Buying privilege. Come on, man.

With the lame quality of bottle shops in our area I am not surprised by any of this. I have been going to The wine club on Coleman. Not a wide selection, but all interesting/quality stuff and fair prices.

 

I doubt AB InBev is forcing any store to do this.

 

I can guarantee my local breweries do not do this. I would never partake in this bullshit no matter who it is. Support breweries that don't do this and maybe collectively we can make a statement. Even if it's only in my dreams...

 

Not the norm, but not unusual either. As I said, its standard throughout the industry. For example if you want to be able to sell Bell's Hopslam, you have to move a lot of Bell's beers. That's how distributors allocate the stuff that's in "short" supply.

 

Lol obviously not forcing. But encouraging? By implementing the policy of more sold last year = more BCBS next year? Yes.

 

But the breweries don't do allocations to retailers. The retailer decided that's how they'd do their sales, but they only got their allocation by selling enough for the distributor to give them some of the limited supply.

 

Got nothing to do with ABInBev. Its standard practice throughout the industry.

 

Really? You'll offer little old plebian me the opportunity to purchase this nectar of the gods themselves and all I have to do is help you move old stock by buying more beer I don't want??

Nah, get fucked. If I ever ran into this I'd leave and never shop there again. Immensely condescending. I have no interest in buying beer I didn't come there to buy just to help you get a bigger allocation next year.

 

Well to be honest I probably don't know enough about the industry to make the die hard claims I was making, but there's still a connection between store and AB even if there's a distributor in the middle. Doesn't AB own a ton of distributors too? Either way, the store is encouraged to sell more generic GI to get more "rare" bourbon County. By whom? It's not just the distributor.. AB rewards this behavior through a multi layer vail

 

Yea, that's how breweries do allocations. Do you think they give a highly sought after limited brew to accounts that don't support them?

 

It's really not that bad a deal if the BCBS is priced reasonably. GI regulars are quality beers, I could find something in their standard lineup that I'd be happy to have in the fridge if I could also get a bottle of BCBS for say $13 or less. If they markup the 6ers/4 packs or the BCBS then screw 'em and walk.

 

In a few states ABInBev is allowed to own distributors, but in most states not. The vast majority of distributors nationally are not owned by ABInBev.

Also you may not like the policy, but you want to let go of the notion that this is something unique to AB. Lots of hard to get craft beer is allocated to retailers on exactly the same basis by distributors who have nothing to do with ABInBev.

 

Ya you know, I imagine you're totally right, I just can't comprehend encouraging people to buy their old IPA's to get a hold of something that's "whalezbro". And I hate AB InBev if you couldn't tell. Sorry for the heat.