this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
68 points (100.0% liked)
Bay Area
1316 readers
70 users here now
Discussion for all things Bay Area.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yeah, fair enough any business running for over a 100 years has done something right. However, the amount of (craft) beer competition in the last century just wasn't even close to the level it is today. In 1978 there were only 89 breweries nationwide. There's more than that in the Bay alone now. Considering how many really great local breweries and beers are now available, yeah I don't think their products were good enough to stand out. Then again this is a problem a lot of breweries are having, they are not unique. I never said their beer sucked btw.
Craft beer isn’t new though. It’s been booming for decades. We could say that they didn’t ride the IPA wave and maybe that marketing failure was just enough to sink them. Their distribution was also lousy. I never saw their taps out of state. After visiting them, my sense was that they were just a small-minded, small-scale business. And small businesses have a harder time surviving the ups and downs of the marketplace. They made a bad deal with Sapporo. They went under. None of this besmirches their core product, which is a classic and loved by millions.
Craft beer isn't new, but it has been building up to this point, especially in the last decade. The number of US breweries has quadrupled in this period and the past couple of years I've easily had many of the best and most interesting beers I've ever had in my life, often from local Bay Area breweries. That's all very new, and the "classic" couldn't compete when there's better, or let's say at least more interesting choices available. A more likely story for declining sales than "distribution and marketing issues" for a brand which is far more well-known than almost any other SFBA beer with the backing of a global megabrewer.
There's too many IPAs though on that we can agree.
Well I just saw the other comment with the vinepair article, and while I think competition from the explosion of craft beers is a part of it, the stories of mismanagement hurt to read :(