Macro Trickery

When I first heard of Shock Top, it just sounded (and looked) like a macro owned beer... Turned out I was right.

 

I honestly can't remember but I don't even think I realized the difference between micro and macro brews back then.

 

Honestly, I drank some of my roommate's Shock Top Wheat IPA last night and it was really good. First BMC product I liked. Very surprised.

He didn't know it was made by Anheuser Busch

 

The use of "dba" brewery names on beer labels was always pretty common in the US brewing industry and long predates the "craft" era. When breweries picked up the brands of closed breweries, they often continued to use the original brewer's name. So, when for example, Schmidt's of Phila. picked up the brands of Rheingold in the late '70's, those labels began to read "Rheingold Brewery, Phila, PA" "Jacob Ruppert Brewing Co. Phila., PA" "McSorley's Ltd. Phila, PA" etc. Some breweries that specialized in private brands or the brands of closed breweries (Horlacher, Eastern, Heileman, General, etc.) used dozens of dba names over the years.

And breweries often used "dba" names when they contract-brewed other brands or simply didn't want to associate a new beer with the brewery (or vice versa). Ballantine's version of Meister Brau Lite was labeled as a product of "Christian Feigenspan Brewing Co., Newark, NJ" (a brewery they'd bought in the 1940's), Rheingold's Gablinger's Light Beer was a product of the "Forrest Brewing Co., Brooklyn, NY" (Rheingold was located near Forrest St. in Brooklyn). When Carling brewed Tuborg under license for the US market, it was originally labeled as being from "Tuborg Breweries, Ltd., Waltham, MA".

With today's macros dba's it pretty easy to spot based on most of the city names listed-these are almost certainly AB or MC beers;

​

Newark, NJ​

Jacksonville, FL​

Merrimack, NH​

Fairfield, CA​

Baldwinsville, NY​

Cartersville, GA​

Golden, CO​

Shenandoah, VA​

Eden, NC​

Albany, GA​

Trenton, OH​

Irwindale, CA​

Houston, TX​

Ft. Worth, TX​

Columbus, OH​

Chippewa Falls, WI​

And these cities should raise an eyebrow, at least, for "unknown" new beers:

Williamsburg, VA​

Fort Collins, CO​

Milwaukee, WI​

St. Louis, MO​

Denver, CO​

Los Angeles, CA​

Likewise, the old-line breweries that do a lot of contracts or private labels are usually easily figured by the city, as well.

Genesee/NAB - Rochester, NY​

F X Matt - Utica, NY​

The Lion - Wilkes-Barre, PA​

City - La Crosse, WI - Latrobe, PA - Memphis TN​

Schell's - New Ulm, MN​

Minhas - Monroe, WI​

Stevens Point - Stevens Point, WI​

Cold Springs- Cold Springs, MN​

 

See Jesskidden's reply to the OP for a full explanation done more carefully than I would have done it. I simply would have said its common practice.

 

This is the same line of thinking I subscribe to... I look it up on my phone when in doubt.

 

Than he shall be vilified sir and held up to ridicule, shame and scorn by those in the know, who know better and are ready to rub the noses of the ignorant into the proverbial carpet of the beer war ridden landscape...

 

I don't care if a beer is marketed with good taste, I want a beer that tastes good.

Mostly that doesn't include beers made to the ridiculous adjunct requirements, and quick turnaround time in fermenter, of the macros, but there are exceptions.

I don't like bullies as a matter of principle, and it is even easier not to like BMC bullies since they really do abuse their clout zestfully (even more than Beer Wars portrays, if you can believe it), but at the end of the day what goes in my glass is the best tasting beer I can find for the most reasonable price.

 

While I prefer to support microbreweries I am sometimes curious enough about some products that I suspect are brewed by macros, but that does not stop me from satisfying my curiosity.

Some beers not listed above that I believe are brewed/owned by macros are Margaritaville/Landshark Lager, Jack's Pumpkin Spice (sketchy memory says that one may have Michelob on the label?), Wild Blue, Red Bridge, Green Vallley Brewing, and the Leinenkugel lineup.

 

This is often something I wondered about as well before I joined BA. It's not that I am going to occupy the Total Wine or anything, it's just that I wanted to try some great "Craft" beers, and to me (and before everyone jumps all over it, I said "to me") the term craft implies a personal touch that is the hallmark of alot of smaller breweries and is definitely missing from BMC products. That said, I firmly beleive if it tastes good, drink it. There is also a time and place for everything, including throwing back copius light beers when offered at a freinds BBQ. But I do care if a BMC is hiding out next to my green flash or trappist beer, and I feel duped if i were to buy it only to find out it is Budweiser with "Craft Flavoring" in a fancy bottle.

 

I rarely go out, but went to dinner with family a few days ago to a place I had heard a couple of local taps. I asked what was local and was told two names, one of which I'd had before and one not. Turned out they were out of the one I hadn't tried so I asked for the other, which they brought but all the time the bartender was pushing Batch 19, which they had nicely printed coasters for all over the bar. Never heard of it and it wasn't until I got home and checked it out on BA that I discovered it was a Coors product.

 

I don't think this is that sort of common practice. There's no picking up the name of some closed brewery. BMC is losing marketshare to craft beers, and they're creating these faux-brewery names and packaging to pass it off as a micro/craft product. The Beer Wars example was perfect as they went around and asked locals about a locally named brewery, yet nobody knew what they were talking about. It's even more obvious when you see how many people had no idea it was a BMC product, and perhaps the most glaring example of this is Blue Moon and their faithful customer base who are largely ignorant of it being Coors and not a small "micro" brewery (in my experience this is the case overwhelmingly).

This isn't that complicated. Some of the replies here rather twisted ways of avoiding the obvious explanation. Sorry but if someone can't just admit that this is what they're doing then it really looks like arguing just to be argumentative. BMC is creating these faux names and trying to pass them off as micros or craft breweries, and they intentionally leave off their BMC name so most/many consumers won't know the real origin of the beer and make an informed decision about purchasing the product.

 

One that popped up this winter was Alexander Keith's, was at a local bar with a decent draft list and saw "Nova Scotia Style Lager" it even listed it as a Canadian brewery. Looked it up on BA and sure enough its listed as a Canadian brewery, but low and behold when I saw bottles in a store the label says St. Louis MO. A little poking around the web confirmed its brewed by AB, but I was, and still am rather annoyed that Beer Advocate makes no distinction on this brewer's listings between those beers they actually make and those made by AB.

To reply to the milk comment, maybe I'm in the minority here (not in my community), but I do like to know where my milk comes from, as well as my eggs, my bacon, and as much other quality local food as I can afford. It blows me away that people who understand craft beer can be so ignorant about food.
If I cant vote with my dollars because I've been deceived, then how is capitalism working?

 

Alexander Keith's has been a macro-owned brand since the 1970's, when Labatt (one of Canada's Big Two) bought Oland. Labatt itself was bought by Interbrew in the mid-'90's, so Alexander Keith's has been an InBev brand longer than Anheuser Busch.

So, it's just a matter of being brewed in an AB-InBev-owned brewery in the US or one in Canada (altho' the actual AK beer styles brewed in each country aren't the same either, IIRC).

 

I agree, and it annoys me to no end that A-B & others deliberately leave their name off so that the typical micro/craft consumer can't make an informed decision while standing in the aisle.

 

are you telling me that its a sin to drink ab products. send me to hell in a basket. shit son get me some coors yellow bellies and a shock top. lol but seriously i dont think it matters, even if it a adjunct lager, because taste is what matters and what you, yes you!, as a beer drinker likes. Its just like a band you like, then you start hating it cuz everyone else starts liking it, isnt it still a good band? even if its all over the radio and big record corporations are making money off them?

 

Well, of that handful of examples I gave in my above post, there was never a brewery called "McSorley's Ltd" and Rheingold, Ortlieb and Schmidts all used that dba when they brewed and bottled that ale in the 1970's and 1980's. Nor was there ever a "Forrest Brewing Co." in Brooklyn, that dba was clearly done to disassociate Gablinger's from Rheingold.

Other examples I can think of where a new or reborn beer brand used a dba was the use of "Prior Brewing Co." by Schmidt's for their Prior Double Dark (they acquired the brand from the Adam Scheidt Brewing Co., but there was never a "Prior Brewing Co.") and when Ortlieb came out with the first new US stout in many years in the 1970's, Sean O'Shaughnessy Boarhead Stout, they labeled it as being from "O'Shaughnessy Ltd, Phila. PA".

The 3 US breweries that brewed Black Horse Ale in the '60's and '70's, Diamond Spring, Metropolis and Fred Koch all labeled the beer as being from "The Black Horse Brewery".

A number of the big contract/private label breweries had dba pseudonyms that used on a number of brands - Eastern often used "Waukee Brewing Co." and Horlacher often used "Hofbrau", etc.

Is it done today mostly by AB and MC, and often with the obvious hope that an unsuspecting consumer might think that it's a "craft" brewery? Yeah, no doubt --- but the use of "dba" names to disguise the originating brewery did not start in the craft era, nor is it unique to the brewing industry.

 

Didn't Iroquis (spelling?) also brew a Black Horse Ale? I'm sure that's the one I remember having had in Casper when I first moved here in 1980.

 

Yeah, by 1980 the Iroquis Corp. owned Metropolis (aka Champale) in Trenton, NJ. The labels I have from that era are still labeled "Black Horse Brewery of NJ, Trenton, NJ" with the little "Iroquis" logo next to it.

 

Thanks. Oh my, I still remember how bad Champale Sparkling Extra Dry was. /me shivers.