Trend Alert: Deschutes Scraps Bombers for a Broader Audience
A day before the press release arrived, reader Jason Wells alerted me to this news:
“Just saw the newly 12 oz. packaged [Deschutes] Abyss at my local New Seasons. Picked some up and it is delicious, of course, but what is really interesting was the price. A 4-pack was $20. In previous years, a 22 oz. bomber also sold at the same price point. I don’t need Bill’s Six Pack Equivalent Calculator to tell me that The Abyss is more than half off this year.”
Deschutes’ barrel-aged stout debuted in 22-ounce bottles fourteen years ago, and became the capstone for the brewery’s barrel-aging program. For a decade, the large-bottle format was popular with customers and favored among breweries because of the impressive profit margins. If memory serves, those first bottles retailed for around $12 and ticked up from there, later approaching a dollar an ounce. In recent years, however, retailers scaled back shelf space and customers, replete with choice, drifted away from tentpole releases like The Abyss.
As the 22-ounce format withered, breweries have been experimenting with different approaches. Curious, I asked Neal Stewart, VP of sales and marketing to walk me through Deschutes’ thinking. The brewery is moving away from 22s for the Reserve Series, he told me, detailing the trends they’ve observed. He included a bullet list of issues:
Price per ounce. There are so many great beers out there these days, it's hard to sell one bottle of beer for 1.5x or 2x the cost of a 4 or 6-pack.
22oz or 750ml. It's a lot of beer for one person.
Cellar or drink? You can't do both when you only have one bottle.
Mostly on the warm shelf. Big bottles rarely get cold box space and therefore are shopped less.
Stewart added:
“The 4-pack of Abyss solves these issues. The price point is quite attractive, but we actually expect quite a few retailers to break up a 4-pack and sell them as singles for somewhere around $5.99 - $6.99 which is a little closer to the original cost per ounce. Overall, the smaller serving size feels more appropriate and obviously allows the consumer to drink one now and cellar one for later.”
This tracks with my impressions. The bomber size has always required a big commitment. The Abyss is 11%—roughly four standard beers in total alcohol, and that leaves aside the density and intensity that make it anything but a sessionable stout. They cost as much as a decent bottle of Pinot, and you have to consume them in a single sitting. Nearly halving the bottle size makes the beer a lot more approachable.
Drinkers seem to agree. On Twitter, they echoed Stewart’s comments:
“An 11% bomber is pretty hefty compared to a 12oz pour. More people will be willing to buy a 4pk or 12oz bottles where accounts sell them as singles.” Brett Sandstrom
“Plain and Simple, most smart craft beer drinkers would rather crack a 12oz bottles then dome (or waste) a 22oz or 25.4oz bottle.” Scott Mercurio
“I really think consumers will drink more when it's in 12 oz bottles. I find myself waiting for an occasion to open 22 oz and I will buy less.” Ben Frost
“I stopped buying the 22 as the price got higher. My local store was selling singles for ~$5. I picked one up where I normally would have avoided the more expensive and larger bottle of years past.” Kill Nye
In his initial question, Wells wondered how the economics of this shift work out, noting the hit Deschutes is taking to the per-ounce price. Stewart didn’t touch on this, but it points to one of the inevitable pinch-points of a mature market. Breweries loved 22s because the profit margin was so much higher than any other package. For small breweries, it helped offset the disadvantage of their inefficiencies of small scale. That funny little quirk in the market was bound to end, and it has. The margin on The Abyss will drop, but the price point is triple that of their regular beer.
As a final note, I’ll add this. Deschutes moved to a four-pack, but kept the beer in bottles. Stewart didn’t mention the “signaling” aspect of the choice, but I find it instructive that the brewery didn’t use cans. Deschutes makes a lot of specialty beers, but Abyss is the most visible “rare” product. When the brewery makes an argument for its stature among American breweries, it starts with Abyss. A younger brewery cultivating an image of trend-setting cool might have chosen cans. But bottles still project an image of elegance cans can’t match, and while Deschutes is willing to change up the format in order to better serve customers, it appears they’re not willing to scrap the beer’s identity entirely.