruery shelf beers since the start. once he gets enough capacity for that, they're going to dominate the aficionado market.

as for the nitty gritty stuff, i'm pretty sure he had a background in business or law, and i know that he was an active homebrewer (posting on BA) for awhile before he started the bruery. my guess is the guy is just really insightful, and correctly identifies what needs to be done to succeed.

good thing too, their beer is awesome.

edit: was this some kind of necrobump? i did not read any of the thread but the first post (it was bumped to the top of the forum when i posted). if the conversation is dead and i'm repeating stuff or even saying stuff that was already disproved, my apologies.

 

I'd be interested to know more about this. On the one hand, Patrick's blog post sounds like they were pretty far from awash in cash; on the other, how did they possibly expand production as much as they did and reach as many markets as they did as quickly as they did without capital? Also, what do you mean about their own distribution setups?

 

Yeah, Patrick Rue went to law school, but he says that he spent too much time homebrewing.

 

I thought the same thing when I was reading those early blog posts, but think about what went down during that first year: tons of custom construction, painting, piping, a glycol chiller setup, etc. They pretty much got it all right off the bat. I'm sure he was working on a budget, but it certainly wasn't a small one.

 

read through the thread.

was that at gordon's? i think i was there. i bought 4 different bottles and loved each one.

like the correlation/causation stuff. won't get into it, but i'll throw out that i'm an analytic philosopher, and we all turn our noses up at pretty much anyone outside our field who sincerely speaks about "causation" (like, they're illustrating a given example).

want to reiterate about my post, the bruery has shown a meteoric rise (just look at their distribution, and the fact that patrick was just some BA posting homebrewer a few years ago), but i don't think we've seen the plan come to fruition yet. in 2 or 3 years, you're going to see markets saturated with beers like black tuesday and oude tart, with other breweries making a tiny fraction of the barrel aged beer and struggling to sell their hot shot one-offs against the bruery.

similarly, imagine if BCBS really does get a heavy increase in production, and GI uses economy of scale to keep the prices below what they were a couple years ago (when BCBS sat on the shelf). now imagine trying to sell your "i'm just getting into barrel aging," $15 22oz bottle in the same stores. it will get some mileage, but at the end of the day there's going to be one brewery pulling in the vast majority of the BA beer profits. the bruery is going to be that (kind of) brewery, but in slightly different niches than BCBS. at least, that's my guess.

 

they don't seem to self-distribute locally, which is legal in ca. instead, they made distribution partnerships and kept the local stuff close enough to justify building a bottle shop.

i'm mentally comparing them to stone: stone found it was important to refrigerate beer, so they invested a ton of time getting their own distribution company off the ground. patrick didn't have to.

 

If there's anything that BA has taught me it's that new breweries can release shitty BBA stouts and sell them for whatever they want. Of course, it's possible that BA's culture will change as the good ones get common and people get over ticking.

 

i think breweries will be able to get away with, "you like our barleywine? well, we put some in barrels!" "whoa [such-in-such] in barrels! i've gotta try that!" for awhile...

but you only have infected and/or just plain bad $15 1-offs so many times when < $15 4pks of better BA beer are in the store.

as another thought experiment, imagine if every brewery's limited anniversary beer was the same style as duvel. maybe that would excite aficionados for a short time, but ultimately these breweries would have trouble selling entire batches of the stuff. BA beer (and silly mashup / variant beer) is hot right now, but that niche can be dominated like any other.

edit: posts like this in particular make me reconsider my lazy no-capital posting. that shorter paragraph up there borders on illegible. meh.

 

Well, it depends on how much BA beer the market can take. It's actually conceivable that there's enough demand for it (or will be eventually) that the limiting factor might be the amount of bourbon barrels available, then things would get interesting. But if there's not and BCBS/Parabola/KBS/BT are on the shelves for months at a time, maybe they won't be able to compete.

BUT I think they'll still be able to sell stuff for that. Beer drinkers like novelty, for one. Plus different people like different things, and so you could go that angle. And it's not clear to me that the big guys would compete on price all that much, so you could end up asking the same question as "why are there IPAs besides Pliny on shelves in the Bay Area?" (This, of course, ignores that Pliny sells out too damn fast, but even if it didn't there'd be dozens of others.)

So I think for the foreseeable future the tradition of the mostly-shitty-but-sometimes-great local BBA stout will continue.

Capitalization was invented for a reason!

 

honestly, i'm not sure we'll ever hit that threshold. even as some older ba's mature, there are enough new people coming into the hobby that the fraction who "learn" are continuously washed out.

and yes, i realize when i'm in a mode of thinking "the growth will always be exponential!", some problems may be around the corner...

there's nothing wrong with no-capital posting. when the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world — "no, you move."

 

I've found The Bruery to be nothing short of the most overrated brewery I've ever come across. Somehow they use their reputation to sucker people into paying obscene prices for mediocre brews.

 

Necrobump. That word gives me chuckles. Never heard it before. Only a matter of time before some shitty metal band gets ahold of it.

Funniest use of the emoticon I've ever seen. This thread has a life of its own, in a good way. Good mix of high and low brow humor throughout it. And what sucks is I know some of it went over my head.

If you think that's a massive failure, you should look at our parental/cultural values-'system'. Pales in comparison. But yeah, I hear ya.

Deep man. You should have been funny like everyone else who posted.

 

^And here I thought Raider fans didn't have a sense of humour.

 

Saw this on BeerPulse's linking of a LA Times Story on the Bruery

 

Quoting and replying to four different posts with no mistakes? Who stole your login information?

I thought they just filled a pool with that money and swam around in it.

 

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