The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) has a story today about how “Craft Beers Have Big Breweries Thinking Small.”

This is, in fact an advertising story, with the focus on Coors’ Blue Moon.

Typically, linking a large brewer to a craft beer would be the kiss of death. But Coors has managed to have it both ways, relying on a “stealth” marketing campaign that rejects the macho TV commercials that offend many craft-beer aficionados. A Coors spokesman says Blue Moon has an agency – Omnicom’s Integer Group – that creates the brand’s point-of-sale materials, but “our marketing has been very minimal.”

Instead, Blue Moon has used word of mouth to build the brand. It has focused on cities like Chicago, where full-bodied beers sell well, and relied on those whose opinions beer drinkers seek: namely, waiters and bartenders.

It’s hard to argue this hasn’t worked. Coors sold 200,000 barrels of Blue Moon in 2005, and although the brewery doesn’t confirm numbers estimates are that sales will top 400,000 in 2006.

Still, as carefully as you look at a Blue Moon bottle, 6-pack holder or 12-pack box you won’t find information that Coors brews the beer and that doesn’t feel honest.

You have to blame the big breweries – and the story points out that it isn’t just Coors – for the labeling. But perhaps a bit of fault lies with some (probably not you) craft beer drinkers. When their knee jerk reaction is to describe any beer from a large brewery as lousy tasting you can see why the breweries aren’t forthcoming about where the beer is brewed.

You are certainly entitled to choose not to drink beer from large breweries just because those breweries are big, and to buy beer from small breweries just because they are small. But that’s different than describing a perfectly acceptable beer as swamp water because you don’t care for the brewery for whatever reasons (size, politics, inane commercials).

At this year’s Great American Beer Festival I chatted with the brewer most responsible for Anheuser-Busch’s organic Stone Mill Pale Ale. He’s proud of the beer (and the brewery he works for), but the label says “Green Vallley Brewing” despite the fact the beer is made at A-B’s Fairfield, Calif., brewery.

The Fairfield brewery is located just up the road from the Jelly Belly Candy Co. – so close that when you stop outside of the Jelly Belly plant the air is filled with the distinct aroma of beer wort. Visitors love the Jelly Belly tour, watching the process behind glass in a carefully orchestrated trip through the facility, although this is clearly a big factory. Just as much a factory as the nearby brewery.

I’m more skeptical than most when it comes to just how big a brewing company can be and still deliver beers of conviction. But I don’t think quality is determined by the size of their largest brewing kettles (or the beers made most often in them).

That’s why we lose as consumers and the brewing companies lose as well when they aren’t straightforward about who is brewing these beers.

Posted: November 20th, 2006 under Beer culture.