These are a few of the taps at Dr. Rudi’s rooftop bar in Auckland, a busy place with plenty of outdoor space and views of Viaduct Harbour.
But what made the spot special for me is the Wi-Fi password: smoothcone.
That’s because Dr. Rudi is a hop first released in 1976 and called Super Alpha. Her name was changed to Dr. Rudi in 2012.
Smooth Cone is her mother.
Queenstown, New Zealand
The mutilated portrayal of history you discover sitting in the Columbus, Ohio, airport.
“In 2011, Greg Hall, owner of the craft brewery Goose Island retired. AB Inbev stepped in and bought the brewery. They kept the name but cut corners, reducing the beer quality in every measurable way.”
The headline that sucked me in? Why craft beer fosters better communities than its corporate competitors.
My first thought was that this could be a product of AI. But apparently it is an act of promotion for this book: “Producing and Consuming the Craft Beer Movement”. The hardback edition will cost $160, almost $10 a page.
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.
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.
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.”
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– Why are beer growlers more expensive than six-packs?
A headline Gussie Busch would not have understood
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