Beer in grocery stores.

Im a beer buyer for Heinen's in Barrington Illinois. As far as craft selections go i feel we have a really good selection, the only other store that comes close is Whole Foods. Anyone in the Chicagoland area should check us out and say hi!

 

I go to deciccos Armonk all the time. now thats a grocery store with a craft beer selction. lol

 

Since this started as a result of a survey, and you got a shout out from it let me ask you what percentage of your total beer sales, either by dollar or volume, or both, does craft sales comprise?

 

I think the laws are different for each county in Maryland. On the Eastern Shore, most grocery stores(as well as convenience stores) sell beer and wine. The craft selection is pretty limited. It is usually Dogfish, Sam Adams, and Sierra Nevada, and generally not too fresh.

 

In NE Ohio, we have it pretty good - Acme / Giant Eagle / Buehlers / Mustard Seed etc all have solid selections of craft beer, and are priced well.....I buy the majority of my beer at one of these places, and the prices are all pretty much similar across the board....good bottle shops are fewer than grocery stores around here and are often more $$
Just picked up some Great Lakes Eddy Fitz porter ($8.49 / 6 on sale) and Lake Erie Monster 4 pk ($9.99), so am pretty happy with what we have here!

 

In Austin and the surrounding suburbs, Whole Foods has a great selection. HEB (standard grocery) has a whole isle of beer (almost all chilled) and 1/6 (my estimate) is BMC. Virtually every local (that gets out of the brewery -JK is rare) is at all the HEB, plus almost all Founders, Lagunitas, Goose. The beer guys (and at least one gal at an HEB on 620) know their business. Randalls is pretty good, but I feel HEB beats them on selection and price.

HEB is always the best price on what they have compared to virtually everyone else. Specs Liquor stores have some sales that beat them, and Walgreen Pharmacy has some clearance of what little they have at cheap prices that can beat HEB (yesterday I found 2014 New Belguim at Walgreen).

 

Oklahoma is a joke. You can get 3.2 beer in Grocery stores & gas stations/quicky marts. I have seen Boulevard Pop up & Wheat Beer, other than that, good luck. I'm sure selection is slightly better near OKC, not impressed by what I've seen in Tulsa. This may change, I believe the legislature approved some changes, but you can't even buy refrigerated full strength beer at this time, hence most of my beer money is spent in Missouri & to a less extent Arkansas.

 

I live in New Brunswick, Canada and here alcohol is not sold in Supermarkets (or anywhere else other than government run "agency" stores),

 

We got them about two years ago in MA, and as a native Missourian it was one of the nicer surprises in recent memory.

 

NorCal: Whole Foods has terrific selection in some stores, others still good just smaller selection. Safeway used to be decent but now they have scaled back in certain stores and not sure why. The good safeways still have Craft front and center of the beer aisle though

 

Agree. The Meijer in Ada, MI is upscale all aspects of the store and offers the best craft beer selection in a grocery store that I have seen in west Michigan. The Meijer stores in Holland, MI get the basics and I do buy beer there with the exception of IPAs, which are usually past their prime.

 

Totally depends on the supermarket. Some in my area (northeastern San Fernando Valley) have veritable Berlin Walls of macro cases with no craft at all while others have "build your own 6 packs" of craft bottles. I always check freshness dates when available and most of the craft stock in the chain stores tends to be older and is often expired.

There are no growlers in California except at breweries, so that's a non-starter.

There are plenty of liquor stores around and they tend to run the same: most have little or no craft, some have a decent selection and a very few really try hard.

 

I don't disagree that many PA alcohol laws are silly, but they are getting better. As for the wholesale distributer versus local distributer details, they don't really effect the average consumer. The only Pennsylvanians who care about these distributer distinctions are those that work in the beer industry [or geeks, like me, who for some inexplicable reasons care enough to learn these esoteric details].

 

The Cascade Meijer (which is the one i think you are referring to) does the #1 beer/wine/liquor sales in the state for Meijer. Such a great selection and the guy that is the manager of the department is awesome. He will let you know when they get BCBS, KBS etc.

 

I monitor a lot of craft trends in grocery stores and have noticed something interesting in my conversations with breweries. There's one Ohio brewery where it seemed like their wheat beer should be dropped from a large grocery chain because it didn't move. Oddly, that large chain is the exception since in on/off premise sales elsewhere, it's one of their top beers. Interesting, eh? Another issue you'll see is that some grocery chains will say that they'll stock a product if they can put it in all (or some high percentage) of stores. Well, If you're doing 10,000 bbl/year and you go to Wal-mart, Kroger, etc. they could buy your entire production for the year just to fill the stores. So, you may not see those specialty items in larger stores as a result.

If you believe the hype in publications like thefullpint and Beer Business Daily, several large chains are going to go hard into the craft market with more bars and growler stations. Personally, I think this is a terrible idea. There are a couple stores near me (most notably Remke/Bigg's) that have growler stations which must be operated by morons. Several times I'll see a beer on tap which is more expensive for a growler fill than it is to go by the same damn 6 pack off the shelf. Also, I've hung out in the beer aisle and waited 15 minutes for somebody from the store to get me a growler fill, only for the manager to come and apologize but nobody was working "who knew how to fill growlers"....If it's that hard to get liquid in the glass, I can't imagine they have cleaned their lines...ever.

I'll save you all the effort and acknowledge that you may have a great grocery store who carries every limited release and has the best growlers in town, but these are just some of my experiences. I would rather they ignore growler stations in more stores and add more space and variety to mix-6 sections.

 

Without a link to the orginal article (or post) it's kinda hard to comment, but, for one thing, I don't think one can determine how many "craft beer drinkers" or even "all drinkers" there are in any given area based on local sales. As Jim Koch has noted, based on BBC's own market research, craft beer is purchased by more than half of all beer buyers with only 7% of the entire beer market made of near-exclusive craft beer drinkers.

"More Fair" or just more available? Most of the industry uses IRI figures, which are (probably?) based on computer generated, bar-code scan sales data - local "mom & pop" bottle shops are typically not counted by IRI (nor are on-premise sales - which apparently are a greater percentage of "craft" sales than overall beer sales).

IRI reports state where the data comes from - a report might be for "U.S. Multi-Outlet + Convenience (Food, Drug, Mass, Walmart, Club [Sam’s and BJ’s], Dollar and Military) + Convenience" for instance, or just "IRI Data Total Food". Even if "Remarkable Liquids", a NY state-based wholesale distributor, is, in part, using its own sales data I've got to assume they don't have similar, accurate data from the local AB, MC and indie houses.

 

That's one of the many reasons I like your beers. It's so simple to just add a date to the bottle and or the box. I appreciate that.

 

My go to bottle shop is a supermarket, although an "upscale" if you could say one.. cause it has the best selection.

However, as time has passed regular markets that I've gone to the selection has gotten a bit more diverse and varied in the past years than I used to see.

 

One fun thing about Ohio is that our supermarkets can have full-service bars inside them, allowing you to grab a pint and go grocery shopping. Many of the ones in Cleveland get really good stuff on tap as well... Zombie dust has been on tap a few times at the one near me, for example. Pretty awesome.

 

Here's the Fred Meyer (Kroger) a mile from my house. Unfortunately the person who took the picture was standing at the shit end of the beer set, but pretty much everything past the Corona & Sol is craft and imports: