Beer giant ABI bought many craft brews and is now buying beer rating websites
foodandpower.net
foodandpower.net
https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-blogg...
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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.
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)
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!
Basically, mattress stores are cheap to open and print money. This is also why there are so many nail salons
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.)
https://amzn.com/dp/B00Q7EPSHI - $261.28 for me
In practice I just opened it directly in the bedroom and it inflated in a couple of minutes.
I guess that if the wrapping bag is punctured during transport it must expand in the box and in that case put a lot on pressure on it.
Luckily it did not happen for me.
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!
A Foam Queen Mattress for $189 https://goo.gl/YLChia
King or Queen $440 and below https://goo.gl/KNGwQG
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.
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.
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.)
Distribution all the way down the chain was consolidated — i.e Pubs — and was only remedied through legislation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guest_beer
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.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/uk-pubs-clos...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Reliably making Very Old Barton or Old Forester or Four Roses is extremely difficult.
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!
[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 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".
You are getting novelty which is a fine thing to pay for, but it’s not the same as quality.
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.
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. (:
Or the Belgian aristocracy. A few "old money" families have majority control over ABI.
I don't know much of a market is there is now or ever was for esoteric whiskey.
The beer industry is taking their queue from the scotch industry in this. Consolidate but keep the small brands.
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.
That has not been the case with brewery consolidation, which has mostly aimed to cheapen production. The reactions from enthusiasts reflects that.
Wine is the more apt comparison, since sour beer and wine operate on similar time scales.
(via the way back machine since now it's paywalled(?))
https://web.archive.org/web/20150903212722/http://www.busine...
I think the beer nerds also just hate to see breweries they like bought up by big companies that, in general, ruin the product.
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.
For Lagunitas you get:Heineken International For Blue Moon you get:MillerCoors For Anchor Steam you get:Sapporo Holdings
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."
Also, what's A-B?
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.
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.
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.
Yeah they can. I think the last 3-4 six packs I've purchased were Belgian imports. They tend to have distinct flowery notes that I really enjoy.
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.
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
"Help us raise $213 billion we need to buy AB InBev"
Biggest crowdfounding ever :)
> 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
- Upton Sinclair
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.
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.
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.
The beer that "tastes great" and is also "inexpensive" usually cuts corners in one of the above areas
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.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-a-b-i-craftbeers-probe-ex...
Admittedly, I spent a while in Germany and really learned to appreciate quality beer there, especially the purity laws.
German purity laws are great but too narrow, there's good beer made from rice
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.
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 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.
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
I didn't mean to imply that it would. Laws regarding the distribution of alcohol are just a small piece of the puzzle.
However, it sure seems like an opportunity for new beer reviewing websites to pop up!
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.
Taste all of them? I'm not an alcoholic by trade man, reviews are necessary.
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?
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.
[1] Little Sumpin' Sumpin'
https://beerconnoisseur.com/articles/how-milwaukees-famous-b...