All puns aside, craft beer is hopping. Sales of the more-flavorful brews have surged at a double-digit clip the past few years.
So much so that fast-growing labels such as California’s Lagunitas and Colorado-based New Belgium are planning new breweries to serve national markets. Meanwhile, little brew-pubs have popped up left and right, churning out small-batch servings of porters and pale ales, and building an image of a sector full of scrappy entrepreneurs.
Now, increasingly, national breweries are getting into the act as well, buying and building craft labels, then plugging them into their huge marketing and distribution networks.
MillerCoors - which has its own craft-and-import division known as Tenth and Blake - owns Wisconsin-based Leinenkugel and Oregon label Henry Weinhard, and is building both into national brands. Its Blue Moon Belgian White is expected to sell 2 million barrels this year, which would make it the 10th-largest beerseller in the nation if it were its own company. Of all the growth in the craft segment last year, one-third came from brands run by Tenth and Blake.
“There’s a revolution going on in beer,” said Lee Dolan, Tenth and Blake’s vice president for sales and marketing. “We’re glad to be a part of it.”
Anheuser-Busch InBev isn’t far behind. It keeps adding new versions of its Shock Top line of wheat beers - on pace to sell 800,000 barrels this year - and in March 2011, it bought control of Chicago craft brewer Goose Island. Now, it’s taking the brew national, with hopes of selling 1million barrels by 2015.
Last week, Anheuser-Busch InBev put one of its veteran executives in charge of Goose Island, while naming the brewery’s founder, John Hall, to anewly formed Craft Advisory Board.
It’s a smart strategy for the big guys and a pretty simple one, said beer-industry consultant Bump Williams. “They’re just trying to give beer-drinkers what they want,” Williams said.
But for the booming ranks of independents, the influx of national brewers is a mixed blessing.
On one hand, the marketing muscle that industry giants wield can help draw more beerdrinkers to more adventurous, alternative brews. After all, craft beer is still a fairly niche product -- all 2,100 craft brewers combined sold just one-eighth as much beer last year in the U.S. as Anheuser-Busch.
On the other hand, some worry that the big guys could muscle smaller brewers off the shelf, so that the only craft beers consumers see are the ones brewed by the corporate behemoths.
The trick for smaller brewers, said Jim Gorczyca, owner of O’Fallon Brewery, is to make sure that consumers know who is who. “I think the craft customer is a pretty savvy beer drinker,” he said. “For them, authenticity is very important.”
Of course, Goose Island, Leinenkugel and Henry Weinhard’s have authentic roots, too. All three got their start as regional independents, and that’s how many customers still see them. They retain their own breweries - even if most Goose Island beer is now brewed at AB’s giant plant in Baldwinsville, N.Y. - and their founders are still involved in running the brands. There’s little outward sign of change. The words “Anheuser-Busch” appear nowhereon Goose Island’s bottles or packaging.
“The multinationals are doing the best to blur the lines between their non-light-lager products and the ones that come from independents,” said Dan Kopman, co-founderof Schlafly parent The St. Louis Brewery.
Even more important than image are the mechanisms of getting beer to market. The nation’s complex network of beer wholesalers evolved over decades to serve the nation’s brewing giants, and today virtually all of the 3,300 distributors in the U.S. have a perpetual contract with either Anheuser-Busch or MillerCoors.
That network, plus their enormous marketing budgets, means the big guys can make almost any beer huge and crowd out competitors, said Paul Gatza, president of the craft-beer trade group the Brewers Association.
“They have a lot of muscle at distribution,” he said. “When they decide they want to get a product on the shelf, they can pull some levers and make that happen.”
Craft brewers have ridden the coattails of that system. Many sell their products through Anheuser-Busch InBev or MillerCoors distributors, benefiting from an infrastructure built to support national brewers without having to build it themselves. Those wholesalers help small labels get on store shelves and in tap handles, and people all over the industry point out that beer consumers have never enjoyed a wider array of choices.
Business, Pages 64 on 12/02/2012