So I am in St. Louis for work and I stopped in Dierbergs (local grocery store) to grab some food when I saw this display: It made me laugh because it is local ... but its definitely take a page out of the "craft" playbook and emphasizing the local aspect as a marketing tool.
It would be funny if they turned out to have been brewed at one of their other breweries, like in Fort Collins.
This label says St. Louis: I haven't spent much time in St. Louis, but I have spent a lot of time in southern Wisconsin, and I can assure you that local loyalty to Miller slowed conversion to better beer among what otherwise likely would've been a very receptive audience. "What made Milwaukee famous" wasn't exactly craft beer. I'm guessing the same is true in St. Louis.
The TTB no longer requires the actual source brewery to be listed on the individual labels. Instead, the actual brewery is noted in AB's date coding (first letter): (It's why, for example, the first AB Rolling Rock came from Newark but the labels said "Latrobe Brewing Co., St. Louis, MO" and why there's no still no Yuengling label that says "Tampa, FL".) The BATF ended the original "Name and address" requirement back in the 1980s (90s?) to save the big, multi-brewery companies money and allow them to use one label at all their sites. For a time, AB's Budweiser labels used to specify the actual brewery, and then list all the others. Or they listing all of them in chronological order.
Promoting the "local" brand was common in the brewery industry long before the "craft era", of course- one of my favorite such ads from the 1950s: In traditional brewing industry marketing terminology (not always followed by the consumer, obviously) Budweiser is a "national" beer even in St. Louis, not a "local" or "regional" one.
If you're looking for CBC, North High, Brew Dog, Seventh Son, Four String, Land Grant, Wolf's Ridge, or Elevator in a Columbus Kroger store, you won't find it in this section: There's also this:
Wow I wanted to try that beer but it's $9.99 here so I won't try it. Beer just keeps going up here and seems like it's so much lower elsewhere. Enjoy
That ad is really interesting - I guess at that point there were enough regional/local breweries still operating you could push that as an marketing angle.
Yeah, in 1950 there were still 407 US breweries and only a few were truly "national" with multiple breweries (AB, Schlitz, Pabst - w/Hamm, Falstaff and Ballantine being pretty close to it). So, that probably left around 370-380 local and regional brewers. 18 breweries alone in New England, the most in MA with 13 (none in VT or ME), although the NYC-NJ metro breweries and a few in upstate NY had a good share of the N.E. market, too. The market segment breakdown in Massachusetts in 1950 was: National - 14.5% Regional* - 73.5% Local - 12% * Primarily NYC's Ruppert, Ballantine in Newark and RI's Narragansett.
We have a scheme over here in which pumps serving beers from local breweries are labelled with a "crown" Local means 20 delivery miles in urban areas and 30 miles in rural ones.
