Craft beer goes Kraft

Did you catch the The beer story in  Shanken Daily News entitled, Craft Controversy: Rotating Drafts Spark Concern Among Brewers? 

It seems that Boulevard Brewing in Kansas City, Missouri, a big craft produer with $36,000,000 in sales had a complaint. 

 

Bars that refuse to dedicate draft handles to particular brews, but rather regularly rotate beers in and out are “becoming more prevalent,” remarks Bob Sullivan, vice president of sales and marketing at Boulevard Brewing in Kansas City, Missouri, the tenth-largest craft brewer. The tactic—while often a successful strategy for on-premise operators—is damaging to all craft brewers, new and established, Sullivan says, as it doesn’t give brewers a chance to build their brands.

It strikes me that this attitude is contrary to the craft movement, which revitalized a dead, homogenized beer market.

The writer of the piece went further to comment more deeply on the trend, while great for consumers and beneficial to many bars—is a challenge for marketers and distributors.

We could argue that decreasing the consumer's intake of diet soda is bad for PepsiCo's business, or the decrease of smoking is bad for Phillip Morris, or that GreenMarket vegetables might be tastier but that's bad for Whole Foods or Southern complaining that they've harder time getting by  the glass pours because of Jenny & Francois selection being so popular.

Okay, I'm going on a roll here,this is not as pernicious a motive as those listed above, but the mindset is the same. Control the market, control the consumer.

Just to make sure the independent craft beer industry wasn't going totally off their rocker with commercialism, I put in a call to  craft beer central, Oregon, and specifically to Charlie Devereaux who  heads up Double Mountain, a company that has just started to put its draft into bottle, works in a much more crowded local market than Boulevard, albeit makes a whole lot less beer.

He was a surprised by the piece, because he  believes Boulevard to be the real thing, but he does realize they have a problem. "When they started there were 200 craft breweries, now there are 2000," he said.  

Even though he was eager to defend his bigger colleague, as he sees it,  the way a beer is built is merely through demand, and not because a bar pours you.  "The real damaging threat," he said, "is when the industry gets boring." 

 

Comments

[George]

As someone who has followed the craft beer industry closely, I always try to read between the lines on these pronouncements from brewers. Boulevard has been around for 20 years and is now producing about 175,000 barrels annually. They are in a tier of the craft industry that I think of as the "super-regionals" - not yet truly national like the big 3 (Boston Beer, Sierra Nevada and New Belgium), but they have expanded successfully from their home base (Missouri) into multiple other states. As such, and with the rapid proliferation of new brands all around them, they find themselves somewhat between the rock and the you-know-what. Too old and too big to be "exciting", and too small to match the distribution clout and cost advantages of the national guys. Not unlike wine, there's a whole segment of craft beer consumers who thrive on experimenting with new brands and innovative brews. Those are the people Boulevard is losing. But it's more satisfying to blame it on the restaurant and bar operators.

[Alicefeiring]

George, thanks for your thoughtful response. Indeed, the problems of being a Legacy brand. But for some reason, I don't think Brooklyn Beer has this kind of problem. It would be interesting to give them a call to see how they are dealing with perhaps a similar situation.

[D]

Anyone that large is not a "craft" product any longer. Even that aside, their argument is wholly selfish and patently absurd. Imagine a resto that wouldn't change its food/wine/cocktails...ever? If people aren't missing their product when its out of rotation then they didn't really care about to begin with and the problem doesn't lay with the restos taking their product offline.