Limiting Case Count: Supply and Demand

I've been meaning to ask this question as well.

Namely, why do brewers like troegs not brew beers like nugget nectar year round??

 

There are lots of potential reasons.

One is limited tank space. I know Surly had this issue with Darkness, before their expansion, & that Darkness took longer to ferment, taking valuable space from their core lineup of beers that cycled through much faster.

Two is limited materials. For example, if a place wants to crank out a rum-barreled whathaveyou, they may only be able to get X amount of good barrels, limiting how much they are able to release.

Three is the experimentation factor. If a brewer is whipping up something funky they've never made before & it bombs, it's a lot less costly/painful to dump 2,000 bottles of something that 20,000 bottles of something.

I'm sure brewers could come up with a lot of other reasons, but there are plenty of explanations other than hype & faux scarcity. Though I'm 100% sure there are places that engage is that, too!

 

Yes, you have it all figured out. Brewers are a devious, manipulative bunch who are mostly concerned with artificially driving up the price of their beer while simultaneously pissing off the tickers. It has absolutely nothing to do with production capacity and the disruption to their flagship bread-and-butter money-making beers. Clearly selling 1000 bottles of a beer is preferred over selling 20,000 bottles.

 

Basically, as other have said, they don't put the limit, the limit is imposed on them by access to critical resources and by costs of production.

 

I think they are more popular and valuable because of the rare limited status. They usually take finer resources to make, and sometimes the problem is lack of resources. Certain once a year beers like SN Celebration, and Nugget Nectar use fresher first harvest hops. Other beers may require expensive ingredients that are harder to obtain year-round, certainly in the case of barrel aging when the barrels cost money and then are being used in the aging process, limiting availability further. Certain hops may only be available to a brewer at times. Some brewers have to make their mainstay year-round beers with hops that are more widely available since all hops aren't grown in the same vast quantities that the most available ones are. It all depends, and maybe a small number of breweries even limit availability for monetary reasons. I usually stick to buying beers that are within a fair price that I usually pay. Only if it is a really unique different rare beer will I consider dropping much extra.

 

I think it has to do with being a limited release. They do not intend to mass produce the beer or take up space from their main production tanks. Also being a limited batch they are playing with flavors etc so no intent on a big run think they do intent to give it a rare factor to some degree.

 

Well that is a false comparison. It is more like selling 1,000 cases in one day for cash at your facility is better than selling 10,000 cases to a distributor, leaving a paper trail, and getting a fraction of the profit per case. And then have some of those beers possibly sit on the shelf unsold and go bad.

Scarcity marketing of products is nothing new, OP. It creates a false sense of popularity and grows buyer excitement for the product

 

Breweries. Operating as businesses, also have to deal with many layers managing their supply and demand as well. Tank real estate. As mentioned. Some beers take longer. And when you have finite tank space. That puts your output at the mercy of your production bottleneck. Gotta have space to put the beer before and after you brew it. Barrels are much the same way. How much real estate you got to let something sit doing nothing for 6 - 8 mos of the year.
Hops come and go all the time to. When you are smaller. Suddenly. This one hop you use becomes impossible to get in the quantities you require for x beer. Or you run out and all you can get is x year on a trade. Or the prices go up and this grain is switched out.
False value? Sure. Some of that comes into play because beer is a finite product, and people have attached value to it. But. It is the store that does this. Not the brewery. The brewery can only brew to what its capacity and mission set out to brew. If it develops a cult around it. That is the loyal consumer who created that. The brewery just made the beer and had whatever charm about it that made that become that.

 

You also have to realize that many "one-off" beers or yearly special releases are not profitable and many can actually lose money for the brewery. However, breweries will continue making these as a combination of a love of the game, a thank you to their customers, to build brand equity, etc.

 

Yes but some of the breweries you mention have relatively large capacities. For example Russion River puts out their beers at their full capacity and still only distribute to a few states.

GI has much larger brewing capacity and distribution than, say, Russian River and GI also has access to one of the two largest distribition networks in the country. In addition several of their beers are now brewed at AB facilities in other states.

Cascade? What's that. Never seen them around here. So they do limit access to all those beers they produce. Weird considering that Philly area has one of the best distribution footprints in the US.

Don't let your local conditions lead you astray. Pliny the Elder (on tap only, no bottles) is quite common around the Philly area, but that is the only place east of Denver where you can expect to find RR beers (except though trading or resale on the gray market) . And keep in mind that all breweries are not equal in size, access to resources, and deepness of their pocketbook. In addition, some of the breweries you mention as a examples were once much smaller in capacity and distribution. The first time I ever was able to buy a 4 pack of GI BCBS was on a trip to Michigan and it only started showing up here after their acquisiton by ABI who then proceeded to put lots of money in to the brewer to allow new equipment and expansion of their barrel aging program.

 

This statement boils down to "a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing". So, let's use Goose Island for example, they probably put out more barrel aged stuff than the production of most breweries. So, obviously, a small brewery should have no trouble doing the same?

I suppose that you're right, what small brewery doesn't have an extra 143,000 sqft warehouse just to barrel age stuff? I mean, why wouldn't they?

You're hung up on aftermarket prices, why would a brewery give a damn what the aftermarket is? Once the brewery has sold the beer, they don't get any additional money if somebody sells it for $100 over list price on my beer cellar. Cascade has a completely different business model than Jester King and sell many different products in different markets. You seem surprised that these differences have an effect on what a brewery chooses produce with it's finite resources of time, materials, effort, etc.?

 

Higher prices could be to compensate for the expense of the barrels that they probably paid more for than the bigger breweries. JK is also newer and less popular than GI, FW, CW. All new businesses need to make profits to continue growing and producing. They probably don't make enough money to sell it cheaper like a big brewery can.

 

<shrugs> If you only wanted viewpoints that supported your own, why didn't you just say so?

 

Cascade is a brewery in PDX on the east side, not that big, not all that old. Been a few times, they specialize in sours, but the IPA is decent too.
http://www.cascadebrewingbarrelhouse.com/?p=beer

 

Ok...I'm picking out a couple random recipes as examples to illustrate a concept, don't get started on "blah blah blah, another beer might have different proportions!"

Dark Lord Stout Clone: http://www.brewersfriend.com/homebrew/recipe/view/231334/dark-lord-clone, OG 1.14, FG 1.03

Takes around 50lb of malt for a 5 gallon batch
3 oz of hops
4 lb of misc. adjunct

Random Hefeweizen Recipe: OG 1.05, FG 1.01
http://www.beersmith.com/Recipes2/recipe_82.htm

9lb of malt for a 5 gallon batch
1 oz of hops
No adjuncts, etc.

So, you may not understand what the OG and FG mean up there, basically it means how much the sugars need to ferment and for the sake of this discussion you can take it to mean "how long it takes to ferment this beer". So, Dark Lord has to ferment .11 while the Hefeweizen only has to ferment .04. Seeing the difference yet?

So, if you are a brewery who needs to pay rent, you can have liquid in tanks for 3x as long that has 5x as much money in ingredients sitting in that tank before it can be sold. So, you can theoretically sell 3 tanks of Hefeweizen for every tank of Dark Lord. Oh, and if you have a batch of hefeweizen go bad, you're out 1/5th the money in ingredients you would with one batch of Dark Lord going bad. Much less risk to keep pumping out the cheap and easy hefeweizen.

If you don't believe me, head over to a local brewery that has an anniversary beer or a special beer of some sort and ask them why they keep making this year around crap and don't make more of the anniversary ale. I'll bet a case of beer that they give you an answer functionally similar to the one above.

EDIT: One other piece of follow up, an additional assumption you have to consider is if a brewery can even buy the additional ingredients they would need. Just because you can buy all the hops you could possibly want for a homebrew, doesn't mean a brewery can buy 10,000 times as much. Those hops simply might not be for sale in that quantity. If you look at beers like New Glarus fruit beers or Upland Sours is they have a specific type of fruit they use from specific farms for each beer. There is only so much of that fruit that is grown every year and maybe (just maybe) the farms have more than one customer they want to sell their product to.