My sense is that they're scammers and bottom-feeders, like the people who advertise on daytime television and XM radio. They have very little of value to offer, but are masters at skimming pennies off of their scams.
Is the implication here that after buying a mattress from Casper you don’t actually get a mattress? I’ve never tried to buy one, and I didn’t realize it was a scam.
People also love their Leesa mattresses and their Tuft & Needle mattresses and their Purple mattresses and their Ghostbed mattresses, and so on.
Online memory foam mattresses have become a bit of a commodity and the biggest distinguishing factor between them appears to be the marketing (and legal) budget.
As somebody having moved to the US a month ago : some of your industries like mattress sound a lot like gigantic scams.
I did not want to pay 2k$ for a good mattress because it is just a stupid rectangle of foam. Each time I read about how they have nasa engineers in their teams to help them innovate on 'mattress technology' I choke up a little. How can somebody write that with a straight face ?
I ended up buying one on amazon (a Zinus if anybody is interested, heard about it in another HN thread)
As a natural born American, some of our industries confuse the hell out of me. Why are used car dealerships so scummy? Why are there (overpriced) mattress stores on every corner? Why do we sell prescription drugs on TV?
Mattresses truly are a weird one though. You can see how overpriced they are by the mere existence of these massive stores with allegedly-valuable inventory, that are always empty, because people don't need new mattresses that often!
Of course, they're ridiculously overpriced so you can get great "deals" on them as they're always running tax-free sales, etc.
Thankfully when my wife and I went to try out mattresses for our fancy new big wood bedframe, in the process of trying everything from $600 up to $3000+ (california king size pricing), she declared the cheapest one her favorite, and that was that!
Used car dealerships are scummy because 1) the quality of the product is much better known to the seller than to the buyer, and 2) people make few enough purchases that repeat clientele is not that valuable.
Memory foam was developed by NASA’s Ames Research Facilty in the 60s[1]. Great for marketing but not worth it IMHO. Not all mattresses are boxes of foam. Box spring mattresses are not like the foams ones you order online that expand when opened.
I didn't check the others but Casper and Leeza are twice the cost as a Tuft and Needle now. It's interesting to see how much they're raising prices with so many competitors and little to no differentiation. It must mean if you walk into a mattress store, you're paying well over the $1k.
Zinus' claim to fame: replace your mattress at least once more for the same total price. Based on the anecdata I was terrified it would attack me! (Verdict: a bit more firm that I prefer, but still an improvement on ancient of days.)
Your Casper matrress that they paid a Chinese outsourcing company to make and paid less then $100 for one mattress. While you paid $500 or more for it. Yet you could have gone to AliExpress and bought the same none branded mattress for $100.
Also and hmmm does a hacker newser really love their Casper or do they work for them? Casper obviously trolls the Internet for the better of themselves!
"Yet you could have gone to AliExpress and bought the same none branded mattress for $100."
You proved the statement to be false. Not to mention, what you have posted are coil mattresses. Companies like Casper and Tuft mark-up quite a bit if AliExpress is "warehouse" pricing, but it's really not outrageous.
My Casper mattress started out relatively firm but over the course of a year or so became pretty mushy. It significantly impacted my sleep (without me realizing it) during a period of my life where I really would have benefited from quality sleep.
I'm replacing it with a mattress from an old-school company as soon as I can. I've been sleeping on the floor in the meantime.
Consolidation in the beer market bothers me less than it does my beer nerd friends. Many of the best-known, most-loved independent breweries run into major quality problems trying to scale up their output. ABI probably has advantages in regulating quality. Breweries that don't want to scale are unlikely to sell in the first place.
The whiskey market is almost entirely consolidated; you have to go out of your way to find quality products that aren't traceable to large concerns, despite a proliferation of brands. But we're in a 2-decade renaissance in whiskey quality (despite the No Age Statement movement!) and availability. The median big-brand whiskey is overwhelmingly more likely to be good than the median independent whiskey.
The barriers to entry for beer are far, far lower than for whiskey. We're not going to run out of microbreweries, or of interesting new beers. Why are beer nerds so freaked out about this?
(I have nothing useful to say about beer rating sites, which I think are pretty sketchy to begin with.)
The problem with beer consolidation is what "regulating quality" at scale entails. Consistent quality in gigantic batches often translates to lower quality beer than pre-acquisition. Maybe it's just not possible to scale every recipe to nationwide distribution, but if that's the case it still means a small brewery's acquisition and subsequent scaling to national levels generally means the taste you were used to is gone for good.
Case in point, Magic Hat. The beers are entirely different since acquisition by NAB, and terrible. There are nationally available independent breweries that make quality beer - Oskar Blues comes to mind. They scaled without selling, and I have no doubt NAB or ABI would have absolutely destroyed the recipes in their own scaling process.
Another acquisition model is what Goose Island did when they sold to ABI. As I understand it, they outsourced production of their less differentiated offerings like Honkers Ale and 312, but continue to run their brewpub and make their Bourbon County Stout and Belgian beers like Matilda and Sofie. You see this in some other industries, where a company will spin off or sell businesses that aren't its "secret sauce".
The brewpub was not part of the sale - ABI couldn't legally own a brewpub.
There remains a mostly-independent, somewhat expanded brewing operation in Chicago. They've experienced quite a bit of turnover since the buyout, with many of the experienced brewers going on to start their own breweries.
But a case in the other direction is Three Floyds, which is independent but scaling and suffering major quality problems.
You can lament your favorite beers attempting to scale production at all, and that's an understandable feeling to have, but it's ultimately no more reasonable a demand than that your favorite band continue playing your favorite tiny local club.
The sibling commenter here said something I believe as well, which is that in the US market at least, every acquisition is just going to make room for a new independent.
This is true, but separate from the real problem at hand. I can't lament the general natural patterns of new markets maturing, but I can lament ABI being the one to buy these breweries when they're trying to cover for the dramatic quality loss by buying review websites.
I remember years ago when I was living in Boston; many of my colleagues were brewing their own beer and were among the biggest "beer snobs" I've ever met. Every one of them, without fail would say about Anheuser-Busch (colloquially, "Budweiser") that the consistency of their product was absolutely astounding. While they may personally feel that it's a bad product, the fact that it is always consistent is a feat not to be ignored.
It's not easy. A local brewery couldn't produce for a year while they moved facilities. They did contract brewing in another state and were constantly testing the water here, sending equipment to condition the water in the other state, flying brewers back and forth, and it NEVER tasted anywhere near right no matter how many times they tried. While I love craft beer, I admit I don't have the most sophisticated palette, but it was immediately obvious when I tasted different samples of what was allegedly the same beer. My tastings started when I asked, unprompted, "Hey, why does <beer> taste so weird today?"
This is why I judge brewers on the quality of their lighter beers while being a fan of heavier stuff. If you can't get a Kölsch right I don'twant your Tripel or IPA.
The UK was an example of consolidation resulting in terrible quality and limited choice. The "CAMRA" (CAMpaign for Real Ale) group is a result of push-back against this, and has been very successful: http://www.camra.org.uk/key-events-in-camra-s-history
The US is nowhere near the same setup, though, so it's doubtful it would end up quite as bad. For beer at least, every time there's a consolidation, there's an opportunity for a new player to enter the market they just left behind.
I think the hate comes from some shady stuff the big brewers have historically done to push out smaller brewers, limiting tap and shelf space for craft, sponsoring laws that reduce ways that beer can be sold direct from the breweries or adding fees that hurt small players
Consistently, my experience with market consolidation has been lower quality products for more money so I can susidize the wealth of merger consultants.
If consolidation has such a prior, why would I expect beer consolidation to end differently?
Similarly, I disagree about whiskey: distilleries from my state consistently provide a better and cheaper product than large firms, and are basically dead to me when they sell these days, after a few bad experiences.
Name the distilleries you like. Let's see if they even sell their own whiskey, rather than MGPI. There are very few independent "distilleries" selling real product, and the ones that do are pretty notable, and open about their limitations.
Reliably making Very Old Barton or Old Forester or Four Roses is extremely difficult.
OOLA is the only one that springs to mind -- but I could be mistaken, I'm partly relying on their marketing. (Which I mention in hopes you will correct me if I am.)
Edit:
Dry Fly used to be smaller and ship some of their stuff from the other side of the state over, so I also count them. Again, please correct me if I'm wrong!
Dry Fly's "Process" page, by the way, has the hallmarks of a distiller that actually distills their product; they're way too specific and making way too many falsifiable claims for it to be rational for them to lie. They even call out the process of augmenting a distiller's own make with NDP product.
That's respectable! It's neat that companies like these exist and I'm happy they do.
But that doesn't make their products better than Four Roses or Woodford Reserve. They almost certainly aren't. The major whiskey distilleries have huge advantages accruing to quality that small distillers don't.
Even simple stuff like volume works in their favor. Sazerac did an experiment where they the same product in 5, 10, 15, and the standard 53 gallon barrels. Indie distillers use smaller barrels both because it suits their production needs and because it "accelerates" aging, ostensibly due to the different surface area to volume ratio. The smaller barrels produce off flavors (presumably, they're extracting more and different chemicals from the wood in the same aging time).
You can do a bunch of things to counteract this, just like you can do a bunch of things to mitigate the fact that new distillers by necessity have to sell young whiskey (and probably will long after their first barrels hit a reasonably full maturation, because they're learning as they go, and each learning cycle costs them another several years!). But all those things impact quality and flavor and consistency.
Dry Fly's going to charge you between 35 and 75 dollars for a bottle of whiskey. Not only is Dry Fly not the best whiskey you can buy for $35, but there are better whiskies at that price point in big city supermarkets. At $75, Dry Fly is competing with Buffalo Antiques (at least their list prices). Come on.
I mostly just want to thank you for a detailed reply -- you clearly know more about this than I do and I've learned a bit.
In the interest of science, do you have some $35 bottles you'd recommend as better? It seems more productive to get a suggestion and try it than argue all night. (:
People seem to like them. But OOLA is mostly a clear spirit distiller. Keep in mind that it is way easier to distill vodka, gin, and rum than it is to start up and reliably produce whiskey. When you read OOLA's material, note that they are super specific about the grain and process they use for their vodka, but not as much for Waitsburg Bourbon.
The way they market, my guess is that they distill their own whiskey? Note that there are distillers that distill some whiskey, but then round out the supply with MGPI whiskey, which would allow them to talk about locally sourcing corn and barley while still relying on someone else's product.
That said, I don't know them well, and maybe they're like Few Spirits, a local distillery in Chicago that got started selling vodka and gin and gradually expanded into doing a whiskey. Few is not bad. I like Few. But I don't think a lot of people drink Few and tell themselves, "I'm drinking this because it is categorically better than Buffalo Trace".
Copperworks in Seattle is complete end-to-end whiskey. They brew their own wash (the co-owner Jason Parker was the first brewer at Pike in the late 80s/early 90s), distill and age everything in-house. It's all their product.
I really like Copperworks & think their stuff is super interesting but you are paying a huuuuge premium over equivalently aged whiskeys and I don’t think you are getting better quality.
You are getting novelty which is a fine thing to pay for, but it’s not the same as quality.
Oola sources “some” of there blend. They are at least upfront that they do it if not how much.
[edit] just looked at a newer bottle & they’ve removed the sourcing statement from the older bottles I remember. Either they don’t source or they no longer admit it. Bottle also doesn’t use any of the protected phrases I know of so could be anything.
The whiskey consolidation isn't really comparable. Most of the holding companies are just that, and have gone out of their way to not disturb the quality distilleries keep. They can even be keen to spend on improving it. Whiskey is a luxury market in that regard.
That has not been the case with brewery consolidation, which has mostly aimed to cheapen production. The reactions from enthusiasts reflects that.
But it's a direct reaction to the market. Whisky (and whiskey, but IMO, to a lesser extent) is a luxury market because people are willing to pay for the quality. I'm confident that if people would be equally willing for craft beer quality, these companies would behave similarly, too.
there's a booming market for sour beers, which typically sell for $20-30/750ml, and terroir is a major factor. ABInBev has resisted going after those breweries because they're very difficult to scale and risk is very high. Goose Island's sour program was essentially defunct for several years at one point.
Wine is the more apt comparison, since sour beer and wine operate on similar time scales.
I think some of the concern isn't so much over quality but diversity. Beer nerds almost necessarily like their beer esoteric, if not downright unpopular. If I really like a beer but know it doesn't have much of a market, I'd be worried if its producer got bought by someone who had a history of ramping up popular labels and killing off rarer, harder-to-market ones. Maybe when grocery stores had to go to micros to get enough fancy beer in their aisle they'd end up getting a Saison or two; now when they can just go to macro brewers they'll get a few IPAs and consider the aisle fancy enough.
I don't know much of a market is there is now or ever was for esoteric whiskey.
Another reason to be so proud of one of my city's best breweries, Modern Times. Totally employee owned and growing like gangbusters. I admire Jacob and the whole team there for being the Fugazi of beer.
They seem like very different markets to me. Beers are usually brewed, start to finish, in about a week. They also don't have a very long shelf life--they get skunky if they're not stored well or wait too long. I also think beer is mostly a lower-end product which deals in single-servings versus whiskey being an exclusively luxury good.
I think the beer nerds also just hate to see breweries they like bought up by big companies that, in general, ruin the product.
Scotch is dramatically consolidated. There are only a handful of independents left & most of those use consolidated malters and source materials providers.
The beer industry is taking their queue from the scotch industry in this. Consolidate but keep the small brands.
Sure, in name only. Laphroaig for example was purchased by Jim Bean (I think, or the company that owns Jim bean). The only real change was that they started using Jim Bean barells as part of their maturing process, which I have to say adds a nice flavour.
It's not as if they decided to scrap 300 years of tradition and start spewing out cheap brew under different names because their corporate overlords decreed it.
I'm not sure about the handful number, have you got a source for this? I visited Islay recently and there are at least 7 or 8 independent distillers there.
Yeah, a lot do use the consolidated maltings, but that's because there is not a discernable loss in quality. Malting by hand takes ages and ages. Islay distillers still use local peat though.
The scotch industry consolidation wasn’t about shuttering dustilleries & neither does the beer industry’s need be. Just like the scotch market apply economies of scale to purchasing, supply chain, distribution chain & marketing needn’t mean a loss of quality at the production facility.
I do worry that it will lead to too much uniformity. But that uniformity is usually in the form of improved consistency. You don’t get the really interesting stuff but you also don’t have to taste dozens of bad options to find it either.
I agree here - and many of my beer nerd friends religiously use this app to rate every beer they drink (Untappd I think its called?). Which I believe is free.
So if said beer nerd had an issue with the big corps buying up ratings... perhaps paying for apps or donating in some way is what one ought to do.
Given the remarkably shady business practices of the entrenched players (past and present), I don't consider this relentless consolidation to be desirable. Additionally, in other markets where such consolidation has happened, it has historically not been beneficial for consumers (internet access, cell providers, etc).
I primarily interact with this market via the grocery store, not the bar tap, but I find this app [0] to be useful in that context. It makes it relatively painless to leverage my (minuscule) purchasing power to support small businesses, and reject these kinds of intentionally-obscured corporate maneuvers.
If you don't want the barcode scanning feature, and just want to type in a name and see who owns it, why can't this be a plain old website? Or to say it another way, is there a web-based interface that does the same thing?
Wikipedia seems to work well for this. For the few breweries I looked up Wikipedia it has a box at the top with a summary of info which includes "Owner" or "Parent" or "Manufacturer".
For Lagunitas you get:Heineken International
For Blue Moon you get:MillerCoors
For Anchor Steam you get:Sapporo Holdings
The Brewers Association recently put out a new label insignia that independent craft breweries could use, to signify they're actually an independent operation.
I can see why they do it; my grocery store recently saw a huge influx of new craft brands in the refrigerated section and it turned out that _all_ of them were A-B products.
A-B had a bunch of the former owners/brewmasters release a series of video interviews to dump on the idea.
The video ends with the founder of Elysian saying to be truly independent and "punk" would be to do your own thing and not use the BA's logo. It's sort of funny in the face of Elysian scrubbing their website of mentions of their "Loser Pale Ale," a collab with Sub Pop Records.
The label proudly declared, "corporate beer still sucks."
I don't really understand their interest in RateBeer, RateBeer really does not seem that relevant today. 10 years ago it was very important in the craft beer scene. Now it seems like a dying community.
In terms of reviewing beers, most people have moved to using an app like Untappd. BeerAdvocate, another forum/beer rating site seems to have a more active userbase, but even that is becoming less relevant today as people move away from forum communities.
Is that data on RateBeer of use to them? Are they planning on pouring money into it to position it as a competitor to Untappd? I'm not sure what the goal is. If the fear is they will secretly skew review scores to favor their product lines, that seems hardly worth the effort, as I don't think enough people use the site to drive purchasing decisions to make a meaningful impact.
I think people need to be aware of which beer publications ZX Ventures owns, or owns a stake in, as that will help you identify marketing fluff pieces vs real reporting. The fact that they go to some effort to hide their ownership of several brands they have acquired is concerning to me, but I also understand it is not in their interest to promote that fact. Many people unknowingly buy ABI products without having any idea the beer they are buying isn't in fact locally owned.
Same. As a whole, the American craft beer drinkers are obsessed with really hoppy beers, which I hate. So the ratings are completely useless, because a beer I hate will be like a 4.5 while a beer I love will be a 3.3.
There's definitely an opportunity here for a better beer rating system. Get some equipment to analyze the chemical compounds of beers, automatically classify them and use it to recommend beers based on your personal flavor preferences.
Check out beergraphs.com, it has lots of different normalization lenses that might get you what you want. Founded by some baseball stathead writers, so takes a lot of the same approaches to data.
> As a whole, the American craft beer drinkers are obsessed with really hoppy beers, which I hate.
In standard American fashion, we are bad at subtlety. You want hops, we will make beer that tastes like you're chewing on raw hops. You want alcohol, the beer will taste like whiskey. While there are some exceptions (like Dogfish Head 90 minute IPA), this is the standard formula for American craft beers.
The Belgians on the other hand can really 'craft' beer.
Expressing a beer rating as an average has always seemed problematic to me because different folks' tastes in beer vary so much.
I'd rather have an app that looked at what I've highly rated and either paired me with users who highly rate similar beers, or just recommended beers those folks also rate highly that I haven't tried.
In practice, I just have a few friends that I know have similar beer tastes as me that I regularly swap recommendations with.
I use Untapped to keep track of what I liked, so when I'm buying it next time or in the store I can remember. All of the ratings consolidate around 3.5 or 4 anyway since people have different taste in beers (hoppy/creamy/fruity/etc).
One of the other issues that I've seen with Untappd and many of the other beer rating companies is that their ratings systems are heavily biased by the nature of their users and/or weird algorithmic quirks. I believe that this has caused some beer rating services to become fairly disconnected from reality: For example, the first 4 beers on Untappd's top beers list are discontinued Goose Island beers, and 7 of the top 10 are from the same two breweries (see https://untappd.com/beer/top_rated).
Disclaimer – I'm pretty biased in this assessment (helped build BrewGene, which provides a similar beer rating + recommendation service). Here's our top 5 for context:
* Trappist 12
* Heady Topper
* Pliny the Elder
* Sip of Sunshine
* Pliny the Younger
Is it crazy my first thought is I wonder if I could make a beer website real fast and try and sell it to em. Prob would have to sockpuppet the traffic but nooo nobody in SV does that its immoral!/s
> Q. ZX Ventures, which is wholly owned by AB InBev, is an investor in RateBeer. What are you doing to ensure ratings remain fair and independent?
> Answer
> RateBeer is an independent and unbiased community managed by Joseph Tucker. We understand your concern and have developed quality protections to maintain our position as the most authoritative reference in beer. Among these are:
> 1) RateBeer's reviews are crowd-sourced and not editorial content and as such are beyond simple influence by the site's managers and employees
> 2) RateBeer offer a transparency measure in the form of an API through which other brewers, industry watchers and journalists can easily view and vet changes in scores
> 3) RateBeer has existing policies against affiliated users adding reviews of their own or competitor products
> 4) RateBeer is developing a system by which any user can indicate association with the industry as a means to void all of their reviews for score calculation, and public viewing, but be able to store them for personal use
A reviewer that represents themself as impartial, but is partially owned by a company whose products it's reviewing, is committing fraud. The only way to make it not-fraud is to put up disclaimers large enough that people will treat it like an advertising brochure.
Typically avoid beer purchased/ran by the big guys although beautiful businesses. How great to be in the reorder business at-scale.
My knowledge comes from winemaking, but generally, the larger the volume the less ingredients matter. Obviously still palatable, but in comparison, those details really matter when you're a rising operation. A brand and/or breweries reputation is on the line if they are off with their production process. At scale, they can be off or less perfect but will add extra ingredients to curb the errors.
The pattern is to buy a brand that has developed an image and gradually lower quality bleeding everything from the reputation until it's meaningless. It's slash and burn economics.
The craft beer market has been dead to me for a long time.
That's not to say that there aren't still a number of very good beers and breweries out there that I enjoy, but to say that the market is saturated. It's clear that many newer breweries spend more time on their label designs than they do on their beers, and trying to find the good ones has become tiring.. so I stick to what I know these days.
In Minneapolis there are too many microbreweries. I say this because more than half of them produce tooth looseningly bad beer. Or the beer actually makes me feel ill after I drink it. I've all but stopped drinking beer completely.
Having said that, the bigger microbreweries now resemble AIB so closely they're not really microbreweries anymore. They have become what they were reacting to.
To be completely honest as someone who loves craft beer, homebrews, and hopes to open up a brewery of my own one day, ABInbev is a brewery operations wonder of the world. Yes, they use a ton of rice as one of their fermentables which cuts down on calories, alcohol, body, etc., but that's sort of what the american light lager has evolved into anyway. The real amazing thing about ABInbev is how they have production breweries across the world making the same beers and no matter where you are they taste exactly the same. They sell in the hundreds of millions of barrels annually while the best small breweries that have recently expanded rapidly and are battling with quality control (Trillium and Tree House are the 2 that come to mind) still only sell tens of thousands of barrels annually.
Beer aside, ABInbev is the definition of an evil company. The beer industry is known for being a community more than a competitive industry. Craft breweries collaborate with their "competitors" all the time. Even in close quarters such as Brooklyn/Queens, Other Half, Interboro, Transmitter, LIC Beer Project, Threes, Grimm, and Evil Twin are collaborating on beers with each other every other month or so. It's one of the reasons why I love the industry so much. ABInbev does pretty much the opposite. Sure, Goose Island still collaborates with breweries as a subsidy of ABInbev, but as a company ABInbev offers incentives to bars/bottle shops/wholesalers/distributors that require them to only carry ABInbev owned products or a certain percent of their products.
For example [1]:
> Under the new incentive plan, AB InBev refunds 75 percent of this money if its beers make up 98 percent of the distributor’s sales, according to documents provided to lawmakers by AB InBev.
Even with these incentives, craft beer is slowly taking market share away from ABInbev and they're are starting to feel it (although they still have something like a 40% market share so it's not that huge of a blow). I can't speak for other beer conglomerates (SABMillerCoors, Heineken, etc.) and if they try and give similar incentives, but I know for a fact that ABInbev is trying to kill any competition in an industry where everyone is rooting for their "competitors" to succeed.
The Reinheitsgebot is no longer in effect. Using rice as a fermentable in your beer doesn't make it any less beer than adding adjuncts like chocolate, coffee, fruit, vegetables, etc. While I can certainly appreciate the history of beer in Germany and the rest of Europe, there's a reason why there a bunch of breweries in Europe that are trying to emulate new styles that American breweries are creating. And most of them involve adding adjuncts. Milkshake IPAs include lactose and usually some sort of fruit. NE IPAs involve using flaked wheat or oats as a large percentage of the mash.
Yea, it's funny how they had to add yeast after they realized it was the reason why beer is beer. But I agree that barley, water, hops, and yeast are the ingredients needed to be called a beer, but beer wouldn't be as great if brewers weren't allowed to experiment with a bunch of different adjuncts.
The big alcohol companies force distbutors to carry certain products, or even not carry comepetitors products.
An example: you want to keep selling a macro like Bud or scopes that makes up 40% of your revenue ? Drop that local brewery, we have a “craft” IPA to sub out.
They get the revenue the same, you get the illusion of choice, and the new company gets to pound sand.
Many states have laws forcing producers of alcoholic beverages to use distributors in the first place. It's state law that creates the bottleneck which allows the big players to monopolize the market in the first place.
This would be a problem even with direct distribution. Just replace distributor with retailer.
Here in Kentucky, AB Inbev owned a distributor and was quietly playing these games. After some shenanigans, KY adjusted the three tier rules to prevent breweries owning distributors, even if they’re from out of state.
FWIW the three tier system is dumb and should go away. But removing it doesn’t automatically level the playing field.
> This would be a problem even with direct distribution. Just replace distributor with retailer.
This is false. Breweries that make great beer have no problem selling out of their beer when they only sell packaged beer at the brewery. Examples include Tree House, Trillium, Hill Farmstead, Other Half, LIC Beer Project, Interboro, Night Shift (who actually own a distribution company now, but they sell out of new releases at the brewery within a day or 2), Monkish, Cellarmaker, the Veil, and many more in pretty much any major city that you can think of. Hell, Boston and New York have a half dozen each and new breweries are still popping up that are selling out of beer without distributing.
I agree that the 3 tier system is stupid, but breweries have proven over the past decade that they can scale up to 10k+ barrels per year without distributing a single thing.
Sorry I wasn’t clear, only talking about retail distribution, not direct package sales.
No question plenty of breweries have found a way to be successful outside of normal retail. But they should be able to distribute, without large multinationals strong arming retailers in to not carrying competitors products.
Absolutely agree that many breweries have been successful not distributing
No worries, I wasn't sure if that's what you might have meant. Night Shift near Boston actually started their own distribution company which has helped a ton of local breweries get their beer out of saturated areas and into new markets where they might do better. Right now it's mostly them distributing New England beer to Chicago and a few other areas in the NE and then picking up beer from Pipeworks in Chicago and bringing it back to distribute up here.
The free market has an assumption on equal information between agents in the system. If a company is buying up the sources of information on it's product that usually leads to a massive information imbalance
I have a hard time getting worked up over these acquisitions. If the beer is still good, who cares? If you're really upset about it, there are still literally thousands of other craft breweries to choose from.
Nice sentiment, but it's a bit unnerving to see an industry consolidating like this while ALSO buying out sites that review the beer. Having few large, central corporations control both the market and the medium by which the products are reviewed is not a good thing.
I guess the tricky thing would be measuring what they do the site. If they take it down or delete negative reviews, etc, that would be some questionable behavior. If they use it to gain honest feedback and funnel it into development channels of some kind that could prove interesting. Overall seems like a conflict of interest.
I wonder how much appetite they'd have to buy up the next review site that pops up and catches on. Sort of like review site whak-a-mole. It would be very disconcerting to say the least if a company went out and bought up all new and fledgling review sites of interest to them.
that's true, but I'm thinking they'd bake in some in-house custom API for organizing it all and rendering it into some sort of data analytics repo. I guess this could be accomplished too via the public interface and just work around things indirectly.
What people don't like are the bad business practices, like buying up review sites (can anyone spell "conflict of interest"), locking in alcohol distributors to certain brands, etc. They're limiting consumer choice, locking out competitors and potentially misleading consumers.
I'll agree with you, if it tastes good it tastes good. McDonald's also still tastes good to me, but I abhor their business practices so I avoid eating there.
A lot of economists like to cite this model of a "rational agent," but consumers have more dimensions than just price and quality, increasingly they also see ethics as either a part of quality, or an additional dimension, when judging which product they should buy.
When restaurants and bars use an AB InBev-owned distributor and thus are restricted to only having AB InBev brands on tap, I lose the choice to drink one of those thousands of other beers when I'm there. Not going to a concert because the venue has the wrong beer distributor is not really tractable.
Yes, this was one of the thousands of other options. Emphasis on was. What guarantee do I have that once people move to another platform and start trusting it, they won't purchase that?
The beer is still good, until it isn't. As an anecdote: A Lagunitas beer [1] used to be a favorite of mine. At some point I didn't like it anymore, and stopped buying it. I didn't know they got bought by Heineken, and I don't know if the events are related, but it's possible.
Since that article is from 2010, it's worth noting that Schlitz was relaunched, probably shortly after that article came out. Mainly in tall boys, boasting the original 1960s recipe. It is what it is.
Brewing these days is uniquely local. When buying craft, you're buying not only good beer, but you're supporting your neighbors and fellow enthusiasts in the craft. When a beer gets bought by the big conglomerates, the feeling of supporting "the little guy" goes away.
I know multiple people who stopped buying Karbach beers after they got bought. Sure they'll drink it if it's free, but why support bean counters and 1%ers when you can give some money to the people doing it for love?
What if you can't taste it because your local grocery store stocks its beer selection based on what beers are the best according to the beer review site owned by ABI? It's not as simple as "just make a different choice", monopolies can exert control over the whole system the consumer lives in, not just the small decisions.
Don't be too cynical. They stock beer based on who pays them the most for shelf space, and based on what sells. You can get them to carry your dreck that nobody wants if you pay them enough, but you can't get them to not carry what people are buying.
As in, assume the review sites are compromised and ignore them, but also give money to the company that might or might not be posting biased reviews there? So you're only denying yourself the potential benefit of the review site while still giving up your money.
That was my initial though to. Here’s a good discussion from Sessionable on the subject from independent breweries perspective and their main concerns seem to be around access to taps and consumer awareness when independents get bought out.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-blogg...