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Comment by PatientTrades | Hacker News Reader

If the beer taste great and is inexpensive I don't see how anybody can have a problem with that.

Some care about where it's made, how it's made, who made it

The beer that "tastes great" and is also "inexpensive" usually cuts corners in one of the above areas

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.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-a-b-i-craftbeers-probe-ex...

I'm sorry but if your beer has rice in it its not beer.

Admittedly, I spent a while in Germany and really learned to appreciate quality beer there, especially the purity laws.

Would the proper category then for Bud be some type of "lesser" sake then?

That's why Asian beer taste so crisp!

German purity laws are great but too narrow, there's good beer made from rice

The purity laws that never mentioned yeast as one of the possible ingredients? They have their own issues.

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.

There's plenty of shitty beer in Germany too (at least according to the German hipsters in my friends list)

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.

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.

> FWIW the three tier system is dumb and should go away. But removing it doesn’t automatically level the playing field.

I didn't mean to imply that it would. Laws regarding the distribution of alcohol are just a small piece of the puzzle.

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 problem with anticompetitive practices from ABI

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