Now that the dust (comments and counter comments, you’re wrong, I’m right) has started to settle on the latest craft beer imbroglio involving RateBeer and the ABInBev ZX Ventures division there are two things that I want to talk about. One briefly and one a bit longer.
First is that RateBeer lost a chunk of credibility and will now be viewed with more jaded eyes (at least) and with outright scorn from others in the future. I certainly hope they learned a lesson from the Wicked Weed Funk Fest debacle when it comes to their RateBeer Fest.
But what chaps my hide more than selling a stake is that they hid it, from multiple groups of people for close to 8 months and would probably have just let it ride even longer if not outed. Also, it would have been a gesture to allow users to opt out from having their beer drinking history in the grubby hands of ABInBev. Thank goodness, I haven’t rated any beers in the last couple of years. Though they probably would be OK with my review of the Golden Road Hefe. Bottom line, if you are hiding where you are getting your money from, you need to take stock of your choice of financier.
A second point came to me after reading Bryan Roth’s piece about data and the future of beer. (Read it HERE)
I kept reading the article and I see that ZX Futures seems to be infiltrating craft beer across the board, from grain to glass. But nowhere to be found was an explanation or theory as to what The King of Beers marketing was actually going to do with these companies or the data they glean from them.
A good example is ZX having a share in one beer website, October and the “high end” running a website, called the Beer Necessities. The latter is tactical marketing. Cloaking oneself in the company of craft beer. The former, is what? Beer Education maybe. But Budweiser can’t put a dollar figure on that. And they certainly aren’t going to pull a nationwide best selling beer out of the comments section.
ZX seems intent on gathering data but how will that help the mothership? What spreadsheet from PicoBrew or Northern Brewer or RateBeer will tell them what beer to brew and when? They might see a style trend coming and then going but they are not going to brew the next hazy IPA themselves and I doubt that they will be able to wrangle their 10 former craft breweries through layers of vice-presidents and managers into hopping onto a bandwagon early enough.
For the life span of craft beer, the industrial corn pop lagers have not once had the realization that perhaps they should make a full line-up of beers to suit the needs of all Americans. They have engineered beer to fit into a factory and a distribution chain and to be the same. The consumer has told SABInBev what they want but the consumer was ignored. The consumer drank beer that voyaged for months to the U.S. from Europe or homebrewed what they wanted for themselves just to get something/anything different. That need does not fit onto a self-driving 18 Wheeler.
“The more we know about our consumers and products, the better chance we have of anticipating their needs in the future.” Per Roth’s blog post, that is the goal of ZX Ventures. But what happens when the needs and what SABInBev can/want to provide are poles apart? Personally, I think they will succeed short term with their other goal of being a disruptive growth group. Creating havoc in beer world and splitting people into pro or con RateBeer, or just splitting people into smaller camps. I have already opined that I believe that is a long term bad idea because the comment section kerfuffles are like sunlight on their nefarious plots.
Now that I think about it, it is even more sad that RateBeer sold even a little of itself. Not only does that sale create a rift between the community it had created, but the data that will come out of it hasn’t been used in the past and I doubt it will be ever.
The only funny thing, so far, is how Noble Ale Works chose to distance themselves. They typed over their brewery name, beer names and descriptions with nonsense and song lyrics. A new form of redaction.
