Trends, and the Trendy People Who Are Trending Them

A rare cross-posting from my Session Beer Project blog, because there's more here than just session beer. 

"Not Even Justin Timberlake Can Save Bud Light Platinum"

You know how I know session beer is the smart new trend for craft brewers?

Because the big brewers are making higher ABV beers.

Check out this story in Ad Age. ABInBev and Miller Coors are betting big on boozier beers.

That appears to be part of the playbook for MillerCoors and Anheuser-Busch InBev, which have turned to pricier, higher-alcohol line extensions to recapture share from growing liquor brands. The latest entry: Miller Fortune, which will debut next year at 6.9% alcohol by volume with a marketing strategy aimed at luring millennial males during nighttime drinking occasions.

The brew, in the works for months, follows A-B InBev's recent launches of Bud Light Platinum and Budweiser Black Crown, which both check in at 6% ABV, compared with 4.2% for most light beers. The goal for brewers is to reach variety-seeking drinkers whose habits lead them to the liquor shelf and away from beers their fathers drank. 

(Can anyone tell me what the latest sales curves are like on Platinum? Thought I heard they sucked. Oh, here it is: "Not Even Justin Timberlake Can Save Bud Light Platinum")

Guys, guys, guys...People don't want beer with more alcohol. They want beer with more flavor. And Bud Light Platinum doesn't have beer flavor, it has added flavor, artificial flavor. Session beers have real flavor, and that's what people want. Good luck with the big beers; you're only about eight years behind the curve.

King of Beers now the duke?

Budweiser passed another milestone this week; on the way down. The iconic beer brand's 20+ year slide continued, and Coors Light passed it, headed up, moving into the #2 spot in American beer sales according to a story in Advertising Age. Budweiser hit its peak in 1988, selling 50 million barrels (50 million barrels! Of just Budweiser! All U.S. craft brewers' 2011 sales put together should be about 11 million barrels) and then sliding ever since, including a 4.6% slide in 2011...which actually represented a slowing in the rate of plummet. Total 2011 U.S. sales for Budweiser were 17.7 million barrels, an amazing decline since 1988. Of course, Bud Light's rise has pretty much made up for it, and 17.7 million barrels is still more than most of the world's breweries sell altogether...but wow.

What happened? Smarter people than I have guessed at that one. "Light beer!" is the usual answer offered, explaining it as Americans' desire to get into better shape. Well, maybe...only what's up with the boom in steakhouses, and sugary liquors, and...craft beer? As far as that goes, how the hell does "Light beer!" explain the huge growth of Yuengling Lager? Yuengling Lager, a "full-calorie premium" beer, will likely blow through 2 million barrels on its own this year, and is, if anything, accelerating. (Add'n: when I first wrote this, I forgot the other obvious example here: it's not Pabst Light the hipsters and bike messengers are drinking, it's Pabst.) "Light beer"? Bullshit.

Light beer has seen huge growth, but there are other factors here. I think some of the problem is fratricide. There has been cannibalistic action between brands in the A-B house, and Bud and Bud Light are not the only ones. When you have a number of large brands -- Budweiser, Bud Light, Bud Light Lime, Bud Select (several cases a year are still sold), Michelob Ultra, Busch, Busch Light, Natural Light, and so on -- that are this close together in taste and character (okay, granted: Bud Light Lime does taste a bit more different than the others), and require a huge expenditure on marketing merely to create an illusion of difference...success in one camp is more likely to mean failure in another. This is, I believe, a major weakness for the big brewers, and it's just now starting to crack wide open.

Does that explain how Coors Light is growing? Well, no! I'll have to cogitate on that...especially since it's one of the very few mainstream beers that is growing. Is it the blue mountains? Hey, maybe.

How Things Have Changed

Saw this piece in Slate's The Big Money (thanks to a tweet-link from Beer Business Daily's Harry Schumacher (who just started following me on Twitter, so I returned the favor...and immediately reaped more benefit than I suspect he ever will)) about Bud Light Golden Wheat buying up all the ad time on an SNL episode back on October.

Old news, right? Wrong. Here's the little bit of relevance that makes this a year-story rather than a week-story. Blogger Dan Mitchell says this about the description of BLGW:

The campaign, like so many campaigns aimed at drinkers of mass-produced American beer, emphasizes the brew's "drinkability," which can be translated as "wateriness."

Now...can you imagine seeing that kind of flippancy in the news ten years ago? I couldn't, so I checked (thanks, Google): Bud Light and watery. The only hits I got were three: a taste test of Bud vs. Budvar in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a piece by my good buddy and fellow beer writer Ron "The King" Givens in the Daily News where he says old-time ballpark suds were "the cheapest, most watery stuff that could be poured into a cup" but doesn't actually tag Bud Light as that, and, well, a piece by St. Michael Jackson about how not all American beers are watery.

Sea change time. The whole paradigm has shifted. Smart, bright journalists now say mainstream beer is "watery." Do we call this the "Arrogant Bastard Effect," or the "Sam Adams Shuffle"? How about The Great Awakening? How about Truth Setting You Free?

American mainstream beer. I still do drink it, if only from regional brewers: I'll definitely still drink a Lager or a Straub, and I've said here I enjoyed slamming a 16 oz. Narragansett. But...is it flavorful? No. Is it something I drink regularly? No. Is it refreshing? Yeah, for the most part, it is. And is it sweet to hear a mainstream journalist casually refer to it in terms of 'wateriness?' Yeah. Definitely. One more indication that we've hit that tipping point.

The Session #25 -- Love Lager

It's The Session, beer blogging on a common topic, and this month John Duffy of The Beer Nut asks: "I want to know what's so great about [plain, yellow, fizzy lagers] and what's awful. Are we talking just lawnmowers, barbecues and sun holidays here, or is there a time for some thoughtful considered sipping of a cold fizzy lager?" See it all here, shortly.

There are going to be a lot of folks reminiscing about when they drank fizzy lager this month, I'm guessing. I put plenty of them down my steaming craw back in the day, God knows (and some of them came back up). There's going to be people "giving them a fair chance" and deciding that yeah, they really do suck. There's probably even going to be some "screw you, I'm not drinking those." As I said: I'm guessing.

I'm not going to do that, even though I'd planned to. My first beer, icy Rolling Rocks with the band, all that jazz. But screw it. Philly Beer Week calls, and I've got to get ready and get down to it. So I'm just going to pre-game a little with a tallboy (that's a pint can, for you Euro-styles) of Narragansett.

Is that good? Pre-gaming isn't, really, but on the other hand, it's been a long, crazy day, frantic e-mail as I get caught up going into the weekend full-tilt, like street-luging down Negley Ave. in Pittsburgh...and I could use a beer, just to slow down a little. Grainy, a little sticky, fizzy (and that's where most of the bitterness comes from, the fizz), and...not much else, really.

Is that bad? Well...I guess, if I was looking for much more. But you know, I drink soft drinks, too, I like to drink, and if I drank beer everytime I drank, I'd be like people describe Winston Churchill, in a constant state of varyingly mild inebriation. So this fits in that. I'm in the moment. I'm not thinking about it, normally, though I am now, of course. But mostly I'm thinking about the music that's playing (Nick Lowe, I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass), the upcoming evening (train ride, opening tap of Philly Beer Week, seeing friends and brewers, maybe hanging around and hitting one other event), my son coming home, the dogs nosing around (bright-eyed little beauties)...life.

I can do that with a glass of Sierra Nevada Torpedo. But it demands more attention. This...I was going to say is mindless drinking, but that's not really right. It's effortless drinking.

Is that bad? I don't know. But I don't really care, either. This is beer for other times. Beer for old friends. It's social. Should I be upset when my friends offer me fizzy lager? I'm not, except for a fairly short period in the early 1990s. I got over that. I draw the line at light beer, but that's okay with almost any mainstream drinker; that doesn't challenge them. Beer isn't about beating people up, any more than food is. At least, not for me.

Well, I'm done. Been nice sitting with you, but I've got to go. It's been nice. We should do this again sometime.

I'm hosting The Session myself next month: Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em. Rauch it up. Be there.

The Famous Narragansett Beer

Look, I'm cooking dinner, so this is going to be quick. I did a story for...someone, can't remember right now -- American Brewer! That's it. Anyway, I did a pretty extensive sidebar on the revival of Narragansett. These guys are doing the revival of a retro brand better than anyone I know, and I told them so. I remember 'Gansett, just barely; it was way in the early days of my drinking, and they were already being brewed elsewhere.

Anyway, like I said, quick, cuz I gotta slice mushrooms. They sent me a sample sixer of 16 oz. cans of Narragansett Lager, canned in Rochester under their supervision. Whatever. I had it in the garage, and even though it's 66 outside right now, the garage is still nice and cool. And when I opened the door to get a dinner-making beer, that was the first thing I saw. Mmmm, cool can of lager? Mainstream, American, lager? Swill, yellow fizzy beer, pisswater, as so many of the geekerie say, so very very nicely?

Yeah. And it's tasting okay. Light, a hint of bitterness (I think they said it's about 15 BU), and some body, and an edginess to it that's feeling good as I hoist and slosh it. Retro? Yeah, the beer and me. I can drink some of these, or this one, anyway. Backsliding? Maybe. Hey, it's beer. It's a quick night. And right now, this is hitting me in a good place.