Break Up Budweiser. (And Molson Coors too.)

Typically as a business gets larger, the ability of the controlling shareholders to respect their competition diminishes.

 

This is something I feel people miss. Is it ok to try the same tactics, but fail vs succeed? Are you going to tell me that the local brewery isn't trying to use their popularity to get more of their product on tap and force others off? Isn't that the exact same position/argument the big ones supposedly use. "if you want to carry my popular beer you also need to carry my second, third or seasonal one!" I guess if your small its ok, but if you are big then its not.

 

I don't understand these 2 comments - the brewery's English-version website still says:

 

Which is something I don't understand, which comes down to greed. As a business gets larger, it and it's shareholders should be making a lot more money, which would require them to need and do less and still get a larger amount than the competition. Of course, investments are always made into new expansions which then requires more profit to pay for the investment.

All businesses try to get ahead, but there are right and wrong ways of doing it, and legal and illegal ways.

 

Yes, I was about to say "but at that size... would they even be a craft brewery?" There are large breweries in Europe that marquis and others have said were doing "craft" long before it was a thing, but I've no idea on their business workings.

A brewery couldn't equal or surpass the big boys without adapting to their game. Unless there was some huge shift in culture, there is "mainstream stuff" at one end, and "craft"/"local" at the other and they'll always remain separate, with different consumers.

Though you have "heritage", or regional brands, and some larger "craft". Are there any "new" breweries who are not craft, but also not connected in any way to AB and such? I know this was common 150 years ago...

 

Is that even possible? Do you just mean a brewery that only makes an AAL with a light version and nothing else? If they are a new independent brewery, I'm not sure if they wouldn't be considered "craft" just based on what beers they make. If we had a good AAL producing small independent craft brewery I would imbibe.

 

But Schlitz once was.


Market Share of each brewer between 1967 and 1976:
Anheuser-Busch - 14.22% / 19.07% *
Schlitz - 9.5% / 15.86%

* Coincidentally, '76 was a strike year for AB, the year before and the year after they had ~23% of the market.

As noted in the article, the illegal "stuff" was common in the industry - AB would be hit with fines by the Feds the same year.

 

Narragansett, F X Matt, Genesee and Yuengling all make AAL's (though Utica Club's distribution area has shrunk over the years - I no longer see it in NJ so it likely isn't in New England either).

 

That's a good question. From my understanding, even early AAL were different from what we get today (not sure if that translate to quality, since many people are blinded by nostalgia). Ideally, something like that, or whatever is currently popular?

On the other hand, they could go the other way, and make something unlike whatever is on the market today (not gimmicky). Pilsners were quite the departure for their time, and its hard to believe wheat beers were once one of the most popular in the States.

 

I'm personally not a fan of Yuengling or Narragansett Lager, heard of but never seen Genesee I don't think and never heard of F X Matt but see it is local to Saranac NY. I can get some "craft" AALs locally since more brewers make them, I was just wondering how a brewery could be "new", and still independent, but not craft. Hyperlocal to me is Night Shift and their Nite Lite, and now Nite Heavy, Trillium has canned a corn lager Party Pump and a rice lager, has made more lagers with corn and rice on draft. I'm also a fan of Founders Solid Gold, being a nationwide release, though the term "craft" might be disputed for them.

I think small and independent wasn't called "craft" back then because they just didn't term it that way. We started calling independent beer "craft beer" and created associations with the term "craft" more recently. And George Washington supposedly made a porter with corn and molasses.

 

Yeah, so, I was wondering, since for example, some European brands aren't that old at all, but looking at them side-by-side with those from 500-1000 years ago, you probably wouldn't know that (Straffe Hendrik is one example). I'm not sure the whole craft scene in the States had reached Europe at the time, or if it was merely an extension of their traditions?

Which makes me wonder: is there an end to "craft"? Or will it remain as long as the US exists? I'm interested in how things will look in the long run. Its crazy to me how so many regional names were dying out at right around the same time. Is it a case of one influencing the other, or simply coincidence?

 

There were numerous "Weiss Beer" breweries in the US in the last half of the 19th century, mostly concentrated in urban areas in the Northeast and Mid-West but most sources suggest they were very small and tended to rely mostly on German immigrant customers. For instance, an 1873 article notes there were 15 Weiss breweries in Brooklyn and 50 in the greater NYC metro area.

An 1885 Police Gazette article claimed there were 99 Weiss beer breweries in the US, which brewed 31,550 bbl. in 1884. By comparison, The Year Book of the United States Brewers Assoc. (1909) lists 18,998,619 barrels of beer brewed that year, with the number of US breweries in the 2,500 range.

The beer was modeled on Berliner Weisse style (according to some contemporary brewing industry sources, some was made with grits and barley malt and wheat) and was always bottled since it underwent secondary fermentation for carbonation. The breweries ran into problems with the Feds, since originally the only way beer was taxed was by the barrel/half/quarter, with physical "Stamps" attached. Lager and ale brewers (or outside bottlers) would then bottle the taxed, kegged beer. But the Weiss Beer brewers didn't keg.

Not a lot of info on them- which suggests to me they had a very small portion of the greater beer (lager and ale) market in the US.

There were a few small attempts after Repeal to revive the style, but they were mostly gone within the decade. (Looks like I never did create my Post-Repeal Weiss page). No "wheat beers" in the US until August Schell and Anchor came out with them in the mid-1980s.

 

I meant Hefeweizen, but was too lazy to type out. Were those beers as popular as craft Here were during the 90s? I'm guessing they didn't have the same distribution...

 

F X Matt is the brewer of the Saranac brand, which was created back in the mid-1980s. Previous to that, their flagship brands were Utica Club (an AAL and a Cream Ale) and then Matt's Premium. Matt was an early contract-brewer - notably of New Amsterdam Amber Beer, and later Brooklyn, Pete's and Samuel Adams.

 

Oh, you mean craft-era US style (so-called) Hefeweizens - the most notable brand being Widmer Bros.? Yeah, there were quite a few, along with a number of German imports, but I wouldn't call them, even taken together, "...one of the most popular (beer styles) in the States"... but, of course, there were a lot fewer beer styles around at the time, too.

 

It's easy to understand. The more degrees of separation between us all, the easier it is to simplify it down to dollars and cents. I can only imagine the suffering that went into my cellphone.

 

In the craft beer scene, then. I can't imagine someone barely putting one out today, as many of the best known names on the market were established decades ago. It might have even paved the way for lager renaissance today

 

JK, I suppose we could add August Schell, Spoetzl, Straub, Lion, & Stevens Point breweries to that list (and maybe others?).

Do you by any chance maintain a list of Regional Breweries that produce AAL beers on your website?

Cheers!