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The Beer Apocalypse: The World After Big Beer – Displaced People

May 18, 2015 · by Oliver Gray

(This is the first post in a series of theoretical end-of-world scenarios probably resulting from my reading too much dystopian science fiction. The series will cover how the people, places, markets, and beer of the United States would change if Anheuser Busch and SABMiller just up and vanished. I’m not playing apologist or anything, just having fun with what-ifs. #longread warning)

The unifying craft cry resounds obvious and singular: big beer is bad.

It’s bad because it doesn’t taste good. It’s bad because it’s corporate. It’s bad because compared to modern beer, it’s adjunct junk. Repeat ad nauseum.

What the claim lacks in tangible, objective proof, it makes up for in passion and consistency. The rising tide of local, independent beer would stop at nothing to push the current market share nearer and nearer 100%, completing a role reversal that would radically change the definition of “American beer” for good, and for better. At least that’s the common assumption.

Given the money involved, these giants would not go quietly in the night, nor would they go alone. If smaller, local breweries do eventually take over a majority of the market, it will be the result of a slow and steady decline; an empire falling from internal Cran-Brrr-Rita centered conflict, backlash from fed up citizenry, and other really poor decisions. It will be years – decades even! – of lost battles, attempts to retake old ground or stake flags in new, maybe even resulting in the transformation of the big beer companies as we know them as they finally decide the only way to compete is to brew for beer, not brew for money.

But let’s just say that small beer fans got what they wanted, and for the sake of this piece, they got what they wanted overnight. That by some divine stroke or extraterrestrial intervention, Anheuser Busch, SABMiller, and all their corporate subsidiaries just went poof. Eaten by zombies. Spirited away by cosmic horrors in the midnight deep. Vaporized in a hellish post-nuclear landscape.

What would the United States look like without “big” beer?

(To keep things more simple, I’ll focus on the two beer behemoths only, as they do represent 68.2% of the overall US beer market.)

Displaced People

First things first, a lot of people would be waking up to get ready for jobs they no longer had. Even after Carlos Brito’s “fat-trimming” during the InBev take over in 2008, Anheuser Busch alone employs nearly ~14,000 people nationwide. SABMiller employs another ~10,000 (as a point of reference, Apple employs ~98,000, but that includes on-site Apple Store employees). When flooded by ideas from the media, it’s easy to think of corporations as executives; suits and yearly bonuses and unnecessary salaries. But behind the overly designed blue and red and chrome of crushable cans, a football stadium’s capacity of people need and rely on the companies to pay their mortgages, feed their kid, live their lives.

If you included the entirety of the international parent companies in my made-up scenario, the loss of big beer would put over 200,000 people out of work. While that may seem like a drop in the bucket when considering the global population, it would seriously, negatively impact areas and cities in direct proximity to the breweries (like St. Loius, which homes nearly ~4,200 of the aforementioned ~14,000).

And that’s just people employed directly by the breweries. The beer industry relies on a massive logistical network of distributors and transporters. It’s difficult to pin down exact numbers because the three tier distribution systems splits the labor of moving and selling beer too minutely to easily research metrics. But if nearly 70% of the beer made and sold in the country disappeared, it’s safe to assume there would be significantly less need for industry support staff, at least initially.

Distributors would need fewer salespeople. Trucking companies fewer drivers. In states where beer can’t be sold at gas stations or grocery stores, we’d see a sharp decline in the number of in-liquor-store employees needed; a direct result of stores losing money from flagship macro sales. Those sales might rebound as other breweries flood into the ginormous AB/MC shaped hole, but it would take time to build consumer confidence and physically brew and ship enough beer to meet demands.

While accurate, all these numbers omit those people on the economic periphery who might indirectly rely on the sales of macro lager: tiny, local bars in small towns who depend on alcohol sales to stay afloat, the bartenders and wait staff they employee, the landlords who rent the space to the bar. If a very popular drink (41% of drinkers prefer beer over wine or spirits) suddenly vanished, the bar would either have to make up sales by selling other beer (that its blue-collar based clientele might not like, or more importantly, be able to afford), or other liquors. My guess is many would close, leaving large social and economic dents in places that are already swirling the recessional drain of middle America.

Price would remain paramount. “Big” beer is cheap, while “craft” beer is expensive, partly due to economies of scale. Without the ubiquitous macro lager, drinkers would either be forced to pay a premium for beer (until smaller breweries managed to speed-brew lagers on a cheaper, more sprawling scale), or drink something else. At the behest of stretched wallets, expensive “craft” beer could indirectly lead to a rise in sales of cheaper spirits in the 75.42% of the population who make less than $50,000 a year. Assuming not everyone wanted neat whiskey or vodka or rum, the preferred drink may manifest mixed, soda or juice to cut the harshness of lower tier spirits. Soft drink companies (who also own juice and water brands) like Coca Cola would drink up those new found profits gladly.

It’s also worth noting that the directly displaced employees would have to go back into a highly competitive, noticeably limited job market. The beer industry is expanding rapidly, but smaller breweries have smaller staffing needs, and might not be prepared for the additional space or money needed to bring in quality assurance, marketing, and financial personnel. While the best brewers from AB and MC might find new jobs at Sam Adams, Sierra Nevada, and New Belgium, the “craft” section of the industry might not be able to fully (or properly) integrate all these additional resources, either forcing people to seek entirely new careers, fight tooth and nail for positions in smaller breweries that probably pay less (and would probably require relocation), or start their own breweries in a densely packed, ever bloating market.

The ripples of losing ~$80 billion in big beer sales would eventually hit every corner of the country, causing financial chaos and social displacement. It’s easy to bully big beer for their group-thunk terrible marketing ideas, or for just not tasting anywhere near as good as the other options we have today, but we can’t forget how many people actually rely on the fizzy yellow stuff to make ends meet.

Up next in the series we’ll look at the brewing infrastructure that would go fallow in: The World After Big Beer – Abandoned Places.

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The Caped Brewsader: How Craft Beer Might Save the World

May 7, 2014 · by Oliver Gray

(Heads up: #longread incoming!)

Without fail, whenever I pull out all of my homebrewing gear to prepare for a day of beersmithery, someone stops, looks around, scratches their head, and asks questions.

“Are you going to boil crabs?” “What are all these buckets?” “Is it beer yet?”

I laugh and dutifully answer any questions the voyeur might have, trying to think of other situations in contemporary America where a person might suddenly become so enthralled by an activity that they engage in deep conversation with a complete stranger.

Some latent power in brewing radiates, pulses out an aura of homemade creativity that demands attention and explanation.

It could be the novelty of the whole process; despite the American Homebrewers Association estimate that one million people actively homebrew in the US, many have never witnessed the primordial swirl of freshly hopped wort at boil, especially not in their neighbor’s front yard. It could be the spectacle of the water running off in all directions like the spokes of a liquid wheel, the brilliant shine of sanitizing glass carboys as they snatch shards of star, the bags of sweet grain piled on the stairs of the porch lazily awaiting their destiny.

It could just be that I happen to brew on clear, sunny days, when perhaps people’s temperaments more align with curiosity and conviviality, and they would have stopped to talk no matter what I was doing.

But I don’t think so.

Few people seem to ask about the “why” of beer. Discussion rages about the what, and the how, and as of late the who, but the why remains relatively unprodded, unprobed. Some truth hides behind the obvious answers: taste, ethanol alcohol, social and emotional lubricant, a catalyst for an unforgettable but unrememberable Friday night. But these few reasons are prosaic duhs, as boring and generic as claiming the “why” for cooking is caloric survival, and don’t satisfactorily explain the powerful cultural and economic surge that craft beer has seen over the past few years.

There’s a bigger reason craft beer festivals are selling out, small town brewery tap rooms are standing room only on weekends, and major news outlets and publications are scrambling to cover this whole “beer thing.” A bigger reason rooted in the attitudes of people willing – nay, happy! – to spend a significant portion of their income on something that will quite literally be pissed away.

The much decried Millennial generation was raised with the foolish notion that what they do should matter. Many sit disillusioned by desk jobs that their parents would have blissfully embraced, lamenting the slow, corporate death of their dreams to change the world, if only in a small way. The psychological underpinnings of our generation may be misguided, unrealistic, possibly naive, but it’s too late to throw the car in reverse. What has been instilled cannot be uninstilled. The way we were taught to view the world influences every action, every decision, every purchase. Behind every Tweet, every status update, every Instagram shot, the heartbeat of a generation who wants to do thumps unrelenting.

As a result of our inborn desire for meaning, Millennials have helped to rejuvenate the cottage industries through the likes of Pinterest and Etsy; brought homemade and handcrafted out of County Fair obscurity, back into the self-wrought prime time of legitimate goods. Creating things by hand gives purpose, a tangible product that acts as an extension of self-worth, proof of a secular reason for our existence. Our generation naturally gravitates towards artisinal and artesian not because of marketing, or the condescending, popular idea of ironic hipsterism, but because these products – the ones that at the very least have a veneer of being lovingly crafted – resonate deeply in our emotional and psychological core.

Craft beer started gaining widespread popularity around 2008, which coincides roughly with the time most Millennials had settled down into somewhat steady jobs, and had managed to lasso some of those wild dollars into a stream of disposable income. With that money, they could have easily chosen to drink Budweiser, Miller, or Coors, and some did. But a sizable chunk didn’t. They sought out local, smaller breweries, supporting suds that were made by people passionate about their jobs, their processes, their beer.

They went after beer that not only tasted good in their mouths, but felt good in their hearts.

It was a natural reaction for anyone paying attention; Millennials saw mass-produced as oil and gears, not flesh and blood. Budweiser was Kraft Cheese Singles and an afternoon stood in line at Walmart; cheap and accessible, sure, but hollow, tasteless, and sort of sad. Miller Lite, Bud Light, Coors Light, and Natural Light clattered about on their soulless steeds, the four horseman of the anti-Do-It-Yourself apocalypse, unflinching, unforgiving, oddly proud of their stranglehold on mediocrity. Traditional American macro beer stripped away the uniqueness of personal tastes, the artistry and pride that could (arguably should) be associated with brewing, replaced by machines, business plans, and the proverbial bottom line.

Bryan D. Roth provided a brilliant breakdown of the recent comments from Pete Coors (chair of the Molson Coors Brewing Company and Chairman of MillerCoors), and his fundamental misunderstanding of his own market. We all laugh at his enthusiastic get-off-my-lawnmanship, but Pete’s comments echo down the abandoned palace halls of an aging dynasty, the last bemoaning cries of emperors who grow more infirm and less able to rule their kingdoms every day. The old royals are up against a force they’ve never seen before, a hive mind they can’t easily muscle out with lobbying dollars or court room shenanigans, a group who defies “well it has always been this way so it should stay that way” logic. Craft beer supporters aren’t playing by the rules of the big guys, and the big guys have no idea what to do about it. Eventually, if this trend continues, they’ll be left to innovate or fail, the prior seemingly less likely given their current models.

And here is where that hidden “why” steps out of the crowd, fist held high in solidarity. The reason craft beer has done so well is because it is the embodiment of an entire generation’s way of thinking, a gold and amber representation of this nation’s resilience and hope. Every barrel of local IPA pours triumph in 20oz servings, proof that we can change the world, for the better, despite often overwhelming odds. The all-grain beer industry marches forward as the economic vanguard for other industries, to rattle the armor of posturing Goliaths, to prove that ancient weathered monoliths can and maybe should fall, to shine as an example and a beacon for those who think the long night of start-up business is too dark and dangerous to traverse.

We’re ushering in a new era of quality, local goods, one small brewing company at a time. We’re promoting ethical practices in product design, execution, and promotion. We’re encouraging environmental awareness, business transparency, and fiscal responsibility. We’re collaborating, not (always) litigating, reaching out instead of pulling back. We’re taking pride in domestic, dry-hopping the American dream one cask at a time.

And it’s working.

Beer might just save the country; hell, one day, it might just save the world. It doesn’t hurt that it tastes pretty damn good, too.

I am stout. I am the porter. I. Am. Beerman.

I am the stout. I am the porter. I. Am. Beerman.

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