musing

On the Wicked Weed Brewing Purchase.
[Via Jester King Brewery]
What it’s like to work for a brewery that “sold out”
[Via DRAFT]
Watch the Hands, Not the Cards — The Magic of Megabrew.
[Via Good Beer Hunting]
If you somehow missed the news last week that AB InBev acquired Wicked Weed Brewing take a moment to google a few of those words. It happened. The reaction was swift, much of it like when AB InBev bought 10 Barrel Brewing, like when AB InBev bought Elysian Brewing, like . . . you know the drill. It’s happened enough that several bars were quicker to announce they’d no longer be serving Wicked Weed beer. At the same time, drinkers across the country asked if it was OK to be excited to think about Wicked Weed’s highly rated beers showing up in their hometowns — just as 10 Barrel and Elysian already have. In addition, DRAFT magazine and Good Beer Hunting posted insider written stories that told us something new. They both come from a point of view.

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The challenges Big Craft™ faces are not unique to beer.

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal published a story headlined “Big-Name Food Brands Lose Battle of the Grocery Aisle.” Pretty straightforward premise.

America’s packaged-food giants are losing the battle for retailers’ shelf space, complicating their efforts to break out of a yearslong slump.

Instead of promoting canned soup, cereal and cookies from companies like Kraft Heinz Co., Kellogg Co. and Mondelez International Inc., grocery stores are choosing to give better play to fresh food, prepared hot meals, and items from local upstarts more in favor with increasingly health-conscious consumers.

“We’ve got to maximize return on our shelf space,” said Don Fitzgerald, vice president of merchandising at Mariano’s, a Chicago grocery chain bought by Kroger Co. in 2015. Shoppers, he said, are drawn to steamy pasta at the store’s deli counter, rather than a box of dried macaroni with powdered cheese sitting on the shelf for weeks.

This follows a report last February about how larger companies are looking to smaller ones for, as the headline (“Big Food Looks to Startups for Ideas, Innovation”) suggests, news ideas.

Food giants are starting venture-capital funds to invest in startups focused on healthier and less-processed foods, betting the younger companies can teach them to be more entrepreneurial and innovative. Slow to recognize consumers’ shift toward those products, global titans have found themselves stuck in a rut. This week, Nestlé SA, the world’s largest packaged-food company, dropped its long-running sales-growth target for the next three years, saying it needs time to adapt to these fundamental changes in the industry.

“It’s hard for consumer companies to step out of what they’ve been locked into for 60 or 80 years,” said Ryan Caldbeck, founder and chief executive of CircleUp, a business that connects private-equity firms with food startups. CircleUp says large consumer-goods companies lost $18 billion in market share to smaller competitors between 2011 and 2015.

This might belong in the mix as well: “Hard times for Whole Foods: ‘People say it’s for pretentious people. I can see why'” It seems that eventually price matters even for authentic, or great, or “exquisitely selected” products.

*****

ENDNOTE: When using the term Big Craft™ be sure to honor the the trademark — at least as long as Big Craft™ is relevant.

Beer and Blue Collar Cities.
A scholar somewhere is probably getting close to publishing a related thesis. The premise of “working cities” is tricky, because weren’t all metropolises working cities when they were born? I’m not sure I ever thought of Chicago as a glamorous city (or to lean on Carl Sandburg: Hog Butcher for the World/Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat/Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler/Stormy, husky, brawling/City of the Big Shoulders) but the yuppie/hipster and beer question question Jeff Alworth poses continues to be provocative.

In 1985, Philadelelphia Inquirer food editor Gerry Etter wrote, “Today, beer is invited everywhere. It hobnobs with vintage wines and attends formal parties, it slides effervescently into crystal glasses held by long-gowned hostesses.” This caused another writer for the Inquirer to counter, “I’ve never hobnobbed in my life (and if I did, it was only once and with a consulting adult), and I don’t intend to start now. One doesn’t hobnob while drinking beer, one shoots the bull.” Thirty years later this has not been resolved.

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Monday musing and linking began in 2008 as a way to stay in touch during our semi sabbatical, but there hae often times I am not sure what reality I am in touch with. So rather than force the issue, next Monday there will be no links because I will be in Brazil. And I understand that because most of this week’s links were collected while I was in the midst of the rather insular experience of the Craft Brewers Conference they might look different in bright sunlight.

Gonzofest literary contest winner: The Great American Smoker.
Larry Bell said Monday he’s not sure when he last missed a Chicago Cubs’ home opener (which was Monday), but he thought it was important to be at CBC even though the company hums along fine with a minimum of intervention on his part. There are a lot more parties at CBC (and the Great American Beer Festival) these days, bigger, sometimes more lavish, more everything. Well, maybe not more fun. [Via Leo Weekly]

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