Story. TL, DR: a handful of employees all left around the same time, they're cutting out Bitter Neighbor and Rise to the Top - pushing the new Minnesota Gold lager hard, and they might not bring back Hunny Do, Jack'd Up, and Sugar Shack. Pull quotes: and
I really liked Rise to the Top and Bitter Neighbor. Also enjoyed the recent coffee beer even though the bottle format and ABV were all wrong in my opinion. No wonder a lot of people left if they are going to concentrate on one beer and do contract brewing.
i like lost trout, at least for what it is. simple brown ale. and i wouldn't claim to know their overall market, but i could see pulling back and making one product that (hopefully) will sell well rather than having 15 or 35 different ones that you hope will go over. not everyone wants cranberry nut crunch fucking ale.
I think Lost Trout is by far their best beer, so I'm glad to hear they're keeping it. I haven't tried the Gold, but I haven't been impressed by any of their other beers.
While all of the Third Street brands I've tried have been well-made, none has had the appeal of the brands which Third Street (c.f. Cold Spring) co-packages for everyone from 21st Amendment to Deschutes, brands which are well-established in the Craft Beer market segment. Wrongly, Third Street was understood (by amateur and professional observers, alike) as a costly effort to spruce-up the image of an underachieving regional lager brewery. In fact, it was money well-spent, and the improvements made to the beer and brewing process are too fundamental to detail in full, here. A total re-branding can't hurt their sales, and will likely have the intended, immediate term economic impact.
For their main line beers, I enjoyed Rise to the Top for what it was, and Lost Trout as a solid brown. Cool Beans was rather good from the one bottle I found, and as I mentioned before, we try to keep Hunny Do in the house as much as possible over the summer. I'm skeptical, based on that one article, that Third Street is moving in a direction that I will appreciate - but we'll see what some of those new seasonal beers are. Regardless of their direction, I hope they do very well.
I enjoyed the 12 pack of Minnesota Gold cans I picked up last month. But it could use some more corn.
Gluek's was a lager, how did that go for them? I acknowledge the popularity of lagers, but that segment is dominated by the big guys with a strong presence of grain belt for the local crowd. The craft beer might be getting crowded but lager drinkers are probably less likely to actually look at other options on the shelf.
You make a lot of sense with these thoughts. While I think this is a pretty good lager that would appeal to many of those BMC drinkers the bigger question is will they ever try it....perhaps a risky strategy indeed...depends on the marketing $ behind it I guess...
