Draw and Hold the Line

So many "craft" breweries, many that were among those that were Trail Blazers in the craft industry, have gone corporate and can hardly be thought of as craft brewers any longer.

Find a great, small, brewery and support the local economy. There's lots out there. Drink Local!

 

Keep it simple and drink local. That's all you need to do and you'll never have to worry about who your supporting.

 

2 points:
- "Craft" was really just a way of saying "not those guys". It never meant 'artisinal', although that's that rhetorical game they were playing.

- The size of the brewery doesn't matter; awesome beer can come from a large brewery while abominable beer can come from a small one.

 

Or maybe this instead:
Support the big guys who were trail blazers and haven't sold their business. They need your support to hold their own vs the ones that now take advantage of all of the perks of larger ownership. Plus:

There are breweries that have been purchased that people would still consider "local."

All in all, let's not confuse size or location with "independence."

 

In every industry there eventually comes a disruptor, just like with every dictatorship must come a rebel to end it. Craft is that disruptor rebel to macro's dictatorship. When faced with a disruptor, the current dictator must do something and there are several options;

1. Squash them by any means possible - notably war. Go after their supply lines, and control the propaganda. Kill if necessary. Be ruthless. Go to the mattresses.
2. Join them - as in do what the disruptor is doing, make good beers in this case.
3. Form and alliance with them - make peace, collaborate.

This recently occurred in the computer industry where companies such as IBM were faced with the industry disruptor of cloud computing, which began impacting sales of computers to companies with their own data centers (computer rooms). Rather than fight it, IBM did #2 and #3. IBM is now big in cloud services and is a supplier of hardware to their competitor cloud providers. Same with Oracle. Similar thing happened with Cray and the supercomputer industry - disruptors built supercomputers with thousands of Intel chips vs the dictator Cray that had a monolith vector supercomputer. So - Cray changed track to survive.

Good business for the dictator is to take all three steps, perhaps only feigning #3. Macro has many bazillion $ to play with to ensure their continued dictatorship. They can afford - to some limited extent - to buy problematically successful craft breweries only to drive them into the ground, and nabbing their best recipes, brands, and staff.

So - macro in general has arguably taken all three approaches. Buying craft breweries can be #1 and/or #2. Buying suppliers and beer review sites is #1. Miller and Off Color collaboration is an example of #3. How macro proceeds depends on how successful each option is, and how much it costs. We better hope #3 works out somehow, because #1 is not good, and #2 might be as bad.

 

What is the intent? What is the owners intent.
By that. I mean strategy. What kind of competition is there with its game?
Friendly. Where we both get better.
Or foe? One gets pushed out.

 

Good stuff, that's why I visit this site and subscribe to the BA magazine. The Rate Beer debacle is a tipping point for me. That's too many legs of the stool, IMHO.

 

Rather than change the definition of "craft" every time on of the big "craft" brewers eclipses the arbitrary barrel limit of the day, just keep a list of breweries to smear and hate - seems simpler.

Couple other things:
1) Those big breweries have lost almost 30 million barrels of business is the last 10 years; if you're a "craft" brewer or a "craft" enthusiast seems like you'd want the big breweries to continue the crushing influence on "craft" beer (its not working - see "disruptors").
2) So when some of the bigger "craft" brewers with multiple locations become bigger than the big brewers, what do we do then?

I keep coming back to its beer, its a business and do whatever you feel is right; just be thankful we have such a passionate community and live in a place that can tolerate all of it.

 

I don't boycott big beer. I will habe one from time to time. But it's about more than the liquid. I prefer to support independent craft. I also prefer to support small, and to support local, although thise,are all different things.

Fortunately there are thousands of options with beer.

There are not that many options for beer rating, which is why I will continue to utilize ratebeer.

If there is someone whose beer preferences are so specific that they find few good alternatives to a beer owned by big beer, I will not shame them.

 

Craft beer, artisan, buy local, free trade, living wage, independent. . . Its all marketing to a certain niche of person. . . city livin, flannel, neckbeard, thick rim glasses guy/girl that is willing to stand in line for beer kind of vibe.

I love how I can get Lagunitas, Goose Island and Track 7 almost anywhere now. Your average "local" brewery doesn't make a hoppy beer as good as Waldos, same for Track 7, they make a better IPL than your average "local" brewery. While GI did have a setback year, over the years, their barrel aged products are better than your average local brewery. And oh yeah, these things are often cheaper, easier to acquire and fresher than your average local beer.

Corporations rule.

I hope InBev buys Central Waters, Cigar City, Moonraker, Omnipollo, Fremont etc. . . and I can buy that stuff of the shelf at Safeway too in the future.

Worst case scenario, they screw those up, and the circle of life begins anew, people start up local breweries to fill those bought out niches and the cycle continues. . .

 

Nice! I agree that (real) beer needs to be protected. And to me, that is the point of this article. ABInbev actions are hostile to the thing I love. I'll vote with my wallet.

The important thing is to educate yourself, only then can you make an educated decision. Thanks to @BeerAdvocate, and others for keeping us informed. I'm looking forward to your list of corporate influence.

 

I have to strongly (but respectfully!) disagree with almost everything you said. And for the record, I live in the suburbs, own no flannels, am clean shaven, and don't want to stand in lines for beer. In all fairness, though, I do have thick rimmed glasses.

But I want to focus on the claim that "the circle of life beings anew", because, well, if AB InBev has its way... it won't. Between GI's failed attempt to buy up all the usable Bourban Barrels, the SA hops situation, and the unfair market practices which make it impossible for midsize regional breweries to get their stuff onto the shelf/tap, AB InBev is actively preventing competition. When they do this, the new local breweries hit a point at which they simply cannot grow due to unfair business practices. Furthermore, they have shown that they will only keep quality up and prices down until they've beaten their competitors out of business. It is shamelessly unoriginal monopoly behavior. Rockefeller would be proud.

So basically, taking a "Live and Let Live" to big beer would only work if big beer wasn't actively trying to kill independent beer.

 

That is the best dystopian perverse Blade Runner replicant-type rant that I know of, relative somehow oddly to beer. Well conceptualized and executed.

 

In 1985, the 3 largest US brewers w/market share were:
AB (38.4%)
Miller (20.5%)
Stroh (12.2%)
= 71.1% total US market share.

(Doubt very much that Van Munching's books says otherwise- at least, I can't find it with a quick index search.)

Add the share of the rest of the so-called Big Six national brewers of that period - Heileman (8.5%), Coors (8.2%) and Pabst (3.8%) - and you'll get closer to 95%.

Can you explain what you mean by saying the national brewers of the era "attacked" their rival brands' distribution networks?

 

The coffee world offers a really interesting analogy. You've got limited supplies of high end ingredients (beans or hops). You've got a bunch of indie guys that got consumers interested in high quality products. For a while those indie guys lived side-by-side with the big business guys, but now you're seeing buyouts of the indie shops. This is happening in the coffee industry as companies like Blue Bottle and La Colombe take on investors and Stumptown and Intelligentsia sell out to JAB Holdings.

I wonder if part of the reason Big Beer was successful at displacing smaller brands was because there was relatively little competition on taste/quality. I'm too young to give an assessment, but my impression is that local/regional breweries produced "beer" just like big breweries. Now that the world is taking beer more seriously than just "beer," I'm optimistic that the genie will be hard to put back in the bottle. I'm sure the presence of macro-owned craft brands will make it harder for Homebrewer Harry to fill a few growlers and quit his day job, but I doubt we'll see the wholesale disappearance of the quality and innovation that has led to the current craft beer boom. I think small, locally-focused places will be just fine as long as they don't forget to operate themselves like a business, and talented brewers will continue to find jobs (though brewer-owned may be less common).

The biggest question is whether the middle ground survives. Are bars going to continue to pour SNPA, or will they switch to Honkers? Will people bring a craft variety pack to a party, or will they bring Blue Moon? Those are the guys that seem most at-risk from a taphandle/shelfspace battle with big beer.

 

Ok, so after reading these threads on the board, I see a trend, big beer bad, well unless it is BCBS.....

 

How so? How does my supporting non-big beer owned options make me more far-sighted and altruistic?

How does supporting non-big beer support my local economy more than big beer does?

 

The issue is not just having a list, but knowing how to act with said information. ABI is not the only multinational corporation out there buying craft breweries and many of these corporations are no less competitive. What happens with one of them buys or invests in your favorite brewery? What do you do when they're no longer independent?

 

If Beeradvocate wants to do something about it, why not make a tagging system for beers that are produced by breweries that fall under each of these categories?

 

People's heads would explode when they found out how many breweries have investments from outside interests. I don't think that the Big Beer ownership would be surprising, as most of those investments/acquisitions are pretty well publicized. It's the VC and PE side of things that would melt people's faces off. When you have board members whose primary interest is profit (and not making the best beer possible), that can lead to cross purposes.