A little news item just flitted across my desktop that really caught my eye. It was an item titled, “Less is More? Are There Too Many Breweries?” Since I’m working on starting my own brewery, this article gave me a pause. I had to read it.

It was a little article about a topic that’s apparently been cropping up at the 2010 Beer Industry Summit: Are there too many breweries? The argument runs that there are so many breweries that distributors cannot possibly represent them all well. It seems like a fair cop:

…no one really believes that any single distributor can properly handle 100, 75 or even 50 breweries. Even the best salesperson doesn’t have the time or opportunity with their retail customers to make proper presentations for that many breweries. For a distributor with such a large portfolio of brands, the larger volume brands are going to get a lot of attention, but the rest will suffer. In theory, the top 10 breweries out of 50 may flourish and the remaining 40 will get neglected.

Of course, the argument that you’re going to see around most of the internet for this one is something about how the three-tier system is flawed. I can’t really get behind that argument, either. The three-tier system is exactly why craft beer has been able to grow so well. Plain and simple, if there weren’t laws keeping distributors separate from breweries, everything would be owned by BMC, and craft wouldn’t be distributed at all. But, look – there’s more:

One brewer I spoke to this week worries that his brand doesn’t get enough attention and becomes “clutter.” That means he’s concerned that his beer gets stale on the shelf and that shipping and logistics become troublesome and expensive due to small volumes. Yet another brewer has suggested that distributors should focus only on their top 10 (or so) craft brands, thus streamlining their operation and making it possible for them to make more frequent and more in depth presentations for those remaining brands.

I don’t know who these guys are, but I’m kinda glad, because I have very, very little sympathy.

Part of me really wants to call horseshit on this entire argument. I hate making the comparison between wine and beer because it’s loaded. People get all bent out of shape about it for all of the wrong reasons. But let me just throw a comparison out there. Here’s a quote from the article:

Right now, the Brewer’s Association will tell you that there are almost 600 breweries in the United States that bottle, can, keg or otherwise distribute beer. That number doesn’t count the many hundreds of brewpubs that brew beer for sale in their restaurants. In most markets, there are only 2 or 3 beer distributors that will carry and sell craft beer, which leaves a theoretical total of 200 to 300 brewers per distributor in any particular area, not including the wide array of import brands that are currently available.

Okay. Fair. 200-300 breweries per distributor? That’s a LOT!

There are 5218 wineries in the U.S. (2307 in California, alone). By the same math that’s 1700 – 2600 wineries per distributor. What a scale difference! It’s almost a factor of 10!

Good heavens! There must be too many wineries!

I mean.. fair. There are too many wineries.

The other day, I went down to the beer store closest to my house and noticed that they had expanded their beer inventory to two full aisles. One section is ONLY sixpacks, one is ONLY bombers, and one is single 12 oz. bottles (that sell for like $1.50/ea. – yikes). It’s all split by country and state (though no split on style).

Clutter? You bet! How is a consumer supposed to make sense of all that?

Then I realized that what I was looking at is just two aisles of the store. Out of 10 aisles. The rest of the store was filled with wine.

I like to give wine people a hard time by saying that there are only two types of wine. Yeah, you can tell me that they go by all of these different names, and there are all these different flavors made from different grapes, soil conditions, weather patterns, aging techniques, and the color of the t-shirt that the vintner was wearing on the day they bottled. But in the end your wine is more or less going to taste like a red wine or a white wine. They might be sweet or dry, but they’re still going to taste red or white.

There are thousands of bottles of wine at my local package store. It dwarfs the beer selection. And it’s just two types of wine.

There are too many breweries? What an incredibly selfish accusation! Wahh! I don’t want competition, that means I have to make a quality product! That way lies industrial light lager, my friend.

This all said, there are big differences between the wine market and the beer market that are worth considering:

1) The wine market is not dominated by a handful of players.

Are there huge wineries? Absolutely. I can’t speak as to whether or not they make a “premium” product that smaller.. er.. craft wineries look upon with disdain, but I don’t see a clear analog in the wine market to ABI or the other big players. You don’t have 3 companies that take up 90% of the market and, correspondingly, 90% of the shelf space.

What difference does that make? Look – craft beer makes up almost 5% of the beer market. It’s barely a dent. It’s barely a pucker in a divot. The fact that you can walk into a beer/wine retailer and see such a good selection of craft beer on the shelves is actually a pretty good testament to the three-tier system and a decent distribution network.

Unfortunately, because you have these huge players in the market, they have weight to throw around in the distribution channels. If ABI thinks that their distributor isn’t pushing their beer well and they threaten to pull their products, that distributor can and will lose a significant portion of their business (there are a lot of laws about this, too, and many are difficult for craft breweries to navigate because of the scale difference). Add that on top of the fact that there are less-than-scrupulous salesmen out there who aren’t afraid to go the whole “shady business practice” rout (ie – free stuff in exchange for accounts, which is illegal) and you begin to see why craft has to work so hard to carve its niche. I don’t believe that wineries have this same kind of battle.

2) Wine is ahead of beer in point-of-sale education.

Simply put: If you walk into a wine store without knowledge of what you’re buying, you have no way of telling if the product you are about to buy is decent or not. Just because it’s $15 doesn’t mean you’re going to like what’s inside the bottle. Actually, that doesn’t sound that different from beer, does it?

Luckily, most wine stores employ someone who is more educated about wine than your average bear. This person’s job is to cut and paste descriptions about wines from Wine Spectator into little leaflet things that they tape to the shelves so that a literate shopper has an easier time making a decision. That person is generally available to ask questions to if you need extra help.

Try finding that person for beer in any store that isn’t explicitly a beer bottleshop. Virtually non-existant. Beer, for the most part, relies on the consumer to be educated. Wine, for the most part, relies on the retailer to be educated. The retailer is the one ordering from the distributor.

I can’t really believe that there’s been a distributor salesperson in doing a specific presentation for each one of the wines that’s being carried in that store. They’d never leave. No, they might do a new brand, or a new vintage from a favorite winery, but certainly not every single one of the hundreds of wineries present in even a small wine shop.

3) A significant portion of the wineries in the U.S. sell local.

I will admit that I’m speculating on this one (heck, I’m speculating on 99% of this), but I bet I’m at least close to right. Out of the five-thousand-some wineries in the U.S., there are only a few hundred, tops, represented at my local wine store (and there are equally as many, if not more, from elsewhere in the world). There’s a whole section of local wine, and then there are selected wineries from certain regions within the U.S. – California, Oregon, New York, etc. A decent representation of each, but certainly not even close to every single one.

At my local package store, I can get beer from all over the U.S. and from countries all over the world, but I’m always surprised if there’s more than a handful of local breweries represented. To be fair, there’s only a handful of breweries in North Carolina that package their beer, but because of that I tend to expect to be able to get ALL of them at a local store, and especially at most local restaurants, and yet locally-made beer is embarrassingly difficult to find.

So what’s my point in all this? There aren’t too many breweries, and the problem isn’t with distribution. Not really. The problem is that the craft market is still small and it is still young, but people insist on treating it as a mature industry with a significant market share.

The average retailer – be it restaurant, bar, or package store – is woefully undereducated about craft beer. Is it so surprising that your average waitstaff can’t tell you what the Sam Adams Seasonal is or that a package store won’t know anything about the beers that a distributor is offering? Most of what they sell is Bud Light with Lime! What’s to know? They know their big sellers. Craft is a luxury purchase, not a money-maker. They have no incentive to learn.

Education, education, education – it needs to be stressed by every brewery and every person in the beer industry to every distributor and retailer they come in contact with. Support the Cicerone program because it will help you in the long run! Once there are Cicerones placed everywhere that you find a sommelier, THEN the only thing you have to do is make great beer (not really, but.. y’know). Until then, educate, educate, educate.

Finally? Sell deep before you sell wide. I keep going back to this quote from the beginning of the post:

One brewer I spoke to this week worries that his brand doesn’t get enough attention and becomes “clutter.” That means he’s concerned that his beer gets stale on the shelf and that shipping and logistics become troublesome and expensive due to small volumes.

There are countless bottles on the shelves of my local package store that I will never pick up because they’re from a small brewery somewhere on the other side of the country that I’ve never heard of. If I’m going to drop $14 on a six-pack, I’m going to make sure I damn well enjoy it. I’ve bought too many beers that were old, light-struck, infected, or just ruined from poor handling and storage on cross-country trips to make a gamble based on novelty alone.

This will not be a problem if your growth curve is slow. If you’re shipping your beer outside of your local market to an audience that has never heard of you to be sold by a retailer that knows nothing about beer, then I guarantee you that your product will get stale on the shelf and that you will be nothing but clutter.

Sell deep before you sell wide. Is it hard? Hell yeah. It means having YOUR staff beating the street rather than trusting in a distributor’s staff to do the work for you. Nobody knows your product better than you. Get out there and sell it. If you’re indispensable and ubiquitous in your local market, then when you finally move beyond it your product will sell because your reputation has preceded you.

So, again, back to the first question – are there too many breweries? No. In fact, I’d say that the main problem is that there aren’t nearly enough.

In case you missed it, there was a little sort-of announcement made by Stone this past week. You can watch the video (or read the blog post) to get the whole deal, but here’s the gist: Stone is considering the possibility of opening a brewery in Europe. That’s the announcement. That they’re considering it. Needless to say, this has garnered quite a few reactions, and I had a few of my own that I wanted to throw out and around for discussion.

I have to admit that my first reaction was a little knee-jerk “What the hell” kind of reaction that I appeared to have shared with a few others out there. Basically, the reaction goes somewhere along the lines of: What the hell? I can’t get Stone beers in [name one of many U.S. states] and now they’re going to open a brewery across the ocean?!

It’s where I sat for the first day or two.

To be honest, it’s an unfair reaction. Distribution laws are different state by state. I’m sure Stone would love to distribute to all 50 states. They would be silly not to, but it’s just not as easy as throwing beer in the mail. There’s all kinds of TTB hoops to jump through at both a federal level and a state level and then you need to find a distributor that 1) will carry your product 2) they way you’d like them to. Oh, and then retailers need to buy it. In some states, Stone doesn’t even have more than a few products that will be able to get to the shelf because of alcohol caps. So I’ll reserve my judgment on that one.

My next reaction was a little disappointment. I’ve always had a little soft spot for Stone because of their plan to sell deep into their market before expanding. That I started seeing Stone beers available in really out-of-the-way places on the East Coast made me assume that they had reached their goal of saturation in Southern California and that they were attempting to establish other markets. Okay, I say that a little tongue-in-cheek. I have a thing for small breweries. I hate it when their goal is constant growth. It smacks of greed to me. The craft beer market is too small for greed.

A lot of breweries have been taking the quick-expansion route in the past year. The fact that I went from never having had a Fat Tire before to getting irritated that every bar I go to in North Carolina has a Fat Tire tap before they have a local brewery tap has kind of irked me. To then follow that up with seeing Stone aggressively expand into my market made me a little wary. The American Southeast still has a way to go before it picks up huge hop profiles as its thing (and I doubt it ever will), so Stone hasn’t quite seen the same kind of ubiquity, but it’s here nonetheless. I kinda wish that I still felt the same sort of mystique I used to for Stone. When it was something that I couldn’t get my hands on, it was more special. Now it’s just a big IPA that I’m not always in the mood for at the beer bar. Availability cancels mystique.

On the other hand, this is how I’ve always thought breweries should handle expansion: Don’t ship your beer across god-knows-how-many miles and trust in some distributor that you can neither see nor control, build a new local brewery and distribute from there. It makes sense that if they want to expand their market to Europe to open a new brewery – it makes sense from a “I want my beer to be good and fresh” perspective. It makes sense from a business perspective, and I can get behind that.

My next reaction was amusement. Go back and watch the video and try to think about it in comparison with American foreign policy over the last.. oh.. 20 years. What unmitigated dicks Americans are. Greg and Steve come off as so damn cocksure in this video. “Don’t call us if you just want a brewery in your backyard – unless you’re a KING!” I know that they’re doing it to try to be quirky and cute and funny. But imagine that English isn’t your first language and you won’t be very surprised that there is – from the makers of “Arrogant Bastard”, mind you – a followup apology video to France. Take it from somebody who is related to a bunch of non-English-speakers: Humor doesn’t translate well.

And honestly guys: You’re funny. You are! But this is the internet. You had to know that was coming. Pictures of kittens get angry reactions. It’s the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. You could have prepared that “apology” in advance. (Though I’m sure that all of the reactions that you received were from unmitigated dick Americans.)

My final reaction? I’m not sure I’m there, yet. Part of me feels like a move across the ocean is kind of giving up on the American market. Despite Greg’s assurances that they would essentially exist as separate enterprises, I know that someone’s attention is going to be divided. In a very selfish way, I’d like Greg’s enthusiasm for craft beer and the craft beer market to be hyper-focused on the U.S., not Europe. Craft beer is still trying to gain a solid foothold here. It’s still struggling against imports and malternatives. To put it in perspective, Coors sold 150% more Zima in 1994 (1.2 million barrels) than all of the microbreweries (based on the BA definition) in the country did beer in 2008 (880,000 barrels).

I guess in a way, my feelings do reflect my pansy-ass, small-business-loving, latte-drinking, craft-beer-sipping, uber-liberal, somewhat protectionist political views: Why should we solve the world’s (beer) problems when we still have so many (beer) problems here at home?

I’ve often had my share of kinda irksome moments about Sam Adams. I go through wide sweeping moments where I feel like Sam Adams is primed so that someday in the future we’ll be talking about them when we say, “The Big 3.” “You know, InBev, MillerCoors, and Sam Adams.” Sometimes I feel like they choke local craft markets with their ever-increasingly-wide distribution channels. Sometimes I feel like they’re a little too eager to trumpet their role in the “craft beer revolution.”

And then sometimes they prove to me exactly how much they’re worth to craft beer.

This week at the National Beer Wholesaler’s Conference, Jim Koch, Founder and CEO of Boston Beer Company, spoke about the future of distribution. (WSJ article here)

I don’t have many direct quotes from the speech, but the gist of it is this: A lot of people are worried that distributors are going to be falling on some hard times, and so they have to look at changing their models to cut costs and increase efficiency to keep up with the changing economy, even to the point of collaborating with your competitors to share delivery vehicles, personnel, and warehouse space.

Even while distributors are a federally mandated part of the three-tier system, and a good chunk of them maintain regional dominance through less than scrupulous business practices, there’s danger in the future for them. Some retailers, especially big-box retailers like CostCo, are pushing to bypass the middleman and buy directly from the brewery.

But! (I hear you say…) how could that be bad? Well, for big box retailers it’s not bad at all, they essentially have their own built-in distribution networks. For the small retailer and the small brewery, this represents a lot more work in terms of negotiating contracts, deliveries, displays, etc., especially as distributors lose business out of their large accounts and no longer have the capital to be able to support small specialty products that won’t be immediate profit vehicles for them like, for instance, craft beer.

Let’s go back through the short history of distribution companies in the 20th Century to see how much things have changed.

When the three-tier system was implemented after Prohibition, there were something along the lines of 40 – 70 breweries nationwide with a couple of giants in the mix. Regional distributors distributed regional beers and everything worked like it was envisioned and that was fine. The whole point of the three-tier system was to protect the consumer by keeping competition in the retail market. Prior to Prohibition, breweries often outright owned saloons and, thus, could control distribution through retail outlets, price fixing against competitors, or not carrying their products altogether.

As the number of breweries dwindled and the number of distributors increased things started to get a little bit wonky. You start to see megabrewery sponsored distribution who, again, are attempting to control distribution channels in order to attempt to smother their competition – this time in the form of other distributors. It probably wasn’t that bad in the 70′s and 80′s when there were only a handful of breweries in operation, so long as everybody was playing the same game.

The past 30 years, however, have seen the rise of roughly 1500 minuscule (by comparison) new breweries and all of a sudden we’re in an entirely different market again. Now, with scads of these small breweries, distributors are more necessary than ever to get beer to market. Plain and simple, a small startup business (with comparatively expensive startup costs), does not have the resources to compete in a distribution market. Certainly, they can self-distribute in a small geographic area, but at a certain point it is not cost effective and they must rely on a distributor to sell and distribute their beer.

So, if you’ve got mega-retailers that are attempting to bypass distribution networks, all of a sudden things get really difficult for the craft brewer, again. Why? Because distributors will suffer. If distributors suffer, small craft breweries suffer. It’s an easy equation.

Enter, Jim Koch.

Koch recognizes that that future of craft beer (even – and maybe especially – his) lies in efficient distribution and that craft breweries do not have the power to create said distribution on their own. We see more and more pressure from mega-retailers to cut the middleman out, coupled with the ever-increasing cost of fuel, refrigeration, and even warehouse space. Eventually, distribution is going to take a major hit and craft breweries are going to feel it more than most.

It’s going to take a lot of work to get to a more efficient model. We’re stuck in a 20th Century model of sales and delivery distribution networks and change is difficult on a corporate level. Koch suggested it was a 10-year-plan, and he noted that it would require some contract changes with the Big 2 – which may not necessarily be in their immediate interests in terms of distribution.

If distributors can get behind the idea (and they should, even though it seems a little radical up front), it could be a great day for craft beer.

Shocking, I know, but here’s the confession: Sometimes, when I’m at the beer store, I actively seek out imported beer.

I’m a little embarrassed about this to be quite honest. I really want to support the American craft beer industry, and especially my local breweries, but I often feel like my hand is being forced.

Okay. I can’t really make any apologies about my Belgians. I’m a lambic junkie. When I see lambic for sale, I have a hard time staying my hand, especially for an aged bottle of Cantillon, Oud Beersel, or, really, anything that Frank Boon produces.. There’s just not a good selection of American-made lambics (yet), and actually zero American-made lambic available on the shelves in North Carolina.

But I consistently find myself surreptitiously bringing home Scottish ales, English ales, milds, bitters, porters and even the occasional imported IPA. Twisted Thistle? Yes, please. Fuller’s London Porter? Any day of the week. Adnams Bitter? Load me up. Black Douglas? Every time I see it on the shelf.

But why? Why do I do it?

Because I can’t find a comparable American beer.

(insert stunned silence here)

I don’t know what your bottle shop looks like, but mine looks largely like a showcase sponsored by the hop grower’s association. For whatever reason that I’m not sure I understand, every damn thing in the store – seasonals aside – is loaded with hops.

I like hops. I do! IPA has a constant presence in my house. But sometimes, I want something different. Sometimes, I want a porter, or a stout, or a bitter, or a mild, or anything that isn’t sticky with hops. But wait! You notice I listed an IPA up there? Yeah! A British IPA, which gives me what I love most in an IPA: balance!

Hey, look. I get it. We’re Americans. Not only do we think we have to do everything bigger and better, but as craft brewers we’re trying to forge our own path away from the macrobrews and, really, every established style in the world pretty much ever. And that’s great! There’s a time and a place for a Double IPA. They are tasty beers. But that time and a place for a Double IPA is not every single time I pick up a beer. Sometimes, I want something else – some variety to take me away from the hops, and I have a hard time finding that on the shelves of my bottle shop in the form of an American Craft Beer.

To be fair – maybe all of this is a local distributor issue. Maybe the local craft beer reps are hopheads. That’s fair. I respect that. If that’s the case, I appreciate that they’re putting what they like on the shelves. Now if they could put more than that on the shelves, it’d be awesome.

But maybe, just maybe, when a lot of people think outside the box in the same way, the box just changes.

I’m not saying stop. By all means, forging our own way forward into new style territory is awesome (and, I might argue, constantly necessary – when we stop creating we die), and I want to continue to see it happen. But remember! Variety is the spice of life. If everybody is pushing the envelope by dumping in as many hops as possible, then.. well.. it’s all pretty similar, isn’t it? For variety, we have to move… what.. inside the box and not push the envelope? It seems counter-intuitive somehow.

A few months back, my Zymurgy had a listing of “The Best Beers in the Country” as voted by the readers or.. something. I don’t remember the methods, I remember the lists. The best beers were all IPAs and Double IPAs, etc. Pliny the Elder, Arrogant Bastard, 90-Minute IPA, and on and on. All awesome beers. The only non-IPA at the top was Old Rasputin, I think. The top 10 import list? (Not all of them, not in order, from memory): Guinness, Young’s Double Chocolate Stout, Unibroue La Fin Du Monde, Chimay Grande Reserve; not a beer with hop character among them. It tells me that I’m not alone.

So, when you get a bunch of beer sales statistics together, it’s invariably noted that imports, while losing ground lately (probably due to cost), are still a large portion of U.S. beer sales. And I know why. Bud Light Lime counts as an import. Because sometimes, that’s the only way you can get what seems like a basic beer style. It makes me sad, but until I can find something comparable on the shelves (or have my own brewery where I can think inside the box like a REBEL) I will continue to support the breweries that give me the variety that I’m looking for, even if they happen to be overseas.

Oh, man. Is it rant time, already?

I went beer shopping this weekend; I watch a lot of tap lists in my local area. It’s clear. Fall seasonals are out, the best and worst time of the year, but also: rant time. I’m sure that at this point my friends will expect me to go on my usual Reinheitsgebot rant, but I’m not going to (no, I’m saving that for the beginning of Oktoberfest). No, this is reserved especially for fall seasonals. Why?

I think I’m the only person in the world that really -and I mean intensely – dislikes pumpkin beer. It’s an aberration. For one thing, I believe that I correctly assume that many pumpkin beers don’t actually include pumpkin, but pumpkin pie spices. In my world, pumpkin pie spices belong in one place: pumpkin pie. The flavor of solo pumpkin isn’t all that great. That’s why they load it with spices.

Not to say I don’t like pumpkin pie – I do – but I really like beer, and frankly I’d like my beer to taste like beer, not like allspice and cinnamon. The only thing I can think about is how, in the world-before-refrigeration, they used to spice the crap out of their meat so that they couldn’t taste the fact that it was rotting. Maybe it’s my over-active imagination, but you give me allspice, cinammon, and nutmeg in something that’s not pumpkin pie and I think rotting meat. So thank you, the overactive marketing machine of America, you’ve given me two months full of rotten-meat flavored beer. Awesome. That’s so great. I especially love that it’s on the shelves now, well before pumpkins are in season 90% of the country. You know that pumpkin’s got to be fresh.

Thank god there’s Oktoberfest to offset it.

Oktoberfest! That crisp, malty, lovely lager! It evokes cool fall days, the smell of fallen leaves, and chapped lederhosen! Oktoberfest! What are you doing on the shelves of my store in mid-August, a full month before Oktoberfest even begins? (Sept. 19th – Oct 4th this year. Note: it starts three days before the first day of fall, which is about when I’d expect my seasonals.) This is like how you can go into Wal-Mart on October 30th to buy Christmas decorations.

Come on, guys. Let’s not fall (a-har-har) into this trap. I know you want to be the first seasonal on the market and all, but this is a little ridiculous. When did you make this stuff? And how long is it going to sit around before being consumed by customers? How fresh can it be if it’s been sitting in my retailer for a month and a half? When did it get to the wholesaler? Yikes!

I know that seasonals, and especially fall and winter seasonals are big sellers, but bringing them out earlier and earlier really defeats the purpose of it being a seasonal. They’re working their way to being out-of-seasonals.

Here’s a challenge: Instead of pulling out the fall seasonals in the summer so that you’re the first one on the market and can have your beer sitting around on the shelves forever and ever, why not make a Late Summer Seasonal? Nobody ever said that your seasonals had to correspond exactly with The Four Seasons, but having them match the season (like a beer-food pairing) would, I think, be preferable.

Maybe I’m just a relentless advocate for small-batch brewing, but it seems to me that agility in the marketplace, to more accurately respond to consumer demand – especially when we’re talking about something like a seasonal purchase – is going to be much more important than “I got my beer there first.” It might be first out, but if I buy an Oktoberfest that’s been sitting in a retailer’s hot warehouse for 2 months and it tastes like ass, you can sure bet that I won’t be buying that one again.