https://www.theolympian.com/news/lo...SGQzZ18mtAsarsjpEGNZoZ_jKnR265lrPdHT5vx-hDVmQ It's been a while since I've had any of their stuff, but I drank a lot of it when I first moved out here.
Bummer, but I think this is "stress test" time, and venerable breweries who were limping along will not pass. It'd be nice to envision the breweries making poor/mediocre beer as the only ones to get crushed, but I think plenty of beloved breweries whose financials were not as strong as their beer will be brought down in the near future. Sad to see the (likely) passing of both Fish Tale and Leavenworth brands.
one of my favourite breweries back in the very early 2000s, but like others havent had one of their beers for years.
Yeah. That and the other (Old Woody? Woolly? A Barleywine, IIRC) would still stand with any barreled big beers out there today. Among the first barreled stuff I had. Fun story: I was a regular at a certain bar in town, that, at the the time, had a badass bottle list. One Sunday, the owners day off, his dad, an older guy, was tending bar. They had a very small keg room, and dude was unable to swap out a dead keg. Asked me, and I did it. I'm thinking I get a free beer out of it. Dude wiped out my whole tab, including food, AND gifted me a bottle each of Poseidon and Other one. Good times.
Yeah, I think I knew that. Just can't come up with the actual name. Can sorta picture the label, trees, big trees, a, ahem, forest, thus my thought.
That's sad, but not too terribly surprising. I'm not sure what the current sales figures look like, but when I worked for their PDX distributor a couple years ago they were already in a rather steep year over year decline. The folks at the top were also incredibly resistant to all the sensible changes we suggested. For example: * They were way too late transitioning away from 22oz packages for their ciders, and when they finally did they went with 6/4/16oz cans instead of 4/6/12oz like we repeatedly suggested. This was at the same time that convenience stores were either completely discontinuing 16oz craft cans or were splitting them up into singles. When your primary retail market is C-stores and chain grocery, that's basically the last format you want. * They were incredibly proud of their tired Fish and Leavenworth flagships (and their label designs) and resisted updating the recipes or replacing them. * We asked them repeatedly to change the names of Winterfish and to remove any reference to the word "Winter" on the label. Sales on anything with "Christmas" or "Winter" on it fall off a cliff on 12/26, and their sales reflected that. * Their post off schedule (the calendar showing which months their product was on sale to retailers) was convoluted as heck, like 1 month on, 2 months off, 2 months on, 1 month off, etc, instead of something simple like every other month. This made it incredibly hard to get retailer ad support and floor displays. * Lastly, all of their retail promotional materials and the sales "spiffs" offered to our sales reps highlighted their wine and hard liquor in addition to the beer and cider. The wine and booze wasn't available in Oregon, so it was hard to get retailers engaged in a promotion that focused on things they didn't carry, and made it hard to get the reps engaged in a promo they had almost no chance to benefit from.
Looks like somebody beat me to that. For the record I liked their anniversary barleywine as well, which I think they wound up making a permanent beer for a couple years.
I just picked up a magnum of the BA Poseidon in North Idaho about 6 months ago... $28!!!! Too bad. They were almost certainly the first Barrel Aged beers many of us in the PNW had many moons ago.
That's the new version of Poseidon that they struggled to sell a year or two ago. That brewery seemed horribly mismanaged and tried to coast on gimmicky licensed beers for The Hobbit and National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation.
I remember buying those bottles around 15yrs ago for $10 and thinking they were expensive. My, how perspectives change.
