131–140 of 168 posts
In an 'heritage' economy, proximity, uniqueness and the story of the product matter more than the product itself. We have seen it happen in France for 'macaron', wine and cheese.
More on 'heritage' economy (in french) : http://www.gallimard.fr/Catalogue/GALLIMARD/NRF-Essais/Enric...
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Not to be overly contrarian but it does seem that we are getting close to the peak for the craft beer industry. Smuttynose Brewery going up for auction is a great example of this. https://www.pressherald.com/2018/01/18/smuttynose-brewing-in... Many areas are getting over-saturated with microbreweries and there eventually won't be enough demand to sustain them. In retail, $10+ average price for a six pack, the even mo…
$10 (USD)? Luxury! NZ craft beer six pack: $22.99 UK craft beer 6 pack: £14 You Americans complain too much, easily one of the cheapest countries to buy booze I've been to
As someone who has a bit of a distributist streak, it's really nice to see this. There's a craft brewery near me, and I patronize it not because it's the best beer, but because it's pretty good, and I want to support the local business. Craft breweries seem to be pretty good candidates for distributing the means of production. I'm speaking a bit out of ignorance, but it's not a lot of ingredients and it's not a huge…
You are correct! It's a relatively small number of ingredients to make beer that can be shipped pretty easily. Grain, hops, yeast, water, an assortment of adjuncts. The issues come in with the actual means of production , rather than the material ingredients. Brewing is a rather technically complex task. It's not trivial to do reliably - ask any homebrewer about batches they've skunked. It also benefits significantly…
Contrast that with the finished product. A hoppy IPA is at its best for a limited time, and that is shortened by exposure to light and heat. Other beer styles vary, but none last for ever. This favours local production, not storage and shipping.
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I'm totally with you. Every time I go to a bar or beer garden it feels like the menus are 75% IPAs. I'd rather drink sea water.
Before the IPA fad kicked off I used to go to a local beer megastore and specifically sample every American IPA because that was the smallest segment that was reasonable to take on in its entirety. It still took me two years to complete. Nowadays it would be impossible with the overwhelming glut of IPAs. Nor would it be very enjoyable since the fad breweries just take IPA as an excuse to overload on hops and destroy…
You would never finish. New batches and variants with new names are coming out faster than any one person can try them all, barring maybe a full-time job in expensive alcoholism.
Love craft beer and I am glad my 125K city has 5 of them, but /r/starterpacks was dead on with this one: https://i.redd.it/fio3hqlmuofy.jpg I will be confused if I ever walk into a microbrewery that doesn't look like that!
Not to be overly contrarian but it does seem that we are getting close to the peak for the craft beer industry. Smuttynose Brewery going up for auction is a great example of this. https://www.pressherald.com/2018/01/18/smuttynose-brewing-in... Many areas are getting over-saturated with microbreweries and there eventually won't be enough demand to sustain them. In retail, $10+ average price for a six pack, the even mo…
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Not to be overly contrarian but it does seem that we are getting close to the peak for the craft beer industry. Smuttynose Brewery going up for auction is a great example of this. https://www.pressherald.com/2018/01/18/smuttynose-brewing-in... Many areas are getting over-saturated with microbreweries and there eventually won't be enough demand to sustain them. In retail, $10+ average price for a six pack, the even mo…
In Scotland a few of the micro-breweries are now experimenting with Gin and Whiskey. That could be the next stage as beer gets saturated. But there's also a long way to go with beer. Atm micro breweries are mostly making traditional flavorsome ales. There's a lot of room left for experimentation, particularly in the health aspect. If someone can make a tasty, full flavored, low cal beer they'd make a bomb.
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These graphs are quite convincing that the key events happened around 1978 and not decades prior to that. Amazing how a little data can instantly refute pages of exposition at a glance. The author really went out of their way to talk about Anti-Trust concerns and had to get in a dig at Reagan for loosening them...yet the graph of breweries was up and to the right throughout Reagan’s time when Anti-Trust was paused th…
Yeah, the claims of the article are kind of bizarre. I'm not an enemy of regulation as such but I recall post-prohibition regulations were very much designed to make drinking a miserable experience and prohibition itself destroyed traditions of drinking for enjoy in favor of drinking for drunkenness. Growing up in the 70's, American beer was putrid except for a few, hard to find brands. It seems like microbrews follo…
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Oh lord, this is so true it hurts. Living in Seattle, you’re never more than maybe 300 yards from a microbrewery— and don’t get me wrong, I love it— but they are all exactly like this.
I have a hard time giving that starter-pack graphic too much credit because it's really describing a wider design aesthetic. It's not just microbreweries, it's bars and restaurants too. I can think of a dozen each in Chicago, Portland, and Seattle that look like that. Hell, there are Starbucks concept stores in Seattle that look like that. I've been in tech office spaces that look like that ...
I wonder if marijuana will also be able to avoid being crushed and consolidated by monopolies. I don't think the cigarette industry was able to avoid it but I am not well versed on tobacco industry regulations. My gut tells me that since at the end of the day marijuana is an agricultural commodity large players will come to dominate the market. But on the other hand there is a decent variety in strain types and flavo…
One thing about beer that the article didn't touch on is that it's a fragile product which has its quality harmed by the standard supply chain. It's both temperature and light sensitive. This makes many smaller producers compared to few large producers more attractive than in a more easily transported good eg. phones. One big factory with all of the quality standards and efficiency gains that allows works great for t…