Tampa ABC affiliate WFTS ran a great story about Cigar City Brewery’s uphill fight against big distributors in Florida.  It’s a fight that involves big business and members of Congress all trying to shut them out of the market in the Tampa area.

From flickr user t3hWIT

Good news for all of you who want a casual beer to go with your heftier craft brews: Yuengling, a brewery that has frustrated many beer lovers with their slow and meticulous expansion along the east coast, is taking a very big step.  The brewery has announced that they’ve purchased an old Coors plant in Memphis, TN, which means you have an alternative if you’re looking for an American light lager.

From the Wall Street Journal…

Yuengling, the oldest brewer in the U.S., has signed a letter of intent to buy the Memphis facility from Hardy Bottling Co., which purchased it from Molson Coors Brewing Co. in 2006.

Acquiring the facility would give the Pottsville, Pa., company—the seventh-largest U.S. beer supplier by sales volume—a fourth manufacturing facility and help it expand distribution beyond its current 13 states in the eastern U.S.

“Memphis is an ideal location,” said David Casinelli, chief operating officer of Yuengling, in a phone interview. “At some point we’re going to run out of room” at its existing plants in Pennsylvania and Florida.

Budweiser

USA Today reports on the latest ad strategy for faltering Budweiser: giving their beer away and hoping people buy it later.

To appeal to the under-30 set that has ignored the brand — but is a prime consumer group for beer — Budweiser will unleash its biggest-ever national free-sample effort in trendy bars and eateries. The campaign begins Monday, with the slogan “Grab some Buds.”

The hype culminates on Sept. 29, when the brand hosts the “Budweiser National Happy Hour,” a bid by Bud to nudge folks to at least try a free brewski. The free samples for those 21 and up range from 6 ounces to 12 ounces, depending on state and local rules.

They know how things have changed in the last 10 years, and craft beer is a major problem for them.

The promotion comes as upscale consumers are turning to craft beers, the price-conscious are trading down, and others switched to light beers. “It’s a triple whammy,” says Michael Bellas, CEO at Beverage Marketing.

Executives at Anheuser-Busch, a wholly owned subsidiary of Belgium-based Anheuser–Busch InBev, insist they can reignite interest from younger drinkers with an image upgrade and a reintroduction via sampling.

I’m not sure which “trendy bars” they’re referring to, but trendy has meant craft beer or high-end cocktails.  I’m not sure how Budweiser fits with any of that.

From Flickr user Joel Abroad

Bad news in St. Louis as the Post Dispatch reports on the marketing issues that are swallowing Budweiser, causing a generation to ignore it completely:

Anheuser-Busch knows it has a Budweiser problem. The beer’s share of the U.S. market peaked in 1988 at 26 percent, sinking to 9.3 percent last year. Even more troubling for A-B is that Budweiser seems at risk of being forgotten by an entire generation. Four out of 10 people in their mid-20s have never even tried Budweiser — a rate 2.5 times higher than when it reigned supreme, according to the company.

…

But gaining traction at home has proven difficult. “We know we have a lot of work to do, especially in the United States,” said A-B InBev chief marketing officer Chris Burggraeve during a recent analysts’ conference call. “But I can assure you that we’re energized and completely committed to stabilizing the brand in its home market.”

That task falls to Peacock, head of the A-B InBev’s U.S. operations.

Peacock, standing on stage at Maryville University, sounded indignant when a question from the audience cast doubt on how Budweiser could be saved. The questioner was a man who appeared to be in his 20s, his sideburns long and his eyeglasses fashionable dark frames — precisely the kind of drinker that Budweiser wants to win back. But the man said he doesn’t see Budweiser being consumed when he’s out. He sees craft beer.

The PBR phenomenon has always amazed me, simply because I would rather drink Budweiser than PBR.  While I’ve learned not to draw market-wide conclusions from my own anecdotal experiences, this does seem to be something of a brand issue more than a product issue.

Is Budweiser now the Oldsmobile of beer?  For many 20-somethings, their parents and grandparents may enjoy it, but it’s never something they would buy.

New Belgium bike (Flickr user JOE MARINARO)

Eco blog The Good Human started looking at breweries and came up with the top five “doing the right thing.”  They write…

Human beings love their beer. People all over the world drink well over 100 billion liters of the stuff each year, and I am most certainly one of them that drinks his fill. But did you know that besides the quality that craft breweries exemplify in their beer, many of these smaller breweries are doing the right thing when it comes to environmental sustainability as well? Between installing wind and/or solar power, heat exchangers, and massive recycling programs, these breweries are showing the big brew houses that you can in fact have happy employees, make a quality product, and have a solid profit, all with much less impact on the environment.

Their top five?

1. New Belgium (Fort Collins, CO)
2. Brooklyn Brewery (Brooklyn, NY)
3. Odell Brewing Company (Fort Collins, CO)
4. Sierra Nevada Brewing Company (Chico, CA)
5. Steam Whistle Brewing (Toronto, Canada)

Interestingly, two are from Fort Collins, Colorado.  One of them, New Belgium, is definitely well-know for their environmental friendliness, including the free bicycle given to employees.

We’ve written before about Jimmy Carter’s loosening of homebrewing regulation in 1979 and how it helped people like us pick up the hobby.  But blogger E.D. Kain dove in and looked at the numbers.  What did he find?  That Jimmy Carter may be responsible for the craft beer movement of today.

He writes:

If you’re a fan of craft beer and microbreweries as opposed to say Bud Light or Coors, you should say a little thank you to Jimmy Carter. Carter could very well be the hero of International Beer Day.

To make a long story short, prohibition led to the dismantling of many small breweries around the nation. When prohibition was lifted, government tightly regulated the market, and small scale producers were essentially shut out of the beer market altogether. Regulations imposed at the time greatly benefited the large beer makers. In 1979, Carter deregulated the beer industry, opening the market back up to craft brewers. As the chart below illustrates, this had a really amazing effect on the beer industry:

Pretty interesting stuff, based off the work of Rob Carlson.

(From Flickr user kevindean)

Feeling the recession?  Craft breweries aren’t.

Earlier this week, the Brewers Association released numbers from the first half of 2010 showing craft beer sales were up 12%.

Craft breweries continue to grow despite many challenges, and currently provide an estimated 100,000 jobs and contribute significantly to the U.S. economy.  Barrels sold by craft brewers for the first half of the year are an estimated 4.6 million, compared to 4.2 million barrels sold in the first half of 2009.

“While craft brewer sales volume climbed 9 percent in the first half of 2010, overall U.S. beer industry volume sales are down 2.7 percent so far,” noted Paul Gatza, director of the Brewers Association. “There is a movement by beer lovers to the innovative and flavorful beers created by America’s small and independent craft brewers. More people are starting to think of craft-brewed beer first when they buy in restaurants, bars and stores.”

I guess if you’re going to feel some form of economic stress, you can spend at least a little more to get through it with good beer.

DC Brau

Washington, DC upstart brewery DC Brau took a big step this week, as its two founding brewers quit their day jobs and started working full time for the new brewery.  The local blog We Love DC had a write-up on the pair this week, but more interesting than that post is the idea that we’re able to follow the brewery this early in the process.  On their site, they list a few milestones, culminating with the January 2011 opening.

“We’re quitting our jobs, next week,” Brandon Skall tells me. I look over at his business partner, Jeff, who smiles wryly. “From here on out, it’s all DC Brau.” Maybe it’s a crazy thing to do. Starting a business in the best of times is tough, but in this economy it’s especially risky. Still, Brandon and Jeff don’t seem worried, which inspires a certain confidence.

They’re also running a blog, which will hopefully be updated with the daily minutia of getting a brewery up and running.

Dogfish Head Chateau Jiahu (Brad Horn/NPR)

NPR’s All Things Considered recently covered the release of Chateau Jiahu, Dogfish Head’s newest beer using an ancient recipe.

Dogfish Head brewery is known for making exotic beer with ingredients like crystallized ginger or water from Antarctica, so it might not sound surprising that one of its recent creations is a brew flavored simply by grapes and flowers. It’s not the recipe that makes this beer so special; it’s where that recipe was found: a Neolithic burial site in China.

Chateau Jiahu is a time capsule from 7,000 B.C., but to hear Dogfish Head owner Sam Calagione talk about what beer was actually like back then, it’s not the kind of thing that makes you say “Hey, pass me another ice-cold ancient ale!”

NPR posted a worthwhile radio segment, including an interview with Sam Calagione.

PBR 1844 (Dan Wei)

This post at Foreign Policy Magazine pointed me to a note about PBR’s premium status in China. It’s not your standard hipster PBR (which has a reputation I absolutely can’t understand), but a high-gravity ale called 1844.

Wei writes:

The above advertisement appears on the inside front cover of the current issue of Window of the South (南风窗), a respected biweekly business magazine. At first glance it looks like an ad for a wine or a brandy, but closer inspection reveals the actual brand: Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer 1844.

1844 was the year that the Pabst Brewing Company was established in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In the US, the beer’s lack of pretension led to a recent upswing in popularity among hipsters.

He links to an excerpt from an interview with Alan Kornhauser, Pabst Brewmaster-Asia, given to All About Beer magazine:

I still like formulating specialty beers. In fact, with Pabst, I just made the first specialty beer in Mainland China. There’s almost no ale in China: I had to smuggle the yeast into the country. I formulated a special high-gravity ale called “1844.” It’s all malt, and we use caramel malts from Germany. The initial aging is dry-hopped rather heavily. Then we do a secondary aging in new uncharred American oak whiskey barrels. We bought 750 brand new barrels to the tune of $100,000. This is a very special beer; it’s retailing for about over $40 U.S. for a 720 ml bottle.

Fascinating stuff.  I haven’t seen, nor have I even heard of, 1844 in the U.S., but if I could find a bottle, I’d absolutely buy it.  It reminds me a little of what Michelob has been trying to do — take a long-time cheap beer, and spin it off into a new direction.