Beer line-up changes at Clipper City/Heavy Seas

I don't believe this has been previously posted. Obtained (with permission) from the Beer in Baltimore Blog authored by Alexander D. Mitchell IV.

"Changes Coming to Heavy Seas "Flotilla""
In the midst of the chaos of the past two days, we somehow--somehow--received a missive from the public relations department at Heavy Seas describing upcoming changes to their product lines, including an overhaul of the Mutiny Fleet line of beers, preliminary plans for canned beers, expanded cask ale offerings, changes to select year-round products, and a new seasonal beer. They seem to do as good a job as I can so I'll just excerpt their notes (emphasis added by yours truly):

The biggest change Heavy Seas has in store for 2013 is the repositioning of our line of higher gravity beers (the Mutiny Fleet). This line will now be known as the Uncharted Waters line and all of the beers under that category will be influenced by wood in one way or another. Siren Noire Imperial Chocolate Stout aged in bourbon barrels will come out in January 2013. In March, we will release Oak Aged Big DIPA (double IPA). Holy Sheet Über Abbey Ale aged in brandy barrels will be released in May. Great'ER Pumpkin (our imperial pumpkin ale aged in bourbon barrels) will be released in September. Yule Tide, our November release, will take the place of our ongoing Plank project—aging beers on wood. That style will be determined closer to November of 2013. We have preliminary plans to release three products in cans in 2013. While we haven't determined availability at this juncture, we will be offering Loose CANnon, Davey Jones' Lager, and an Oktoberfest style in cans this year. Year-round, we will continue to offer Loose Cannon, Small Craft Warning, and Peg Leg. In order to better reflect our brand personality, we have renamed our Clipper Fleet beers: Heavy Seas Märzen will now be Cutlass Amber; Heavy Seas Pale Ale will now be Powder Monkey; Heavy Seas Gold Ale will now be Gold. Heavy Seas Classic Lager will be discontinued. As the largest producers of cask ale in the country, Heavy Seas is focused on expanding the number of offerings for retailers. We will continue to offer dry-hopped firkins of Loose Cannon and Powder Monkey (pale ale) year-round. We will also incorporate preset quantities of all seasonal beers and Uncharted Waters beers. Seasonally, we will offer Black Cannon in January through March. We wanted to add a new style to our seasonal catalog, therefore Dubbel Cannon will be replaced by Riptide White IPA, which is currently in formulation; Riptide will be offered April through June. Red Sky at Night, our saison, will be offered July through September. Winter Storm Imperial ESB will be offered October through December. Additionally, the new seasonal lineup will include 12 oz. bottles of Great Pumpkin, offered in Sunken Sampler packs exclusively in August and September.

 

"Consumers get easily confused"

I assume that's the idea. If a product is selling well, I'm assuming the last thing you'd want to do is to repackage it. For the most part, the beers that seem to be getting new names are beers that don't sell particularly well at the present time. Personally, I don't really see the point of changing the name of a line or creating a new line (unless it's for repricing purchases - a distinct possibility, I suppose), but the main thing is that the name of the beer will stay the same, so there really shouldn't be any great confusion (I mean does anyone really care that Yule Tide will now be part of the Uncharted Waters line instead of the Mutiny fleet line? My guess is probably not).

 

LOL!!! I stand corrected. :-)