Anchor Brewing Company ends national distribution, kills Christmas Ale

One of the large contributing factors to the rise in Deschutes during that time was due to their investment in technology because of their newly appointed Brewmaster "Brian Faivre" a computer science grad from UC Davis. While I never met him I saw the result of his and many others who championed consistency and quality via data collection about their production process. This dude was essentially scared away due to internal politics.

>but my impression is their distribution was too large to be able to capitalize on anything groundbreaking.

The distribution is all through large distributors Deschutes and every other "Largish" craft brewery has to sell their soul to the devil that is the "three tiered" system in order to not have to make investments in solo distribution. Given what I know about their production facility and the people there. It is completely geared to cash in on basically any beer trend that could exist. Their pilot plant is simply ridiculous, it's a fully automated 40 bbl split wort A/B testing powerhouse. The best beer you've never tasted has been made in that thing.

IMO Deschutes made many decisions that just ended up being a waste of money that severely crippled their cash position.

Lastly trends in the beer world are a flash in the pan at this point. I disregard Seltzers because it's a different process that doesn't directly involve wort production and therefore many craft breweries aren't set up to pivot to such a product.

One thing I attempted to stoke (not that this was at all my job) while working their is that marketing strategy should shift towards understanding that no consumer is loyal in the sense they always want to "try the new thing". This would have meant investments in better variety packing capabilities. If you didn't know variety packs are the highest velocity product, and my guess would be that any brewery that people think is good at all it's their highest velocity product as well. Time and time again I'd raise my hand and point to the metoric number for our variety packs (from a velocity stand point) and say "why can't we make investments that greatly bring down the cost and increase the production velocity for this product. Now you see brands like 10 barrel, Sierra Nevada basically doing just that.

All I said dude was that I don't believe in it and that I think what they were doing is stupid.

Other people can do what they want, even if its pointless. Because pretty much everyone does shit (like boycott) more because it makes them feel good ("look at me! I'm stickin it to the man!"), not because it is effective.

I suppose if everyone measured their activities on effectiveness it might create a hole in the space-time continuum, so many idiotic jobs and actions would be eliminated.

1: https://youtu.be/YgBvdPH8TZw?t=75

Another middling green-bottle beer. Better than Heineken easy, but typically still worse than your local brewer will make.