Samuel Adams Sales Decline

The only reason I was sad about Noble Pils going year round is that I would not be able to order copious amounts of it on tap as one of their seasonals. It's such a refreshing beer, which can also be said of Double Agent IPL. I also still say fresh Boston Lager is still a great beer, though people are free to disagree with me on that one. Their cream stout is solid as are Boston Ale, Octoberfest, their imperial stout, their doppelbock, the entire barrel room collection, and many others. I will also say the imperial white ages pretty well and the blueberry lager from the summer pack was suprisingly good. Count me as a Samuel Adams fan.

 

I got into beer via Sam products, but nowadays it's so easy to find craft beer both on shelves and on draft at bars and restaurants that there's less reason to order Sam Adams. I'll enjoy a Boston Lager with a burger and fries occasionally, and if a friend picks up a multi-pack I'll try a beer or two, but nothing they make is overwhelmingly good enough to buy over my craft stand-bys.

 

The black lager is excellent in my opinion, had a bottle of it last week and it was as good as I remembered it to be. Their Octoberfest beer is also really tasty imo, I always look forward to trying it alongside the German (pale) Octoberfest beers which make it over here. Then there's their Winter lager which I very much enjoy, inbetween the sweeter Christmas beers it's really nicely balanced between the malt and the spices. Their Boston Lager and Boston Ale are both tasty beers as well.

I haven't had their cream stout but I can't imagine it being anything other than delicious, I did enjoy their Honey Porter when it was sold here.

I think Boston Brewing Company produces a bunch of tasty beers and I don't see how their relative lack of dry hopping/lower rates of dry hopping makes them less tasty, unless everything of a certain kind is meant to taste the same, having the same taste parameters and just ramping them up, the more the better. That would be like only eating asian food and not eating well made meat and potatoes type dishes because it doesn't have enough scoville units and layers of chili heat.

 

“That would be like only eating asian food and not eating well made meat and potatoes type dishes because it doesn't have enough scoville units and layers of chili heat.”

Well, if you take note of the number of posts on this thread which have messages like: Sam Adam need to make a high quality IPA (or DIPA) there seems to be a number of folks who only want to eat spicy ‘asian food’!?!

Cheers!

 

Interesting #'s - so BBC (beer, tea, cider) as a whole was up over last year by almost 100,000 bbl. yet SA brands (beer only) are in decline - so that means they shipped probably abt 100,000 bbl. more ice tea and cider in the 1st qtr than last year? So that's almost 16% of their total current business in just tea/cider increases. So where was the baseline % of cider/tea as part of the whole business? Its gotta be at least 30% of its sales volume in order to have that kind of impact on the whole. If that's the case, just another couple of years of growth like this and they could be making more cider/tea than beer - the BA will have to change its definition again.

 

The BA does not condone cider and mead, as those are wine. Sort of like beer Advocate in that respect.

 

I agree with that. I think SA certainly tries to do a variety of styles, and none of them are terrible drain pours. But none of them, at least to my palate and in my experience, have much memorable distinction, with Utopias being the obvious exception. And I might even add Boston Lager to that as well since there wasn't much like it when it came out.

 

Well, besides the various business point made, Sam Adams is always a go to for me. I'm in that age category where those products were the beacon of light, and returning to them is like revisiting an old friend. Like most breweries they have hits and misses. I have BBC products I enjoy repeatedly and ones I wish I never consumed. They are what they are, to paraphrase our football coach. Maybe their "experimental" styles aren't extreme beers, but I have enjoyed most of them. To me, rather than mundane and boring, I think of them as reasonably reliable (maybe that is the same thing depending on how you look at things). I just don't always need something that is extreme.

The sales decrease isn't alarming, I don't think, but is cause for attention in the business sense. Lots of competition between craft and BMC ramping up their marketing efforts.

 

Meh, bugger the definition.

While size CAN mean that making a good beer is difficult/impossible (EX: the enormous systems that produce bud light), I don't see size as the main source of the quality of a brewery's beer.

What does BA call a brewery that is far above the level of micro, but still produces good beer? Id just want to call it a craft macro.

seems like a more solid definition than the ones BA has coined...... especially since at SOME point a lot of the other larger micro breweries are going to get to Sam Adams size..............

 

Like when they did this "for the industry"?

http://www.beerlabels.com/labels/beers.pl/383/oregon-ale-and-beer-co.html

jessekidden, if you read this would you post that .jpg of the article you have pertaining to this. Or just private message me the url please. Thanks!

 

So BBC's cider #'s are exluded when the BA presents craft beer sales data ? What about tea - fmb's? AFAIK those #'s aren't released to the public, so if true SA tells the BA what they are?

 

If we/re buggering the definition - its arse does look tempting - let's go by flavour. My opinion - their beers are slightly better than what's called BMC.

 

The Brewers Association definition for "microbrewery" is one under 15,000 bbl/yr. They call any brewery between 15k bbl. and 6m bbl. a "regional" (regardless of if it's sold in one state, several states, one (or more) specific region(s), or nationally). A brewer such as the one you describe is a "regional craft brewery" to the B.A.

 

I do remember that SA was under 2 million a while back for the BA, as the Twisted Tea was not in those numbers. This was before the cider, IIRC. Then as they grew, the BA changed the definition to 6 million to allow for growth, and as some have said, it would look odd that the craft went down by a big amount due to the definition on size.

 

I keep a running tally from articles, press releases, etc., of brewers' yearly barrelage totals before the stats come out in the Spring of the following year, and somewhere* I've got Boston Beer Co. at 2,200,000 bbl. of "craft beer" and total barrelage for the year was listed at 2.7m bbl. on Beer Marketers Insights.

Similarly, the B.A. listed BBC at 1,868,471 bbl. in 2010, and BMI has them at 2,265,000 bbl. that year.

The differences obviously the ciders (HardCore and, more recently, Angry Orchard) and Twisted Teas. TT is supposedly BBC's 2nd or 3rd best selling label.

* I keep the dally pretty good - I don't keep the footnotes as well.​

 

Thank you! the more you know ehh?

 

to be that seems to be a bit harsh. But that's just me.

their are things from SA I don't care for, and things that I like a lot. A lot more than just saying that they just barely squeek past BMC brew.......

 

I have a lot of respect for Sam Adams--for years, they were the only alternative to the domestic trinity and mass-market imports on the shelf. I don't have anything particularly against Sam Adams--Boston Lager is a nice beer, and I enjoy their Summer Ale and Octoberfest--but there are so many beers that are a lot more interesting right now (not counting Utopias).

Sam Adams should take a page out of Goose Island's book. They have their gateway sixers, some of which, like the IPA, are damn good beers. But they also release a number of world class beers (BCBS and its siblings, Matilda, Sofie etc.) that excites craft beer lovers. A balance can definitely be struck.