German beer market

I'm not sure what they are talking about when they say that beer sales are being "swallowed". Swallowed by what exactly? Don't they just mean that beer sales are "down"?

Semantics aside, I don't believe that this a particularly new phenomena, or restricted to Germany, is it? I haven't really been paying that much attention to it, but aren't beer sales on the decline quite generally?

The most depressing part about that article is really more about the strongest brands, which are exclusively discount brands and Fernsehbier, of course.

 

What is much more depressing to me personally is the really hard stand that craft beer is having in Germany. I'm getting more and more convinced that it will never take off here. Of course I can only judge it from my immediate surroundings, but Köln is quite a young, hip city and all the bottle shops here seem to be closing down one by one while the Getränkemarkts are banishing craft beer from their shelves because it is just not selling.

The reasons for this are many, but one of the root causes in my opinion is that craft beer has not grown organically over time in Germany and was shoved into people's faces all at once instead, with the untappd ticking craze in full swing already as well. Every shop owner I have talked to is complaining about not being able to sell their cases because people only buy one bottle/can, tick it and are done with it. This is exacerbated by the still relatively low number of craft beer enthusiasts in Germany, of course. I'm actually convinced that untappd is the worst thing that ever happened to beer, but that's another story.

I also think that the motivations for brewers are different. While craft beer was born out of a real passion for beer in the USA, I get the distinct impression that many brewers in Germany are more after the higher margins that craft beer offers than a desire to create a superior product. There are way too many substandard, yet expensive craft beers sitting on the supermarket shelves around here.

Another big issue is freshness, which people just have absolutely no concept of over here. If you want your beer to be in supermarkets, it needs to have a best-by date of at least 9 months, with 12 months being much more common and pretty much the standard, really. Most of the beer I see on supermarket shelves is 4-8 months old and finding an IPA at less than 3 months old is pretty much impossible.

The two biggest issues are simply price and the German mindset though, I reckon. German people are really used to paying no more than 2€ for a litre of beer, it's always been like that and you can buy it for half that price if you stick to discount brands. You pretty much can't buy craft beer for less than 6€ a litre here, with the average price being more around 8€, so that's a huge barrier for most people. That's supermarkets though, mind you. If you wanna buy the really good stuff from bottle shops, where you can actually find fresh stuff from the best breweries, it's more like 11€ per litre.

Then there's the German mindset. Without wanting to generalize too much, I think the average German is very set in their ways and not that interested in trying new things. We even have a saying here: Was der Bauer nicht kennt, das frisst er nicht (the peasant won't eat what he doesn't know). Now imagine finally ponying up that ridiculous price for one of those weird craft beers you've been hearing so much about and then it tastes like shit because it's by a crappy brewery and is 6 months old. Yeah, that's probably the first and the last craft beer you ever bought.

Well, this has gotten rather long, but I'm honestly frustrated. Two of my favorite bottle shops have already shut down and the one Getränkemarkt that was always a mekka for craft beer is getting less and less interested in offering it because he's sick of those untappd tickers and can't sell his cases. Finding interesting beers is getting harder and harder and when you do they are expensive as fuck most of the time. I've gotten used to paying 5-6€ for a can of beer, but I'm not paying 7-9€ or even more for a fucking can of IPA. Go fuck yourself.

 

There are plenty of great IPAs being produced in Germany, but you won't find those in supermarkets because those breweries actually know what they are doing and refuse to set their best by dates for more than 3-5 months. Also, those beers are even more expensive than the supermarket craft beers, but at least they are worth it.

Have you tried anything fresh from FrauGruber, Blech.Brut, Fürst Wiacek or Brewheart for example? I just had a single-hop Nelson Sauvin DIPA from FrauGruber that was amazing.

I think the main reason why so much of the supermarket stuff is substandard is simply because of what I mentioned earlier: margins. They are produced cheaply to raise those margins, probably using low-quality hops at low volumes.

 

What is the "necessary" price though? That is the big question that Greg remained suspiciously silent on as well. Why is Stone IPA that is actually being brewed in Germany almost twice as expensive as it is in the USA?

Why are shitty breweries like Craftwerk or Inselbrauerei that are obviously not using high quality ingredients charging 8€/l for their crappy beer? If these breweries spent less money on excessive marketing and buying up shelf space in supermarkets and more on quality hops then maybe they'd be able to offer better value for money and people would actually buy it.

I'm perfectly happy spending 11€/l on quality beer from small microbreweries like FrauGruber or Blech.Brut, for example, but I'm sure as hell not paying even 8€/l on the kind of crap that Craftwerk or Inselbrauerei are pumping out. Unfortunately it's this crap that is most visible in the German craft beer market right now and it gives all of craft beer a bad name.

EDIT: Look at Maisel & Friends, the only brewery in Germany offering their craft product in sixpacks for 3€/l and it's not even half bad. Are you telling me that Craftwerk (Bitburger) couldn't match that price? No, they are simply trying to charge "what the market will bear" and severly misjudged that price.

Maybe if companies were charging what's fair instead of what the market will bear in the first place we'd all be better off.

 

I did and he ignored it.