There are many items that the craft beer world has on its to-do list.
My rant today is about distribution. Or as sometimes happens, kegs sitting around.
Some breweries self-distribute which takes time. On the plus side, you are dealing with only your beers. So “you” are educating your customers on your beers. “You” know can store your beers in the best conditions. “You” know how fresh your beers are.” But that it is a lot of time that can be used in many other areas of brewing life. Some of which may be more important.
The seemingly natural progression seems to be distribute yourself until you are big enough to “sign” with a distributor. You invariably then sign with more and more distributors as your territory grows.
Finding that right someone who loves your beer as much as you do, seems to be the harder task. And this is the link of the chain that needs to strengthened, especially as more and more breweries start reaching that tipping point between driving the truck and working the hand cart yourself and having someone else do it. More distributors of different sizes and in different towns will be needed.
And when I say size, I am talking about a distributor to brewery ratio that isn’t skewed to the point where a business is repping such a big binder of beers that they can’t possibly sell all of them with the same vigor and they can’t Quality Control the living conditions for kegs and bottles (or cans).
Both of those issues will impede the growth of craft beer than anything Miller/Coors/Budweiser does primarily because it is hidden from sight. Say a new customer tries Brewery A’s beer at their taproom and really likes their Belgian Pale Ale. Next week they see it on tap but it tastes different. Next week, they don’t see the beer at all. A few weeks later they see a bottle of it and it tastes different there too. Mind you, it may not taste bad in the subsequent tastings but it has lost that extra zing.
How does a customer determine (if they even decide to) why the beer is less than it was. Different batch? Recipe being tweaked? Most people don’t know beans about how a craft beer gets to a tap at a bar. Even less know who the distributor for each brewery is. I can tell you who a few local breweries work with but past a handful I don’t and I write a blog about craft beer.
In my example, the cause of intermittent availability could be caused by how much was brewed but it could be that because it is part of a huge book of beers that it is getting missed and therefore not out to people who would put it on tap or stock it on shelves. It could taste different because there was a glut of it and some didn’t get put into a cold box in a timely manner (or at all). That dry hopped IPA may have waited at a distributor for a while before making it to a bar who then waited for a tap to become free to put it on.
Now the brewery shouldn’t have to track kegs. That is why they got a distributor! Bars shouldn’t have to be in charge of quality control. They are busy on the front lines educating customers. What can change is competition.
The more distributors there are, the better chance that your favorite brewery can find one that has the employee and cold box capacity to carefully handle their precious beer. It may be that a smaller house has better staff training and can move the product faster because of it. A bigger company may be able to spread the wealth to a wider clientele. Either way, the fear of losing clients will cause the underperforming distributors to up their game or pay the price.
The goal is to have the beer presented in its best light for each and every customer.