MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 02.02.15
Silly me. Last week I provided links to three stories related to the sale of Elysian Brewing to AB InBev and figured that was enough of such chatter. This is a topic a lot of people have a lot to say about. So here you go, starting with basics of the deal itself, but moving on because this turned into a debate about what constitutes “craft” and moved on to the business of beer.
This week, of course, there will be plenty of chatter about this Budweiser Super Bowl commercial. I was busy tweeting with Alan McLeod about hop acreage at the time, but comments lit up my Twitter feed lickety split and bitching about it cleverly looked like an automatic 123 retweets.
Meanwhile back to the links in hand. This quote was in a footnote for a story Charles Pierce wrote about the college football playoffs. It reflects the bias I bring to this conversation. You may find it relevant or not. “If there were one concept I could purge from modern discourse, it is the notion that everything, and everyone, is a brand. There is something fundamentally dehumanizing in the idea that the primary purpose of so many things, and so many people, is to maintain their ability to sell themselves to the suckers. ‘Protecting the brand’ has become the all-purpose excuse for treating people as though they were pieces of equipment, as though they were products.”
On to the links.
Inside A-B InBev’s acquisition of Elysian Brewing.
[Via Brewbound]
Elysian founders discuss sale, Loser, exit strategy.
[Via All About Beer]
Life after craft: Elysian adapts after buyout by Anheuser-Busch.
[Via MarketWatch]
Craft Beer, Elysian and Emmanuel Goldstein.
[Via St. John’s Wort]
AB-Inbev: Why it matters who owns the brewery.
[Via I Think About Beer]
The real problem with Anheuser-Busch InBev takeovers.
[Via BeerGraphs]
The great craft beer swindle.
[Via Boak & Bailey’s Beer Blog]
A Consolidation dialectic (or why buy-outs do sort of suck).
[Via Beervana]
The Distance: The case for craft.
[Via Chris Hall| Beer Writer]
Why brands matter.
[Via All About Beer]
Danny’s Liquors urges customers to stop drinking ‘Gooseweiser’.
[Via Chicagoist]
It’s funny. For once Budweiser made a very strong brand argument – which may have drawn back some of the craft folk. Then they pissed on beer snobs. I have no objection to AB’s role in the beer world, but someone at the agency really dropped the ball here. Still, bad press is still press and all of us seem to react exactly as they implied we might.