Anchor Brewing Company ends national distribution, kills Christmas Ale
sfgate.com
sfgate.com
Gigin alone at the bottom of the hill / Our protagonist named Bill / Sets his sights on an anchor steam pint / All he needs is thirteen quarters / Congregated in his hat
I swear they must have a pipe straight from the brewery for how fresh it is there.
I feel like that was a much more innocent time. Now no matter where you are, there's a pile of competing craft beers, trying to out do one another across different dimensions (though mostly hops), it's hard to keep track. At the same time, good beer seems to mean a lot less now, because of how spoiled we all are.
In places with younger craft markets, it's like an even split between hops and extreme naming/label graphics. Here in Seattle, beer names are like Obscure Mythology Reference and you might enjoy the Wikipedia hole it starts you on while you imbibe. The first craft brew I remember seeing visiting my original home state, Virginia, was literally named Raging Bitch with a fierce looking dog baring its teeth and blood-like splatters of red ink. It was actually a pretty decent stout IIRC.
As all good stouts should be, in my humble opinion!
My all time favourite beer is the BrewDog, Nogne and Mikkeller collaboration stout: the Black Tokyo Horizon. It's 17.2%!
Something like Utopias by Sam Adams is 28%, and even at that point, you drink it more like a liquor than a beer.
The highest you will see actually fermented is usually around 18-20%, but there are specialty yeasts that can get up to 25%. Then you can get even higher with extended aging in spirit barrels where some ABV is picked up by absorbing residual spirit as well as evaporation increasing the strength. Sam Adams Utopias for example comes in at 28%
The grain to strike water ratio changes so much that lautering often gets “stuck” due to the thick consistency of the grain bed.
The issue is yield and lautering. The mash is so thick, or rather there's so much of it, that proceses need to be adjusted to account for that, and from experience yields are much lower in a typical entry level craft brewing system (400L).
In the US I think it is technically illegal to make with a brewers license, though some breweries may make an Eisbock and sort of fly under the radar.
Steadman also did the art for Anthony Bourdain’s cookbook - highly recommend that though.
edit: HST’s story on the Kentucky Derby features Steadman prominently and it’s my favorite of his after/along with Fear and Loathing and Hell’s Angels. It’s probably the most gonzo of the three as well.
edit: Corrected Flying Dog from BrewDog
'BrewDog, the fast-expanding craft beer firm, has apologised to former employees who accused the company and its co-founder James Watt of fostering a “culture of fear” in which workers were bullied and “treated like objects”.' [0]
0: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/jun/10/brewdog-sta...
I agree with the parent, it's a great piece and iirc it's where Thompson and Steadman first met up. If you're looking for something interesting to read during lunch today, this is for you.
One of the people behind Liquid Death water was on NPR some weeks back, and basically their entire deal, as told by him, was just taking canned water and applying craft beer branding.
Not to knock it, evidently it worked and, as far as the product and concept, was all they needed. Just thought it was funny—yeah, why not put an edgy name and skulls all over water?
(I am kidding.)
[1]https://dg6qn11ynnp6a.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2018...
Beforehand my choices were absurdly overpriced beers, sweetened drinks, or plain water. I’m a big fan of sparkling water, so this new development is nice, even if I don’t particularly care about the branding gimmicks.
> Water quality was one of the critical factors in the company’s choice of WNC from about 200 sites across the eastern U.S. […] it also learned there was some high-quality water to be found in aquifers throughout the region — primarily around Black Mountain.
[0] https://www.blueridgenow.com/story/news/2012/07/23/sierra-ne...
But at least the all-IPA all-the-time trend seems to have died down, and I do see local breweries with more pilsners and Kölsches.
(I've also very recently discovered how good NA/very-low-ABV beers are today, but that's a topic for a different thread.)
I find it quite fascinating that americans like kölsch. The first time, and only time, I saw kölsch outside of Germany was in Mountain View at some beer auction style tap bar in 2016. It was quite popular since it had a high price. I might assume it was due to the similarity with local/large batch beer.
My city has a lot, but I personally can't share in them.
I will instantly vomit if I drink any local brews (in any locale). Same with whiskey.
I can drink nationally-distributed beers and vodka with no ill-effects.
I have no idea why. I'm jumping on this comment because I imagine there are some HN readers that might have a theory and I would be very interested in hearing them.
This beer is unpasteurised and still fermenting in the cask when it leaves the brewery! The carbonation of the beer comes from creation of CO2 during fermentation, rather than injection of CO2 post-fermentation.
This makes for a pretty unstable beer, that doesn’t travel particularly well and should be consumed reasonably quickly!
Nothing like getting a proper pint of whatever is local.
Heineken, the second-biggest brewery in the world, moved 231.2 million hectoliters of beer in 2021[0], or nearly 19,000 acre-feet of beer (!). How many locally-produced lagers actually taste better than Heineken?
[0]: https://www.craftbrewingbusiness.com/business-marketing/the-...
Anchor, Drake's, 21st Ammendment, Lagunitas, Das Brew, Altamont, and Fieldwork all make better tasting beer than Heineken.
> How many locally-produced lagers actually taste better than Heineken?
Heineken is a fine mass produced beer, but there are tens of beers that I would prefer.
For wine and vintages, the absolute consistency is less of an issue. They aspire to some consistency, but a little variation is part of the romance.
The great thing is that in wine and beer, you get both ends. You get the familiar brands and the loony craft beers with outrageous labels. If I favour smaller producers, a good part of it is that I like to support younger businesses. Big producers pretending to produce young-business products is a bit meh though.
Another middling green-bottle beer. Better than Heineken easy, but typically still worse than your local brewer will make.
In my opinion: most of them. Heineken is not a good beer. It tastes similar to other mass-produced stuff: inoffensive bordering on flavorless. I'm actually stunned at the comment. It's like if I asked how many local restaurants make hamburgers better than Wendy's (Budweiser is McDonald's in this analogy).
Same thing with beers made from local ingredients
I'm not a fan of hops, but the PNW grows 96% of hops in the US--so it makes sense local breweries up there are known for IPA. Historically, beer styles leaned into local water mineral content; Pilsners from Germany/Czech Republic and Stout/Porter from Britain/Ireland.
Regional wines (local wines shipped widely) make sense and local beers do, too.
For beers like Bud that are mostly sold in cans, and/or Bud Light often sold in brown bottles, the date labels are generally a marketing gimmick to distinguish from other brands without getting into these kinds of specifics (they come off beer-nerdy and that’s off putting to a lot of their target market).
I've had almost every year of abyss going back to 2011. You picked a beer and a style that is intended to be aged, and the flavor changes over time much like wine. That has nothing to do with Budweiser, IPAs, pilsners, etc that are not supposed to be aged.
Bottles in general are not as good as cans at keeping beer fresh.
Of course it's possible, to a limited extent, to alter the mineral content of the water, but it gets expensive.
Hops, of course, are a key ingredient in beer, and they definitely do have terroir. The Saaz hops grown in the US are not identical to Saaz from the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
https://beerconnoisseur.com/articles/earth-best-water-brewin...
Also while hops have terroir, hops are dried and vacuum sealed and kept cold so that they can be shipped with no change in flavor. (Except of course for once-a-year wet hop beers which truly are very local)
I'm aware of this. I did it for my ribbon-winning brews. It is cheap at the home brewer scale, but at commercial scales, maybe not so much.
> can be shipped
Sure, it's possible to get genuine Saaz hops shipped from the Czech Republic to California. Again, A home brewer might be willing to shell out top dollar for a few ounces, but cost and availability is going to be a much larger factor. I've know craft brewers to abandon making certain styles because of uncertain supplies of key hops, and being unwilling or unable to switch to a similar variety.
There's a reason why so many the American West Coast IPA became a style defined by Centennial, Cascade, Mosaic, Amarillo, Chinook, Simcoe, Strata or Citra, and not like English IPAs and their Target, First Gold, English Goldings and Fuggles
By the time you get to Stone or Lagunitas and their West Coast IPAs, the hops are being packaged as I described and again we're not really dealing with terroir. The Chicago Lagunitas products tastes identical to the California ones.
It wasn’t always this way. I remember when our local breweries had a wide range of regular styles, and many specialized in whatever weird quirky thing they were into. That got me to explore Trappist styles, Flemish style sours, a whole bunch of English styles that I didn’t like at first but eventually became my thing because they’re so subtle, and a huge variety of different adjuncts regardless of hoppiness.
Local beer wasn’t (usually) about the locality of where it was brewed and fermented, it was about the locality of the humans involved and their whims. I think this still exists in some places, but IPA has basically become the “other beer” besides lager everywhere and it’s really a damn shame. And it’s basically ruined beer for me. I actually like IPA, but I’d lose interest anything that becomes so uniform.
The beer was actually pretty amazing. What surprised me is that they do multiple stouts. It's getting hard to find dark beers in CA. My guess is that the coastal temps and generally overcast weather in Shelter Cove mean that the "local" beer tends towards what we normally think of as winter beer. Or it could just be that the owner likes porters and stouts as much as I do.
I wouldn't discount local beer. Unfortunately, I've never much cared for Anchor Steam, so it's hard for me to get worked up about the OP. Great tour though.
Local brewers with even the smallest bit of Belgian influence often have at least some small idea of this. Brewers that enjoy exploring styles known as "farmhouse" or "spontaneous" or "common" are generally exploring truly local beers in both flavor profiles and execution.
If brewing was as lucrative as fancy wines, you'd probably hear a lot more about breweries staffing local yeast experts and building yeast labs the way fancy vineyards hire soil experts. (I do know of at least a couple that do. New Glarus is a stand out for a number of reasons, including that their commitment to local also means that they never distribute beer outside of Wisconsin.)
Within 15-20 minutes from my house there's Avery, Upslope, Left-hand, Oscar Blue's, Fritz, Wibby, Asher, Finkel & Garf, 300 Suns, Beyond the Mt., Sanitas, Wild Provisions, Vision Quest, Twisted Pine, Uhl's, etc.
All of them are at least decent... some of them are world class.
Sure I have some preferred beers but they are all interchangeable in the big picture.
Such is progress - there is no more regional taste, only trend. Even the bottle conditioned beer you stand in line for on vacation - a bottle of Duvel will be reliably better and probably cheaper.
They’re pretty notable, arguably they started the craft beer movement
Peak craft beer implies that the trend is now on a downward trajectory. I don't know if that is the case, craft beer feels really ingrained in the culture at this point.
1. Is there a decrease in craft breweries being started, or total gallons of craft beer being produced?
2. Is there a decrease in beer brewing hobby supplies?
To #2, yes, at least in my area there are about half as many homebrew supply shops as there were ten years ago.
I'm definitely not saying no one is making good new beer anymore, just that the improvements from the ~80s-00s has slowed down.
The uproar is probably more among folks who follow the industry though. Most people have seen Anchor at a grocery store at some point. They were, I'm pretty sure, a natural niche craft brewery before those things were normal. In the same zone as places like Sam Adams or New Belgium or Sierra Nevada. You didn't have to really be "into beer" to know what they were and maybe enjoy buying a Christmas Ale from them every year as a seasonal thing.
To OP's point, there's less places like that now, but that's because I have 3 local breweries I'd be sad about if they closed, instead of 1-2 national breweries. I'd be sad if Trillium or Alchemist closed, but it's not as if I could buy them without traveling to the area, so it's more of a "aww, that's a bummer" and less of a change to my life.
I'm not sure either is better/worse though. We've just moved beyond the sort of craft beer monoculture. We don't just have 2-3 Christmas Ales we all drink, in the same way we don't all watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade or all talk about the new episode of ER every week.
I have never lived in California.
Weird, it's quite well-known even internationally. I certainly see it regularly in London, at the kind of places which sell imported American beers.
If you ever looked up the history of beer in the US or US beer styles you would know it. All the people in the craft beer industry certainly do. Maybe the craft beer drinkers in parts of the country don't know it but Steam/California Common is one of the few original US beer styles. And Anchor was one of the first in the modern craft beer revolution.
They are owned by Sapporo now, so there's that.
[1] Note that I said “might be better [quality]…” Without knowing the details of how Anchor beer is made specifically, corporate ownership can bring more resources and remove barriers, enabling “more, better” or it can exploit a trusted brand by using it to sell a lower quality product until consumers catch on. My bet would be that Sapporo is doing the former.
Can you tell that to Yuengling, I would really like to partake in their beer without having to fly to Philly
And is also now brewed in Fort Worth: https://fortworthbusiness.com/restaurants/fort-worth-brewed-...
https://www.yuengling.com/news/yuengling-begins-westward-exp...
Ain’t capitalism grand?
Half-assed personal boycotts don't present the kind of numbers needed to effect change.
Trump and his cohorts getting their asses locked up does. Burning everything to the ground that belongs to neonazis does. The BLM protests did far more damage and effected far more change than the combined power of everyone who boycotts Chik-Fil-A, Hobby Lobby, or Yuengling.
I think it's a worthwhile exercise to ask yourself before you make a purchase somewhere that you feel OK with the ethical implications of your purchase - and I say this as someone who does compromise on my ethical positions constantly for convenience. It still matters.
But that doesn't apply to boycotts?
All I said dude was that I don't believe in it and that I think what they were doing is stupid.
Other people can do what they want, even if its pointless. Because pretty much everyone does shit (like boycott) more because it makes them feel good ("look at me! I'm stickin it to the man!"), not because it is effective.
I suppose if everyone measured their activities on effectiveness it might create a hole in the space-time continuum, so many idiotic jobs and actions would be eliminated.
By, for instance, boycotting companies they disagree with?
Switchback is also pretty good. It's not a big name style but it's very well done for what it is. Most people don't know about it, though, it seems.
But the OP is absolutely right - there are now good to great breweries pretty much everywhere in the US. It’s hard to be a national beer company if you aren’t humongous.
People aren’t even looking at your stuff. The beer section at the gas station near my house is 50% local and 50% watery stuff. I have no idea if they carry Anchor Steam or not because I don’t look in that section and haven’t for years.
Note that some breweries, like Lagunitas, have effectively become local in multiple places by opening breweries in other states far away.
"Anchor, founded in 1896, was saved from bankruptcy in 1965 by longtime owner Fritz Maytag, and _sold to Sapporo in 2017_, Singer said."
It ceased to be an independent local brewer almost a decade ago. The corporate overlords are doing what corporate overlords always do.
Killing what doesn't make money? If this was profitable what exactly are the 'corporate overlords' achieving here?
Pulling back to California makes sense of sales aren’t strong enough, but also killing off a beloved brand seems that it could hurt in the long run.
Sadly this never came to fruition due to the big beer bust a few years later. Lagunitas sold out to Heineken, Anchor to Sapporo etc - there was a big drop off in sales due to all the endless 6 month lifespan craft IPAs that split the market (many of these went bust too).
Lagunitas and Anchor are now a shadow of their former selves after cost cutting etc. Keith Greggor's innovations when he was running Anchor are now a distant memory. The recent mediocre rebranding of Anchor is an indicator of how out of touch Sapporo are with the market.
A similar thing I saw: Asahi was in charge of Budweiser distribution in Japan. Absolutely miserable sales (not that I like Budweiser, or would drink it by choice), almost no presence. AB got the rights back to sell it, and now Budweiser is a reliable presence in many places and I see it out there in ways I never did.
My head canon is that Asahi got the distribution rights purely to slow roll it and make it so that AB would have no reason to build up a local presence. That way Asahi protects its local brands and simply needs to send some executive once a year to be like "hey I dunno nobody seems interested in this drink"
And suddenly a great mystery is solved! I had Anchor Steam in 2013 thereabouts and liked it quite a lot. When it became available locally I was happy to get it but it didn't quite taste as I remembered it. As time went on I quit buying it because it just wasn't as good as I remembered it to be.
I wonder what they changed in the recipe?
E.g. up in Northfield Minnesota they make Marshmallow Mateys, a ripoff of lucky charms made by Malt-o-Meal. In the dorm cafeteria at St. Olaf College the flavor is like nothing else anywhere in the world. Once you taste it there where they make it, everything else is a sad stale imitation.
I was told the head brewer left to Thirsty Dog and took the recipe with them but while closer that still doesn't taste quite the same to me either.
The alternative to the rebrand might not have been sticking with the existing style forever, but shutting the place down.
Since it was just riding along with the steam beer, I'm guessing the whiskey's distribution will also be restricted to CA now.
I see what happened.
I think that the porter is a real standout, and have based some of my home brewing on trying to simulate its flavor.
There's a lot of stouts out there but not many porters.
The prevailing trend seems to be hop-bomb this and abv max out that. I'm usually not looking for an extreme sport in my mouth.
Ah, I was wondering where the pressure was coming from.
The idea that this 150 year old brewery is closing down a truly cornerstone beer in craft beer history because the label art is expensive - despite weathering untold recessions and tough periods - strains credulity
They purchased the company because they were successful and will then proceed to kill the company by doing the exact opposite things that made them successful.
Ballast Point had a similar trajectory. They got bought for a gigabuck and now are just gone.
Why the hell would you buy a company and then screw it up? In the case of Ballast Point, all Constellation Brands had to do was leave the bought company alone.
And, no, I don't believe that the issue is because you can buy great beers in every market. Hogwash. Maybe I can buy IPA, IPAer, IPAest, and IPAestest in every market--maybe. However, dark, heavy porters like old school Victory at Sea seem to be very thin on the ground nowadays.
(Side question: Why is everything in craft brew now shipping in cans instead of bottles? When did that happen?)
Craft beer grew quickly since the mid 2000s, helped along by PE money, and now it's time to cash out
Apparently 2023 is the year to cash out
I'm totally with you, though my personal love is sour beers. IPA rules the market, to the point where I have trouble distinguishing between whichever super-hoppy IPA is currently the best. But good sour beers are not nearly so common. If someone ever buys Cascade Brewing and kills it, I will be wildly irritated.
I do see that I can buy their good stuff in cans now. I actually think that's alright. They still sell it in bottles, too, but the upside of the can is that it's 250ml, versus the 750ml bottle. One bottle will take care of my entire evening and then some, so the option to just open a can at a time is appealing.
And now that everyone isn't so IPA-happy there are some great examples of varieties like Gose and Kolsch that I hadn't even heard of before.
Craft breweries love the IPA for three reasons. First, they’re one of the easiest beers to make. Second, they stay the most stable on the shelf/truck. Third, toxic style trend. But mostly, it’s the first two reasons.
They are not one of the easiest beers to make, but in fact one of the hardest. They’re very susceptible to oxygen ingress and the high hopping rates can cause diacetyl production + hop creep which can ruin the beer.
They’re also one of the most expensive beers to make based on the cost of hops and the typical amount of hops used per barrel produced.
They do not stay the most stable on shelves / truck as they can fade quickly and are heat sensitive. Heat can quickly cause off flavors in IPAs. If you keep an IPA, especially a hazy, longer than 6-8 weeks you’re going to have an inferior tasting product so you have to turn them quickly via taproom pours & hyping up can sales. There’s a reason why no one ships IPAs overseas like they do with Belgian & German styles. They don’t travel well.
Breweries brew them because they’re a very popular style and they can charge $18-24 for a 4 pack where-as a lager or lower ABV beer cannot typically sell for the same price. They can also increase the grain by ~30% and make a double IPA which can sell for closer to $24 for a 4-pack.
This is why you see six-packs for $15-18 of lagers or similar styles, the customer expectation is different.
I can understand not liking IPAs or thinking they’re overdone but they aren’t the easiest style nor the most shelf stable.
Made me chuckle, thanks!
Hazies typically have 1/2 to 1/8th the amount of IBUs (bitterness) to older school “west coast” IPAs which is why they don’t get the same benefit as older school IPAs which traveled better + had more stability due to the hops.
But good sour beers are not nearly so common
I have to work to find Ballast Point now. Before the buyout, I could buy it at gas stations and grocery stores.
about a decade ago, because it’s cheaper, skunks less, is more sustainable, and is all around just the better way to ship single units of beer.
Also the new school breweries 10 years ago like Trillium, Treehouse, Other Half all came on the scene with 16oz cans and sticker labels as well as the new NEIPA style that became so hot. I think that did a lot to improve the image of cans among consumers. Especially newer craft fans.
As far as Ballast Point in particular, I can only offer conjecture. Sculpin was great ten years ago, but the craft has moved forward and I don't feel like Ballast Point kept up. In my opinion, their recipes are dated. Whether that's due to the acquisition or not I couldn't say, but I believe that's why they've fallen out of favor.
- They block all light
- They’re better sealed than bottles
- They weigh less and are more compact than bottles
- They don’t break
- They’re more often recycled
The freshness reasons probably correlate with the rise of hazy IPAs, which are more sensitive to freshness than other styles.
This is the real key one. My intel from a brewery that was sadly bought by Coke was that the savings in transit & shipping is staggering. More beverages in the same amount of space, which also means less costs for refrigeration.
Let's get concrete about this. I sort of believe what other people are saying, that regardless of what Anchor makes available outside California, we're far better off today than we were in Anchor's heyday. But maybe I'm wrong! It'd be interesting to find out.
The ballast point buy out by constellation brands was probably very much the peak of the craze around craft breweries.
Ballast point was very savy in increasing their unit sales numbers. That 12$ a 6 pack in the California market was unheard of at the time and made sales projections go off the charts.
Of course it was bullshit and unsustainable but their investors took it line and sinker..
The sheer amount of competition with thousands of breweries all over, to me means its a good local business (lifestyle in hn lingo), and a very tough regional business it you want to grow.
1. We've reached Peak IPA. It was novel a couple decades ago, but geez, you can't taste the beer for the hops any more.
2. "Craft beer" has become a branding exercise. A lot of it is being brewed in contract breweries that will make a batch of whatever recipe you provide, with any label art you want. Bingo, craft beer. A couple of breweries in my region, in conversations, people say: "Oh yeah, they also brew for brands W, X, Y, and Z.
I end up bringing home something from one or two mid priced regional brands that taste good but don't break the bank.
https://asiabrewersnetwork.com/news/new-zealands-behemoth-pa...
It would almost never make economic sense to buy a business and then leave it alone. The profitability of the current operation would be factored into the price, so leaving it alone means you're just wasting money buying it. There are obviously exceptions to this but that should be the general rule.
No, you buy a company to make changes. Perhaps you intend to find synergies to cut costs or expand distribution -- or other ways to increase profits that the current management isn't doing. Obviously they wouldn't intend to screw it up, but I'm sorry that your beloved brewery was a victim to corporate shenanigans.
Beer market in the USA is larger today than in 2017.
Something about those old times regional beers with “no taste” fascinates me as much if not more than all the craft ones. Like drinking a time capsule being able to relate with someone from an oddly specific time and place.
There's absolutely no metabolic process that alcohol helps where at least cigarettes' increase your IQ:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/will-a-nicotine-p...
Craft Beer is in a real bad spot atm.
From a manufacturing standpoint that isn't saying much, but from a brewing standpoint it's saying quite a lot.
Quite plainly they are making a bet on bringing NA beverage production in house and they can't pay me because "fresh" market conditions are squeezing them (pun intended).
There are multiple factors that make it really difficult to be a craft beer manufacturer. Primary of which is the three tiered system on distribution, this has been a blight on the beer industry for decades and isn't new.
Other trends such as a decrease in consumption of beer overall in combination with a HIGHLY saturated market place will pretty much seal the deal for the majority of mid-tier breweries that DO NOT have a loyal following.
I never signed an NDA so if you want to know more about my job ask away.
i can't blame them for trying to chase trends, but my impression is their distribution was too large to be able to capitalize on anything groundbreaking.
One of the large contributing factors to the rise in Deschutes during that time was due to their investment in technology because of their newly appointed Brewmaster "Brian Faivre" a computer science grad from UC Davis. While I never met him I saw the result of his and many others who championed consistency and quality via data collection about their production process. This dude was essentially scared away due to internal politics.
>but my impression is their distribution was too large to be able to capitalize on anything groundbreaking.
The distribution is all through large distributors Deschutes and every other "Largish" craft brewery has to sell their soul to the devil that is the "three tiered" system in order to not have to make investments in solo distribution. Given what I know about their production facility and the people there. It is completely geared to cash in on basically any beer trend that could exist. Their pilot plant is simply ridiculous, it's a fully automated 40 bbl split wort A/B testing powerhouse. The best beer you've never tasted has been made in that thing.
IMO Deschutes made many decisions that just ended up being a waste of money that severely crippled their cash position.
Lastly trends in the beer world are a flash in the pan at this point. I disregard Seltzers because it's a different process that doesn't directly involve wort production and therefore many craft breweries aren't set up to pivot to such a product.
One thing I attempted to stoke (not that this was at all my job) while working their is that marketing strategy should shift towards understanding that no consumer is loyal in the sense they always want to "try the new thing". This would have meant investments in better variety packing capabilities. If you didn't know variety packs are the highest velocity product, and my guess would be that any brewery that people think is good at all it's their highest velocity product as well. Time and time again I'd raise my hand and point to the metoric number for our variety packs (from a velocity stand point) and say "why can't we make investments that greatly bring down the cost and increase the production velocity for this product. Now you see brands like 10 barrel, Sierra Nevada basically doing just that.
> "It’s unlikely that it will come back."
Nooooooooooo!
Living on the east coast, are there any good alternatives (for sale during the Christmas period)!?
So, 1/8 of the US population will still be able to buy it.
That's not exactly "killing it"...
That said in Texas we have 512 Brewing Pecan Porter and Real Ale Sisyphus.
Sierra Nevada Pale Ale is another classic and you can find it practically anywhere
Ciders and liquors don’t cause this issue. I tried a gluten free beer at the insistence of coworkers and a similar thing happened. It just makes me hulk out.
Anyone have any idea why? I figure I’ve got to be allergic to something but I don’t really have any idea what that something might be.
What about wheat or barley?
The Gruit style contains no hops at all, but it's uncommon.