On one end of the market, flavor is driving sales. Leaders in the craft segment may be suffering, but as Bud (down 5.6% this year) and Bud Light (-3.6%) both continue a slow death spiral, mass market craft like Goose Island are flying off shelves. So how does a flavorless, blandly corporate beer becoming one of the few success stories in the domestic mass market sector? Branding is the only answer anyone can identify.
Read MoreOver at Willamette Week, Matthew Korfhage has an article about Oregon's tightening beer market. The story is an Oregonized version of one we've seen applied to the national market a number of times over the past couple years. Thumbnail: in a tightening market, it's harder for the biggest players to maintain their barrelage even while small and mid-sized breweries continue to post big numbers. This is, in fact, what you'd expect in a mature market and it's not particularly surprising. Korfhage's case-in-point in the article is BridgePort, which is busy imploding before our eyes--but I think this illustrates a different lesson: in a tightening market, a brewery can no longer make a series of stupid decisions and expect to avoid tanking spectacularly.
Bryan Roth, beer's Nate Silver, has applied some data journalism to the idea that rare beers dominate "best of" lists--and beer geeks' hearts. Riffing on that, he wondered about causality: do we just happen to like rare beers, or do we like them because they're rare?
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