Creative vs Gimmicky

I hesitate to call anything gimmicky if the intent of the brewer was sincere. For instance, I don't personally enjoy a lot of Sam's experiments from Dogfish Head, but I would never condemn him as gimmicky. In my mind, he's genuinely trying to expand the horizons of beer and sometimes he goes a little off the deep end, but for all the right reasons.

I will say there are a handful of brewers who seem less than sincere in their motives. For instance, putting peanut butter in a beer is a dubious prospect at best. Packaging said beer in a pepto bismal-pink bottle makes it really hard to give the brewer the benefit of the doubt so far as his motives are concerned. Still, I actually know a couple people who love that shit, so maybe I'm just being too close-minded.

I used to hang around these forums a lot, but to be honest it was this compulsion to label things that was one of the main reasons I tend to only stop back every so often these days. Everyone has an opinion, and that's fine. But trying to promote your opinion to "the only way for anyone to think" tends to get a bit old after a while.

 

Cigar City Cuc Saison is brilliant, drink fresh, a true eye opener and palate refresher

 

Collaborations that sell for higher than a companies base beer or beers of the same style are some of the biggest gimmicks in the craft beer world. "Hey look we're friends, now pay more".

 

If the beer tastes good; it's creative. If the beer tastes bad; it's gimmicky.

 

Creative is utilizing unique ingredients and blending them into a delicious brew. Gimmicky is using ingredients merely because you think that marketing their use will have the masses purchase the beer, when at the same time the beer tastes horrible. Like a gimmick would be trying to include [I know this sound ridiculous] macaroni and cheese in ones brewing process.

 

Creative: "That's pretty cool."
Gimmick: LOL..."Meh, I don't think so."

 

Let's recap what a brewery has to go through to release something they do not believe in.
They have to invest in all of that equipment to brew it (which is not cheap)
They have to secure the contract for all that grain.
They have to negotiate a similar contract with hops.
They have to pay an artist / designer to create the labelwork
They have to pay someone to operate the millhouse.
They have to pay someone to brew it
They have to pay the cellar person
They have to invest in the bottling line, or canning line to package it (which is not cheap)
They have to pay the packaging staff to package it.
Let's also get into the various state licenses and distributorships they would then have to navigate and secure to get that beer they do not believe in to you.
Etc. and so forth.

 

Most if not all of these things are fixed costs of operating a brewery.
Packaging and licensing may be the only costs. They would need to do this for any new beer they introduce.

 

Well... Maybe, maybe not.

There is something called "opportunity costs." If you use your existing equipment and resources to brew a one-off you don't believe in, you are not using that stuff for one of your guaranteed sustainers of cash flow (sometimes called "flagship beers"). So you are still gambling on something you don't believe in. Lots of folks are not willing to gamble a loss of the cash flow that sustains the business for something that might not sell.

So when DFH brewed a cloudberry beer it actually lost them money. To recoup their costs they would have had to charge about $25 per 10 or 12 oz glass at the brewpub. (See the DFH website for other information.)

 

Yup, and there's a lot of money involved in all of it. If it were your business with all that tied up, would you go and release some bullshit you don't believe in and pay your staff for all the manhours, and tie up your real estate for as long as it would take to produce, and package something you don't believe in? What happens when its barrel aged. You have to get those barrels (which at some 300$ a pop ain't cheap) and have the extra space to store them for the 3mos to a year it takes.

 

I would guess that very few breweries are operating at 100% capacity. If they are they are not worrying about gimmicks to sell more beer. I would also guess that if they are and decide to do a one off they know their market well enough to know that they will sell it. The big hit could come down to reputation if the gimmick falls flat.

As for the DFH example that would come to 250+ dollars a gallon. The overhead cost in there cannot be that much..

 

In this area and in this market place your guess would be wrong. As for DFH overhead on the cloudberry beer I guess you've never priced out what it would cost to buy and get cloudberries from their source to Rehobeth in good enough shape to use in brewing. Having had cloudberry wine at the source I'd willingly have paid $15-25 for a glass in Rehobeth if I'd known enough to get there while it was on offer.

 

Cloudberrys are not overhead. If you are spending a fortune on your gimmick you are doing it wrong. DFH is probably not a good example to go by. They have made a fortune with their gimmicks/creativity. I am sure Sam has no problem losing a few thousand dollars many times over to come up with their next 120 minute.

 

Call it what you prefer, it's nonetheless less a cost in making the beer. As for DFH, I'd say your understanding of them and their motivations and accomplishments is incomplete.

Enjoy the rest of your day!

 

I am sorry you are taking this personally. Having a different opinion does not have to lead to a face palm. I am a member of DUH (Delmarva United Homebrewers) and have had conversations with Sam involving ingredients. As such I will still agree with you my understanding is incomplete. I would say yours is not perfect either. The discussion was involved with cost of a gimmick. I will maintain my "opinion" that a gimmick can be done cheaply as a motivation to help a brewery make a bit of money. Breweries that are running at capacity or near capacity will not need to do this. I will call out no brewery as a few things I call a gimmick have been well received by my fellow brewers with far better palettes than mine. I would say there have been very few things done only as a gimmick. I will also say very few departures from standard styles have been pure genius. Almost all run the scale somewhere in between.

 

Nothing taken personally nor any intended face palm, so if it seemed that way I'll simply apologize and say I was in a hurry to deal with something that needed attention very soon. And I do say that I missed that the critical point of your posts that you mention above.

And in this post you've put your finger directly on one of the issues that is effectively the elephant in the room. Creativity in part is in the eye of the beholder and typically requires extensive hard work on the part of the innovator and a great deal of background knowledge on the part of the beholder for it to happen, to survive and be recognized. Yet the end result quite often appears quite simple or trivial or gimmicky to the rest of the world. But historically speaking the efforts of those who have established creative innovations that have had any sort of major impact only follow lots and lots of "guided trial and error" experimentation to try and see what works, what doesn't and sometimes to help clarify a vision that is often only partically formulated when the innovator-to-be begins. Often times the costs are not measured in dollar amounts but in the hard work required to become knowledgeable enough to get a creative result.

 

I think another problem with the discussion is the perception of the word gimmick. I personally do not see a gimmick as a bad thing. In fact I love gimmicks. My only objection to the "gimmicky" beers is when a brewer adds 4 dollars worth of ingredients to their 17 barrel batch of pale ale, bottles it in bombers, waxes the cap, and then charges 10 times as much for it as the base beer as a limited release. This in my mind is not a gimmick but a blatant ripoff of their customer.

 

Honestly, I think a huge part of this is the fact that most BA users are american, and thus obviously have far greater access to American Oktoberfest beers than the German ones.

 

Samuel Adams Latitude 48 IPA Deconstructed. Gimmicky? Or Creative?

 

Drinking it right now. It's actually pretty good. Can't taste the scorpions though.