musing

Why do people suddenly care (again) about Fat Tire?

Why do people suddenly care about Fat Tire?

OK, maybe they don’t really. I found this tasting note from John Frank at Axios Denver telling:

Fat Tire is like an old friend. You can immediately connect, even if it’s been too long since you last visited.
- The original pours a beautiful copper hue, easy-going with caramel and nut flavors that remind you it once counted as full-flavored craft beer.
- While well-made, the remake is uninspiring. It has a Honey Nut Cheerios aroma, and the flavors of sweet cereal that finish less satisfyingly.
The bottom line: You can probably drink more of them, but do you want to?

. . . even if it’s been too long since you last visited.

I spent more time Tuesday looking at Twitter than I have in the last two weeks, maybe a month, working my way through various threads, wondering when those commenting last drank Fat Tire, or why they spent so much time typing words about the can, or if the rebrand will help New Belgium recharge Fat Tire, or in another words if “high quality, low impact” (a reference to the beer’s zero-emissions production process) will create more connections than “Follow your Folly” once did, or why a brewery should be obligated to make a legacy beer exactly like it always has even if it quit using the exact same ingredients maybe two decades ago, or for that matter exactly what a legacy beer beer is, or . . . whew . . . exhausting.

No, We Don't Have Fat Tire.

This was taken in 2009 at a beer store in Charleston, S.C., a few days before New Belgium Brewing began selling beer in North Carolina. As the company had since 2006, when it started selling beer west of the Mississippi, it offered three brands in 22-ounce bottles — Fat Tire Amber Ale, 1554 Black Lager and Mothership Wit. Two weeks later they would launch the same three brands on draft, following with six-packs about a month later.

We arrived in North Carolina March 2, the day Fat Tire went on sale. We visited a package store the next day. Neat stacks of 1554 and Mothership Wit remained piled as high as an elephant’s eye. The Fat Tire was gone.

In 2009, Fat Tire accounted for 70 percent of New Belgium sales and it fueled expansion. Many customers thought Fat Tire was the name of the brewery, and the Fort Collins, Colorado, post office regularly delivered mail addressed to Fat Tire Brewery.

(I wrote about this in 2019, supplementing more words for #FlagshipFebruary, a project initiated by Stephen Beaumont and Jay Brooks.)

This did not happen by accident. After an early romance with drinkers when the company began selling its beers in the Northwest in 2002, New Belgium Brewing discovered the grass-roots relationship marketing, closely tied to cycling and love for the outdoors, that had worked close to its Colorado base could not be replicated in Oregon and Washington. When sales fell, New Belgium turned to marketing consultants Douglas Holt and Douglas Cameron. Those two outline and explain the strategy they developed in a chapter called “Fat Tire: Crossing the Cultural Chasm” within their book, “Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands.”

Cliff Notes version, there was a tagline and a commercial. New Belgium used the tagline, “Follow Your Folly, Ours is Beer,” for at least 10 years after it was introduced in 2003. “We wanted to say ‘here’s the kind of ideology we aspire to, we celebrate all those who pursue the same kind of thing, and this is exactly the ideology that is at the heart of our brewery and the beer we are drinking,” the authors explain in “Cultural Strategy.”

The commercial featured a character they called The Tinkerer. He finds an old bicycle at a garage sale, carefully restores it and then happily rides it into the Colorado countryside. I think there was more than one iteration, and this is the one I found on YouTube . . .

Twenty years ago this commercial reflected a DIY ethos that had been central to brewery startups for 20 years by then. Of course, there was also the Fat Tire bicycle connection.

It was good marketing.

It is much easier to judge such things looking in the rear view mirror. I think I will leave it at that.

-30-

Finding a place for Old School (whatever that is)

Michael Jackson visits Louisville in 1994

David Pierce, Michael Jackson, Buck Rissler and Roger Baylor. The photo was taken in 1994 when Jackson was touring the United States researching a book that was never written. You can find the story here.

Roger Baylor proudly remembers that Michael Jackson called him a polemicist.

The first time Daria and I wrote about Rich O’s in New Albany, Indiana, in January of 1995 the place had three draft beers, was a “Lite-Free Zone” and encouraged cigar smoking. One tap poured Guinness, one Pilsner Urquell and the “middle tap” rotated. Baylor let customers know in advance what was coming and how many kegs were to be available. By the end of the year, when we compiled our “Beer Travelers Guide,” Rich O’s was up to five taps. Sierra Nevada joined Guinness and Pilsner Urquell as a regular and there were two rotating taps.

By 1999, when we assembled “The Beer Lover’s Guide to the USA” Rich O’s had well-chosen 20 taps.

Twenty-one years ago, when I wrote about what was going on inside of some bars in the days after the terrorist attacks commemorated yesterday, he was the first one I called for a column that began:

In the hours immediately after terrorists flew airplanes into the Pentagon and New York City’s Twin Towers on Sept. 11, Rich O’s Public House publican Roger Baylor paced anxiously between his pub and Pizza Time, the restaurant/bar next door that he also owns. Pizza Time has television sets; his pub does not.

“I was freaking out, basically,” he said. He began to think of the many people with whom he wanted to talk, who he should call. “Then I realized that I didn’t have to. I thought, ‘They’ll all be in here.’” Sure enough, as shifts ended regulars began to drift in. “There are a group of us, well I’m always here, we all sort of appear at the same time,” Baylor said.

The regulars discovered that Baylor had put a television on the counter up front – the first time a TV had been in the bar in three years. Those who wanted the latest news could get it, then find seats out of television range. “People would retreat back into the bar to talk, to get away from these images for a while,” Baylor said. “The first few days there was only one thing (the terrorist attacks) that they talked about.”

I offer this to provide context to a post last week in which Baylor contemplates retirement. He is younger than I am, and that is something I certainly haven’t figured out. Reading it I was reminded that what we expect beer might taste like has changed in 1995, but how we expect it might enhance the quality of our day to day hasn’t. Also, that while it may be cool to be a publican, it is also kind of shitty.

We can do better, right?
The story brilliantly delivers what the headline, “Women’s Work — What the Story of a 17th-Century Brewster Can Teach Us About 21st-Century Brewery Ownership,” promises.

It asks questions.

“What barriers, for example, did women like (Sarah)Frankes face when entering the 17th-century beer trade? How common were such brewsters’ experiences, and how did their work integrate into their larger, complex worlds? And most importantly, is this past really in the past, or is it something 21st-century women in beer have inherited?

“Equally, we can ask difficult questions about gender and brewery ownership today. Why are so many women brewery owners today married to their co-owner? What happens when a single woman who wants to open a brewery seeks funding? And if we ask you, right now, to picture an archetypical brewmaster, how many of you imagine a cis man?”

And more questions.

“But in excavating what we can of these histories, contemporary champions of women in beer must ask what conditions would enable even greater participation for women—especially those with fewer financial resources—to continue in the spirit of (Mary Lisle) and Frankes. The industry is eager for women to participate, but larger socioeconomic forces have always to some degree constrained the choices women are able to make about business ownership.”

Related: “Women Entrepreneurs Who Have Launched Their Own Beer Industry Businesses.”

You might also enjoy
– After this story about TRU Colors Brewing this news doesn’t seem like much of a surprise.

– The best beer cities in the United States? Happy to see Milwaukee so high, but wondering why St. Louis can’t crack a list that has Dayton Beach at No. 12.

– Why are beer growlers more expensive than six-packs?

A headline Gussie Busch would not have understood
Heineken buys out Led Zeppelin son’s craft brewery

Happy Labor Day

Hop picker - Christie Tirado artwork

Today is a day off for many workers in the United States, but not those where hops are grown. Harvest has begun, and Monday is just like Sunday or Tuesday.

The image at the top was created by Christie Tirado, whose artwork is being featured at Dry Dock Brewing in Aurora, Colorado, as part of National Hispanic Culture Month. She’ll be at the brewery to talk about her art and her mission on Friday. Details were in my August Hop Queries.

Since it is Monday, here are a few links:

– Cold IPA is not a style.
Huh?

Although it is not defined in the 2021 BJCP Style Guidelines, guidelines principal author Gordon Strong recently summarized a way to tell a drinker unfamiliar with “cold IPA” what flavors to expect. That’s the goal of having “styles,” right? It is a cross between an IPA and an American light lager.

– Protected Geographic Indication (PGI) style guidelines.

– Of course it took “took several months of planning and tests to find the perfect mix of biscuits, strawberry puree, grain, hops, yeast and water.”

– Pub love.

– Tmavé Pivo.

A question for the ages

Gordon Strong - BJCP styles

“(They) are meant to get people talking about beer, not to encourage people to be beer police.”

– Gordon Strong, speaking at Copa Cervecera Mitad del Mundo in Quito, Ecuador.

‘Massively decentralized iteratively developmental simulator’

Read last week: What Would Beer Taste Like Without The Internet? – A Rebuttal, from Jordan St. John, replying to a post by Jeff Alworth.

I pass it along not only because I think the combination of five words at the top should be put to music, but because it helps explain why the speed at which beers that don’t taste like beers that came before are being introduced.

Fifty years after Fritz Maytag bought control of Anchor Brewing Company in 1965, he talked about the importance of tradition, at least in his mind. “Mind you, there was no beer in the world more traditional than ours. Pure water, good yeast, malted barley, hops. Period,” he said in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. “No additives, no chemicals, no nothing. That was a theme we felt strong about. To make old-fashioned beer in a pure, simple way.”

Although I might like the beers being referred to, I also have reservations about the phrase “beer flavored beer.” Mr. Tradition shouldn’t act as a gatekeeper.

With that in mind, from St. John:

“[Today] you’ve got tens of thousands of brains working on creation in concert in what may as well be a massively decentralized iteratively developmental simulator, sharing their data with each other in real time via social media. The technology has turned us into a computational device.

“When you see a brewer or brewery post on social media telling you about their product, whether it’s the strength, technique, malt bill, hop varieties, hopping rate, etc, they’re not only trying to position it to the consumer, they’re participating in a larger evolutionary discourse that is extant across an entire industry which has more participants than at any point in global history.”

You might also find these interesting:

– When friends actually did let friends drive drunk.

– Josh Noel confesses he owns 147 hard plastic beer can holders. I’ve always taken them back to breweries (not necessarily the ones they came from) when I was buying beer at their door. I would be happy to trade them for a pour.

– Interesting observations in a story about the young bosses of Silicon Valley who rode their unicorns to fame and fortune. May apply to some brewing industry members.

A reckoning. “Patience for visionaries wore thin. Founder-led companies started to seem like liabilities, not assets.”

A familiar attitude. “In start-up lore, Mark Zuckerberg pioneered the modern boy boss. Carrying business cards that read, “I’m C.E.O., bitch” and ruffling Wall Street feathers with his ‘disrespectful’ hoodie . . .”