Back to Building Flagships (Or, the Power or Nostalgia)

I have been enjoying beer (legally) for 35 years, and even I am not old enough to have experienced the early days of the American brewing revival. By the time I first heard about Sierra Nevada’s fall seasonal Celebration Ale, it had been around long enough that people were already starting to speak about it in hushed tones. The whole of my adult life, they have continued to do so.

As I was reading Doug Veliky’s recent post about this continuing phenomenon, I began reflecting on the role flagship brands and nostalgia play in fueling interest in beer. We’ve arrived at a liminal moment, well past the explosive era that preceded the pandemic, but not quite into the next one, which remains indistinct on the horizon. My sense is that most our our thinking is fuzzy as well, and lacking any clear sense of the future, we fall back on what we know.

In the decade of the teens, the lesson of beer was novelty and variety. Young people were fueling interest in beer, and they were excited about new flavors and styles. In an era before the teens, going back to the 90s and earlier, the lesson was the opposite: build a flagship brand and use it as a tentpole for growth. I detect a continuing novelty bias within the industry, a veneration of whatever might be around the corner. But could it be that the future might lie in a retrenchment in what came before?

More than most people, I have learned humility about predicting the future. It’s a lot safer to observe the past and present for clues. History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes, so trying to find the tune may be of use. Reading Doug’s post, I wondered what lessons we might learn by looking back at the scope of beer over the decades—the period described by Celebration’s life, say. Novelty and change are a constant, but perhaps nostalgia and continuity have been equally important as well.

Why Do People Love Celebration?

In his piece, Doug quotes Alex Kidd (DontDrinkBeers), who points out that Celebration is a member of a hopelessly passé style: “Dudes hate on resinous IPAs and ambers. If you love this beer so much why aren’t you trading for Nugget Nectar…?” He’s exactly right. Strip this beer of its label and hand out tasters at a bar, and very few people are going to order Celebration. This is amazing given the love that beer still enjoys—but also revealing. People love Celebration in spite of the beer. Or put another way, they love it for something else.

Beer isn’t just beer. It’s a potentially charged emotional experience. When you crack a can or a bottle, you open a world of imagination, memory, and place. People love Celebration because it’s Celebration: a beer made by one of the most admired and authentic breweries in the world, released once a year and associated with the arrival of cold weather. It’s a tradition, and it anchors our experience in something stable and familiar. Sierra Nevada has national distribution, so it’s a shared experience. Like any tradition, the experience has been available to anyone over the past forty years. I came across Celebration in the early 1990s, and what I discovered was identical to people who came across it in 2009 or 2022.

When Nostalgia is Not a Dirty Word

Celebration Ale is a touchstone of shared experience. That reverence people had already developed was an inseparable component to their relationship to the beer. Sierra Nevada had become a hallowed institution. California as a place was in the mix as well, a land that has for so long represented both the future as well as deep roots. Even in the 1990s, I wasn’t just drinking a beer, I was joining a circle of shared experience.

We invite children into our rituals in exactly this way, perpetuating them. Thanksgiving is around the corner, and it offers an example of how all this functions. Even as we adults have been engaging in this national ritual for decades, a new generation will enter the circle and begin to knit together their own relationships to cranberry sauce and the Detroit Lions and the chill of early winter and that particular feeling the scrum of family creates on that fourth Thursday in November. We may not like cranberry sauce and until recently nobody wanted to watch the Lions, but we feel warmly about them anyway. They’re all part of it.

Beer is nowhere near as potent as Thanksgiving, obviously, but it contains the echoes of its basic structure. We need the experience of stability and continuity in our lives. We need nostalgia, that sense of homecoming to a safe and knowable place. We need the new, as well—exploration and creativity are also important parts of being human. But without a grounding experience, we are unmoored.

Beer has spent a lot of the last decade focused on novelty and discovery. Many breweries didn’t even bother with flagship brands, offering only a steady stream of new products. Breweries dating to earlier eras watched interest in their flagships dwindle, and many neglected them. Part of Sierra Nevada’s genius has been doggedly supporting their classic old beers through fat times and lean. The new beers they created mostly made sense for a brewery with these old beers, too, which helped preserve their value. It’s no wonder people keep coming back to Celebration every year. It’s a bit like Thanksgiving in a bottle.

While I don’t want to predict the future, it’s safe enough to observe the present and see that old brands are doing pretty well. One obvious example is Guinness, which is on a huge winning streak despite having a 65-year-old flagship beer and a brewery that’s creeping up on three centuries. The biggest beer in the U.S. today? Modelo Especial, which will celebrate its centenary next year. Breweries that have old brands might do well to support them. Maybe the next thing is the old thing?

As the great absurdist philosopher Don Younger used to say, “It’s not about the beer. It’s about the beer.” Maybe now more than ever.