Firestone Walker to Acquire Cali-Squeeze from SLO Brewing Co.

So they bought the brand and the recipe? FW has become a very odd and erratic brewer from my perspective

 

They're just doing their best to survive in our current crazy beer industry.

 

No doubt, their approach just seems a lot more haphazard than most places their size. They're leaning into their best selling brand (805) with line extensions, at the same time they are expanding their barrel program and launched a new brewery membership focused around it, they're bringing back old favorites (double jack and wookie jack at least), but they're also adding new hazies, and now they are buying a brand of fruited "sours" (instead of developing one in house?).

I don't begrudge them their efforts it just seems like they are sort of trying a little of every popular approach. Both leaning into what made them famous AND chasing after trends. And then you add their sale to Duvel and they really have hit "regional craft standout circa 2010" bingo!

 

I'm guessing the real draw here is the immediate access to the hard seltzer market with the new Cali-Squeeze seltzers.

 

Cali-squeeze isn't available here, but that's okay because I'm not looking for “hop head” levels of hops in my wheat beers.

 

Congratulations for writing a press release that mostly avoids bull shit corporate lingo.

No leveraging core competencies into forward thinking initiatives within the customer driven malt forward ultra premium portfolio branding space.
Just, you know, this product is successful, and we bought it, and we intend to keep it successful.
Nice job.

 

They must have wanted that particular brand *really* bad, given that it would have presumably been far easier and cheaper for Firestone Walker to tweak/relabel/otherwise offer unaltered the Quirk and Fling lines made by corporate sibling Boulevard.

 

I'm guessing that you are correct. Otherwise this acquisition is a bit of a head scratcher to me. I tried a couple of the Cali-Squeeze beers last summer, thankful for the chance to drink anything that wasn't an IPA. They sounded good in theory, but overall were just ok. Let's just say that they weren't enjoyable enough to make me want to purchase them again. Guess I'll give it another shot once FW takes over the reigns and hope for the better.

 

Is it a seltzer line too? The press release made it sound like a fruited sour thing. They describe it as a wheat beer I thought

 

They do a wheat beer and a hard seltzer. The press release itself doesn't mention the seltzer but it's in the "About Cali-Squeeze" bit at the end.

 

Hahaha I thought the exact same thing

 

Didn't they buy their Paso location from San Luis Brewing back in like 2000? I moved to Pismo back in 1999, and I thought they moved from Buellton to Paso just a year or to later. I'm probably remembering it wrong since it's been so long. I'm still curious though.

 

I believe they moved their brewery operations from Los Olivos to Paso Robles. Their Buellton location (which includes Barrelworks) is still there.

 

Basically, can't even remember if I've ever met my SLO rep, and if I did, it was many moons ago. He dropped by the other day to let me know the news, even though I saw it here first. LOL

I thought it was quite weird for them to specifically acquire the line and not SLO or some part of SLO themselves. Is that something that's happened in recent memory or is this is a newer phenomenon in beer?

I can absolutely see why Firestone would have gone after the Cali-Squeeze line, it laser-targets the same people who go for the Golden Road Cart series: it's beer that "doesn't taste like beer." Simply okay with no discernible technical flaws to people like myself and others here (which actually perfectly describes all of SLO's beer really), but entirely what newer beer drinkers and a considerable section of the casual beer drinking public want.

Firestone seem to be doing something right, they're one of the few brewers of their size who seem to be growing year after year. Quite a few are shrinking, others are steady and moving into seltzer or spirits to diversify, Stone is going through a baffling/embarrassing mid-life crisis... so yeah, it's odd but maybe they got a crystal ball.

 

This is still what sticks out to me about this, I've read about various macro lager brands being traded around between breweries but I don't think I've ever heard of a brewery purchasing a brand from another brewery while both continue on otherwise unchanged in terms of ownership structure

 

Yeah, it's happened a few time. Off the top of my head, going backwards in time:

Pabst sold the Olde English and Hamm's labels to Miller in 1999, which Pabst had owned since, respectively, the late 1970s (when they bought Blitz-Weinhard) and early 80s (when they bought Olympia, owner of Hamm's at the time).

In the mid-80s former Pabst executives bought the Huber Brewing Co. (after being shown the door by the infamous Paul Kalmanovitz, who had just bought Pabst), when Huber's Augsburger brand was their hottest seller with wider distribution than any of the other Huber beers. They sold the brewery back to Huber and a partner (of Chicago's Berghoff family) after only 4 years but kept Augsburger and licensed it to Stroh, which never had a successful "super-premium" beer. (I think the ex-Pabst guys also got jobs with Stroh, but I might be confusing that with another deal.)

Stroh then turned around and sold another of their super-premium brands, Erlanger (which they acquired from Schlitz) to Dubuque Star.

In the early 1970s, Heileman sold 5 labels to Cold Spring, including Gluek (once a well-know Minneapolis brewery), which CS would later briefly adopt as it's corporate name a couple of decades later.

 

So outside of Pabst, a seeming beer label trading house of sorts, and some shuffling in the 70s as the industry consolidated are you aware of any other examples of this sort of brand sell off?

 

Oh, there's a few more similar examples (probably more if I think about it). Problem is the outside observer seldom knows the actual ownership of the labels - whether the new brewer actually bought the brand or is simply licensing it from the previous owners.

Follow-up on the Augsburger chronology further from above, for example, had Pabst owning the label after buying most of the Stroh and Heileman brands in '99 after Stroh shutdown, so at some point Stroh must have purchased it outright (?). Pabst then licenses the brand to Stevens Point in the mid-00s.

And, yeah, Pabst was involved in a lot of these deal, because by then Pabst had been merged into the S&P Corp. (Pearl + General + Falstaff - so also, Narrangansett & Ballantine) and then bought most of the Heileman/Stroh portfolio. Originally they leased the Narragansett brand to the new owners but apparently they sold it entirely later.

Piels, on the other, had always been a licensed brand while owned by Schaefer, Stroh and Pabst and Pabst recently let it go, thus the family of the last owner of the brand wound up with it. (Something similar happened to the Haffenreffer brand, too - once a Narrangansett/Falstaff brand).

The once-huge SF/California brand, Burgermeister (#3 in CA in the 1950s), bounced around a lot - the brewery bought by Schlitz only to have the Feds rule they had to sell it over anti-trust concerns (Schlitz was looking to buy Labatt, which owned half of General/Lucky Lager - #1 in CA at the time). So, Schlitz sold the brewery and brand to Chicago's Meister Brau which closed the SF brewery after only a few years, selling the Burgie brand to Theo. Hamm (which at the time had breweries in LA and SF) and then a few years later, Hamm sold it to Pabst (which still had a CA brewery) when Hamm shut down their CA breweries and were bought by Olympia.

When C. Schmidt's & Sons of Phila. purchased the Rheingold brands in the late 1970s, they sold off the rights to McSorley's (to nearby Ortlieb) and Esslinger's to The Lion. Odd thing about that deal was Esslinger's was an old Philadelphia brand but the two Phila. breweries, Schmidt's and Ortlieb's, apparently had no interest in it (it had become a discount brand under Jacob Ruppert and Rheingold).