So you think they'd rather be known as sexual harassers than people who made poor business decisions? While Jacob, to my knowledge, has not faced direct accusations of sexual misconduct, it has become journalistic shorthand to say "he stepped down amid sexual harassment allegations," which makes it sound like he was personally involved.
Eh. Modern Times was the 44th largest brewery in terms of sales volume in 2019. They were absolutely amazing at marketing which makes sense given Jacob's job history with Stone. I don't know if I necessary agree with your take of "the warning sings were there pre-covid". MT was huge in San Diego and was basically the darling of the west coast beer scene.
2019 is when they filed the SEC paperwork related to their crowdfunding effort where they valued themselves at close to $3500/barrel. The annual report they filed in 2020 showed that they had losses of almost $2 million in 2018 and $4 million in 2019. All of that loss was related to heavily debt financed expansion. It's easy to look back and see the warning signs for the industry and it's easy to write that all off as hindsight. But the reality is that the conversation around market saturation had been happening for a couple years by 2019. There had already been several examples of the perils of over expansion. It's easy to see how we could feel like they could do wrong back in 2018/19, but the warning signs were definitely there and covid may have pulled the rug out, but it pulled it out of a very precarious situation
Fair enough. I never really got too involved in them after their initially popularity when I was selling some of their product managing a spot in Idyllwild. I worked at a popular bar in San Diego from 2015- 2018 that did a lot of collabs with MT. The workers from MT and Jacob would come in a lot and always came off a little too cool for school. Which was fine they were nice. That was kind of the hipster vibe I think they were going for. I guess we are all kinda saying the same thing here though.
Alesmith beers are vegan, as are the vast majority of beers these days. It's just a matter of if you want to market it as vegan or not.
good point, i suppose i should have said that it was a perfectly-timed distraction. i don't want to dispute the validity of the ratmagnet claims vis-a-vis MT because that's totally gauche these days, but i'd suggest that the 'driving the business in to the ground' accusations have more actual proof behind them and would long-term be worse for those particular employees. regardless of what they would rather be, they will go down in history as a bunch of irresponsible children who were satisfied with personal gain over the responsible choice of setting a company's worth of people up for long-term success. no regard for other people, their well-being, their livelihoods or families. just greed and an undying need to be part of the cool kids club.
There are plenty of breweries that are doing it the right way though. The problem with MT was all their debt was in bank debt. Loan after loan and eventually you have to pay it back and when the return on investment isn't there, you can't just go to your investors and ask for more. It was awful business decisions from the start, but what do you expect from a brewery that started from Kickstarter, and then asked for more money in "stock options" online as well. It was all just band aids for the debt they had. The marketing side they had though was world fucking class. They could sell any beer they wanted. Another brewery that I know and worked close within the distro side, they have zero debt and have 5 locations. All done through investors on the side, that they offer discounts to the investors for life, and profit sharing until the debt is paid back. In talking with the owners, they said they can usually pay back a full build off one of the tasting rooms within 2 years and become debt free again. Tons of other breweries use this model too, but they also are careful to expand and chose the right locations. MT just chose too many expensive locations that were already littered with breweries (like, why go into Portland anyways?). Sucks for the people that actually rode it out, but I know a ton of people that jumped ship years ago and are happier now.
In the business world? Absolutely. The only thing businesses care about is making money. If you can make a profit for them, they don't care how awful of a human being you are. Now, if it's so widely known how bad you are that it impacts how much money they can make, then they will care. But for a person who wants to continue getting high-level jobs in business, it's better to be known for a sketchy past than being known for losing a shitload of money at a thriving company.
I dunno. I think when you market yourself the way MT did as this "forward thinking, employee owned, hub of equality" and then employee someone who admitted to some of the accusations and your CEO steps down due to insensitive comments, it's kinda like... there goes your core fan base. In a way, kind of a lesser version of what we have seen with Bud Light from an opposite perspective.
This is completely correct. It was so against the image they had portrayed as the super progressive, BLM, male ally, fill in the blank latest progressive cause. Their initial play was to downplay, deflect, have a symbolic resignation or two and then try to get back to business in a few months once it died down. You can still find posts about their initial lawyerly response on this site. The reasons they couldn’t pull that was they had cultivated a core following that very much held their feet to the fire, and their staff in some cases were threatening to not show up or resign. meanwhile most of the breweries called out in 2021 are long back to business as usual
2013 and 2018 I believe? The first was the actual start up of the brewery on Kickstarter. The second they sold "ownership" in the company, which was basically less than 0.001% to help with some expansion costs if I remember right.
Modern Times seem to be in every grocery store where I live, I’m surprised that they only started up in 2012, I assumed that been around for a while. I only bought one four pack, it must not have been very memorable since I don’t remember it. Someone mentioned that one of the owners worked for Stone, it does sound like he went to the Greg Koch school of over expansion, at least MT didn’t do anything as crazy as try to teach the Germans about beer.
At their peak Greg Koch would have blushed at their brashness. not sure how much you should judge any brewery off a single four pack at a grocery store
Believe me, I don’t judge them, their beers just aren’t interesting to me, I’m not really into IPAs and flavored stouts. I’m sure they made good beer, otherwise they wouldn’t have been so successful. I’d like to try their Pils if I could find it. Most all of the comments in this thread don’t paint a pretty picture of the Brewery, but it’s all news to me.I never followed them.
I remember when they first started canning their core beers Blazing World, Fortunate Island, Black House and Lomaland. They were some of the first in socal to jump on the 4 pack 16oz can trend. Each beer was really good. Nice balanced and approachable beers in a market that was all about extremely hopped IPAs and adjuncts and/or barrel aged imperial stouts. They were a breath of fresh air. Even had a very simplistic can design that was quite sleek. Slowly they became a hyped brewery and got away from the simplicity. Recipes started changing and core beers got retired. The rest is all history.
