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Craft Beer Is the Strangest, Happiest Economic Story in America

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Re: Craft Beer Is the Strangest, Happiest Economic Story in America

#61

Post by scoggs »

40acres wrote: post #5

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…

I think marijuana being a weed :being able to grow as fast as it does while also being an incredibly easy plant to grow (or screw up, depending on how you look at tings) will lend to lots more home growing than we see home brewing, in my opinion. People are already comfortable with gardening or landscaping of some kind. I think home growing pot is more akin to the average American's day-to-day activities than anything like brewing beer is.

I think there are already too many people taking steps to catalog and categorize the already established strains and varieties of marijuana before it's already too late. That and international breeding and cataloging efforts will be the forces that help future home growers to have confidence in the genetics they are planting in the ground or substrate.

Re: Craft Beer Is the Strangest, Happiest Economic Story in America

#63

Post by rconti »

jsm386 wrote: post #39
rconti wrote: post #31

One interesting note: The article mentions Ronald Reagan's Justice Department's lax handling of antitrust regulations as leading to consolidation in the brewing industry, but the number of breweries was near its nadir before he was elected; in 1978 Jimmy Carter legalized home brewing, which was close to the very bottom in terms of number of breweries. https://vinepair.com/wp-content/themes/vpcontent/images/brew...

That chart is from a broader article we published last winter: https://vinepair.com/map-american-craft-brewing-history/ More recently we put together a visualization of the 1977 data at https://vinepair.com/map-american-breweries-1977/ There's also a marked up breakdown by brewery from a 1978 FTC report below the visualization.

That 1978 FTC data is fascinating! Thanks!

Re: Craft Beer Is the Strangest, Happiest Economic Story in America

#64

Post by notsrg »

dragonwriter wrote: post #32
monocasa wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's already happening here in CO. The amount of consolidation going on behind the scenes over the past couple years is staggering. On the plus side it's mainly dispensary owners selling to other owners rather than Philip Morris.

If federal legalization happens, that's when the big multinational ag/pharma firms will take over.

Already happening in Canada.

Re: Craft Beer Is the Strangest, Happiest Economic Story in America

#65

Post by sigil »

dluan wrote: post #58
sigil wrote: post #53

Summary: benevolent regulation caused the craft beer boom. I call bullshit. Look at this graph [1] and tell me again how great the three-tier system was for market diversity. America went from 700 post-Prohibition breweries to less than 100 in 1978. That was the year homebrewing was legalized, and it's a pretty steady climb back up from there. Brewpubs -- which circumvent the three-tier system and its all-too-easily-…

It's not just that there was a three-tier system, but I would argue that in this particular case, it was the legalization of homebrewing that was the gateway into the innovation. Early 80's and 90's homebrewers were essentially hackers [1], doing things at very small scales, and branching far out into experimental recipes and techniques. I'm sure there was innovation in distribution and retail over the last 40 years,…

> it was the legalization of homebrewing that was the gateway into the innovation.

I'm with you on this part. It's hard to imagine the boom happening while tinkering was outright illegal! Also, surely the 58 year gap (1920-1978) caused some generational loss of knowledge. The homebrewers of the 80s and 90s must have started from scratch in many ways.

> without the three-tier system the little amount of innovation in brewing couldn't overthrow the total amount needed to also take over distribution and retail.

Watch "Beer Wars" and you'll see craft brewers with promising products struggling to get shelf space. The problems started for them even before the shelves: they needed to get into existing distributor's trucks, and by this stage of the three-tier game, tier 3 (breweries) had captured tier 2 (distributors). Why exactly would you let an upstart competitor onto "your" truck?

What's surprising to me is that craft brewers found a way! They succeeded not because of the three-tier system, as this article posits, but in spite of it. I'd love to hear how.

PS. You cite an article by the Dogfish Head founder Sam Calagione. In "Beer Wars" he recounts the story of how he started an illegal brewery in Rhode Island, then (because the state was small enough and he knew someone who knew someone) managed to get a law passed to legalize brewing.

Re: Craft Beer Is the Strangest, Happiest Economic Story in America

#67

Post by RandallBrown »

bsder wrote: post #12
vkou wrote: post #2

> Large breweries ignored burgeoning niches, Watson said, particularly hoppy India Pale Ales, or IPAs, which constitute a large share of the craft-beer market. He's reversing cause-and-effect. IPAs are incredibly popular among microbrewers, because it is incredibly hard to brew consistently tasting batches of beer. Smothering all of a beer's other flavours, by dumping buckets after buckets of hops into it is much eas…

> It's why eight out of every ten craft beers are incredibly bitter IPAs. I always saw this is a US West Coast phenomenon. Stone, in San Diego, sort of popularized the trend and then people started rolling with it to extremes. I have a similar issue with barrel aging. I love Victory at Sea from Ballast Point (since bought out by Constellation Brands) and similarly dark "toxic sewage" as my friends so happily classify…

I always thought Dogfish Head was the most well known company doing super hop forward beers and they're on the east coast.

Re: Craft Beer Is the Strangest, Happiest Economic Story in America

#68

Post by Tiktaalik »

In the City of Vancouver there are five breweries in my somewhat industrial neighbourhood. In another nearby somewhat industrial neighbourhood there are another five. There several others scattered about in the nearby satellite municipalities.

A decade ago if you walked into a Vancouver liquor store that specialized in craft beer you'd find it mostly full of Seattle and Portland craft beers. Now you'd find the stock overwhelmingly dominated by high quality beer made within Metro Vancouver city limits.

We don't find it at all odd to find independent mom n' pop restaurants in every neighbourhood of every town, and I believe in the long term we'll find that every town of reasonable size will have a few mom n' pop breweries that largely serve the local populace.

Re: Craft Beer Is the Strangest, Happiest Economic Story in America

#69

Post by dluan »

sigil wrote: post #65
dluan wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just that there was a three-tier system, but I would argue that in this particular case, it was the legalization of homebrewing that was the gateway into the innovation. Early 80's and 90's homebrewers were essentially hackers [1], doing things at very small scales, and branching far out into experimental recipes and techniques. I'm sure there was innovation in distribution and retail over the last 40 years,…

> it was the legalization of homebrewing that was the gateway into the innovation. I'm with you on this part. It's hard to imagine the boom happening while tinkering was outright illegal! Also, surely the 58 year gap (1920-1978) caused some generational loss of knowledge. The homebrewers of the 80s and 90s must have started from scratch in many ways. > without the three-tier system the little amount of innovation in…

I would like to know too, if it really is some odd phenomena that everyone so far is missing.

If I had to pin it to any one guess, I would maybe go with imports. Beer imports were always around to some extent, but it was also the way that consumers got the other tastes they couldn't find at the football game.

In fact, if I had to think back to when I was a kid, there was always that one uncle who enjoyed drinking imports over typical 'domestic', and maybe that 90's uncle is basically the same person today as a craft-IPA drinking millennial. Distributors accommodate more imports as brands get acquired, and maybe that's the gateway. I suppose you could look at the data of brands changing over the years.

Re: Craft Beer Is the Strangest, Happiest Economic Story in America

#70

Post by mberning »

It’s very hard for me to reconcile. I love what craft brewing has done for the industry. But it has gone to a ridiculous and antithetical place. The culture has more in common with wine than beer at this point. It is no longer an “Everyman” drink. Waiting in line for releases. $10 and $15 pours. It’s a turnoff.
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