Who do you think said these things?<\/p>\n
– “What’s probably changed the most in a generation is the variety-seeking nature of today’s beer drinker.”<\/em><\/p>\n – “I think the craft brews bring a really important interest among beer drinkers in how beer’s made, why beer’s special. I am astounded with how curious consumers are about beer, the process of beer.”<\/em><\/p>\n – “Beer’s a local business.”<\/em><\/p>\n Based upon the way the sentences are phrased and that it wouldn’t exactly be news for Deb Carey of New Glarus Brewing to say stuff like this you probably already knew it wasn’t somebody from the the world of small-batch brewing.<\/p>\n In fact, the Wall Street Journal<\/em> has an interview with Leo Kiely, CEO at Molson Coors, today in a feature labeled “Boss Talk.” (Available by subscription or by buying the dead tree version.)<\/p>\n You may not consider what he has to say about management style, boosting share prices and consolidation in the beer industry relevant. If that’s the case, here’s one of my favorite links of the past week<\/a>, with geeky details about Ballantine IPA in 1939, that I haven’t got around to writing about.<\/p>\n Still with me? I’m certainly not saying the guys in the boardrooms think like we do. Consider the first question and answer.<\/p>\n WSJ:<\/strong> How have American beer tastes been changing?<\/p>\n Mr. Kiely:<\/strong> What’s probably changed the most in a generation is the variety-seeking nature of today’s beer drinker. I sort of grew up as a beer drinker in the late 1960s, early ’70s, and my brand set was an import, Heineken, and a domestic brand, Schlitz. Today I watch a beer drinker in his late 20s, and he’ll have an import brand, maybe two, he enjoys. He’ll have a craft-brew brand. And the bulk of his beer drinking will still be a light lager.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Why, oh why do the big beer guys keep saying this? I guess they wouldn’t were it not true at some level but plenty of people have made it clear they aren’t ever going back to international light lagers.<\/p>\n To Kiely’s credit, the newly established AC Golden Brewing isn’t designed to throw bunches of advertising dollars at the “flavor of the year” before moving on to the next fad.<\/p>\n This gives us added flexibility and agility, and another way to get innovative ideas to market without redirecting critical resources from our core brands. We feel this gives us a real competitive advantage as a brand builder in the beer business. AC Golden will focus on patiently introducing a new brand and allowing it to grow over time. Look, we introduced Blue Moon 13 years ago and today it is one of the fastest growing craft-style beers. We like to call it our 13-year overnight success story.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Then there is White Shield in England. The Guardian<\/a> recently offered a great story, beginning:<\/p>\n “It is miraculous. There is the gleaming, sprawling mass of Coors’ state-of-the-art brewery which looks more like an oil refinery than anything else. And there, to one side, in the Museum of Brewing, is the Worthington White Shield Brewery, a classic arrangement of copper mashing tuns and fermenting vessels, wooden floors and wooden joists, and even an old-fashioned hoist used to lift the sacks of malts. It’s like coming across the Koh-i-noor diamond in a box of theatrical paste jewellery.”<\/p>\n That’s not what’s going to be going on in Golden, Colo. But I know that next week at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver that I plan to try the Blue Moon Chardonnay beer that I missed last year (it won a medal). It was developed in Golden. So was a peanut butter beer. <\/p>\n Not sure I need to sample that one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Who do you think said these things? – “What’s probably changed the most in a generation is the variety-seeking nature of today’s beer drinker.” – “I think the craft brews bring a really important interest among beer drinkers in how beer’s made, why beer’s special. I am astounded with how curious consumers are about beer, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[292],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4wTn-5u","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=340"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}