Why are brewers taking months between IPA bottling and availability?

Agree and why most of what I buy is local. I want fresh tasty product and have grown tired of buying any old beer. I have had too many aged items that taste like crap due to sitting. Why do it anymore I can get Day old stuff miles from my home. I have done so many taste tests on beers I like that are fresh then months old and I can say I hate the old ones, not the same item and not very nice to drink sometimes lol.

 

You will get no argument from me here. I too have a preference for fresh beer and I am fortunate that there are many high quality breweries (with new ones opening up all the time it seems) where I can purchase fresh, high quality beer. Within the past year two larger (30 barrel brewhouse) breweries opened within walking distance of my house and they both make very good beer!! It just keeps getting better.

The larger, distributing breweries and their partner Wholesale Distributors would be wise to fully recognize this changing beer scene and take true steps to properly compete or otherwise they will lose the portion of the market that values fresh beer and worst case those breweries will go out of business. The Wholesale Distributors will likely not go out of business since there is still a need to sell BMC type beers (but that market is shrinking so....?).

Cheers!

 

It’s always lobby money, it’s everywhere, no real surprise there.

 

Are you anticipating that Old Mecklenburg will return to your area?

Cheers!

 

I hope the breweries push this more and more and get people to support the effort. I know many people will say we are crying over nothing but that is just not true. I have been on both sides of this and honestly the fresh beer is miles ahead of older stuff. I used to say it was not as important but the more I compared things the more I saw how different it is. You take a fresh IPA and then one that is 3-4 mos old and its not the same beer. At this point in my beer drinking life I want great stuff, I had all the bottom end for a long time and won't support it anymore.
Hope the main stream craft folks do the same so we send a message.

 

I hope so, they shut down their expansion plans because of the NC laws on distro, rightly they refused to turn over their superior product to careless money *****s. The avenue is there and I sincerely hope they do so, but I live so far from Charlotte I’m not sure if they’ve made a statement, but they were a leader in the movement as well as Red Oak that garnered thousands of signatures. Those signatures mean votes so politicians paid attention.

 

And IPAs are the most popular segment of the craft beer market.

And you are not alone here. Luckily there is a burgeoning small, local brewing scene which is an alternative source of product.

I am still keeping my eyes open here but frankly I am not seeing it. In my area there is the same MO where the larger, distributing breweries are just selling their beers to the Wholesale Distributors and not doing much more. As you are aware I recently sent a message to Stone Brewing that my local beer store had out of code Stone Enjoy By. The good news is that within a few days Stone Brewing Co. had this old beer removed. The bad news is that there were many other brands of Stone beer sitting on that shelf which were out of code but they weren't removed. The person who removed the old Enjoy By couldn't be bothered to remove the other old Stone beers? One more reason for me to buy fresh locally produced beer vs. beer from a larger, distributing brewery.

Cheers!

 

The issue is logistics from what I've seen and it looks as convoluted as this:

Brewery(which has its own brew schedule and release date (whenever it's ready, should nothing go wrong))>
Distributor sends a (hopefully refrigerated) truck (which is on a separate schedule from the brewery's release time frame and often doesn't sync up)>
Warehouse (which depending on the size of the distributor has to catalog and organize the entire incoming inventory from possibly tens or hundreds of breweries/wineries/distilleries and depending on the load can take days, weeks to complete and is ongoing with new incoming stock daily)>
Sales (which allocates what available product goes to what stores and in what amounts usually broken into three sub-divisions of "On-premise(bars, pubs, restaurants)", "Off premise(smaller non chain stores)", and "Big Box" (grocery stores, total wines, etc.))>
Shipping(which is zoned, with different sectors of cities receiving products on a separate delivery schedule throughout the week.

I don't know an easier way to explain the supply chain that I've seen working in the industry and no this isn't every distributorship but this is par for the course. But I hope it helps explain why the beer comes out late other variables exist but this is the most basic.

 

Distributors have to order so much from a said brewery to make it worth paying for shipping. That’s why I think many places are seeing “NEW” products a month after other parts of the country are getting them.

If a distributor ordered every new release they wouldn’t make any money.

 

No problem with Odell.. 2 week old IPA scored in the last couple days.

 

The three-tier requirement of many (but hardly all) states were developed mostly after WWII - as late as the 1940, half of all beer was still distributed to retailers from the brewery or brewery-owned "branches". Many states allowed out-of-state brewers to own wholesale licenses or self-distribute into the state.

Anheuser-Busch has owned distributorships in about a dozen states and still operated nearly two dozen today (accounting for around but not more than 10% - by agreement with the DoJ - of all AB sales). Coors at one time or another owned around six distributorships in the west, including one in St. Louis. P. Ballantine distributed into NYC from Newark and Schaefer did the reverse - Brooklyn into NJ. Ballantine operated company-owned branches up and down the east coast, and as far west as Chicago. In the craft era, Brooklyn Brewery owned a Massachusetts distributorship for a time.

But, with the notable exception currently of Stone in CA and some very local distribution by other breweries, very few "craft" size breweries with multi-state distribution would likely even consider self-distribution in today's beer market. Sure, lots of problems with distribution* and I agree likely the OP's problem can be blamed on them, but self-distribution just is not economically realistic for most of the 50/100k-up bbl breweries today. As some of the now-defunct breweries (Ballantine, Schaefer, Rheingold, Falstaff after buying Ballantine) hit hard times in the 1960s-1970s, ending the brewery's local distribution and farming it out to independent wholesalers were some of the first acts they did to save money.

* How 'bout this stat. In 1978, when the number of US breweries had pretty much bottomed out at fewer than 50 (and many of those were truly local or regional breweries), there were over 5,000 licensed wholesalers. Today, with over 7000 breweries (granted, maybe only 1/3 are distributed to any great degree) there are only around 2 - 3 thousand wholesalers (the Federal number disagrees with the NBWA's) but still around half as many while the number of breweries has exploded.

Too many beers, too many breweries, too many "SKU's" - despite all the high tech ordering and inventory processes.

The higher pay and stricter work rules (esp. those that required a helper on trucks) of the brewery-employed delivery drivers in "self-distribution" states, whether in the Teamsters or the Brewery Workers, were a more expensive to the brewers than the cost of independent distributors, even those which were organized, from what I've seen in union contracts.

 

This is why regional/national/local brews that are shelf or seasonal suffer in my area. the self distributed very fresh canned local offerings from several states is what is selling , its what i buy.