Banana Pants and Distribution Modalities

It's Friday night and it's time to relax and for me that means reading while drinking a frosty beverage and trying to do the whole synthesis thing my brain has supposedly been trained to do. I stopped at my local retail purveyor of beverages to go and wondered at the marvelous supply of bottles and what not on the shelf. This made me think things:

The breadth of what this purveyor carried was wide in breweries, but not wide in variety. Granted, this was a gut check, not actual pen and pad recording observation, but it felt like what I saw was a wide array of breweries "safe beers". This made me realize that despite the wild growth of the market recently, we're seeing a few narrow things get presented to a wide percentage of the audience. Again, I was in a big regional retailer that gets foot traffic like you wouldn't believe. Safety in some ways is to be expected, but when you think about the banana pants craziness being created by most breweries it makes you wonder about the reach of bonkerism.

So... naturally that leads into my thought about a breweries nature vs. their distribution modalities. (What, shush, I couldn't be at GABF this weekend, so you have my beery brain inflicted on you)

There seem to be two distinct modes for breweries to operate in:

The Traditional Model (Anchor, Sierra Nevada, etc): From way back in time immemorial when it was fashionable to wear an onion on your belt, this was the way a brewery was run. Concentrate on your local market, build your accounts slow and steady, provide consistent approachable products and slowly extend your reach, county by county. Slow growth, slow risk, sustained growth.

This form of distribution was about the only way to be in the earlier days of the craft movement. These were the men and women out there educating the beer drinking public that beer didn't just have to be yellow and vaguely something. The education effort was aided by the focus on a small core of repeatable and reliable beer styles. Give people a taste, let them taste often and eventually they may be devoted to that flavor of a brown ale.

The HyperLocal: (Eagle Rock, Enegren, Craftsman, your local brewery not too far away) In a way this is the The Traditional Model, cut off at its knees. Every brewery starts hyperlocal, right? The question is: do you expand beyond that? What's your identity? You can look at a high flyer like Stone, for instance, and see that from the start the company's image and ambition wasn't tied to being a local thing. But look at ERB or Craftsman and you see breweries that are intimately tied to their community. This gives them a dedicated audience and a little more freedom. Folks in this mode, today, can take advantage of the education done previously and depend on their local audience, but there's still a need to hold a core dependable line that can reach a fair percentage of the market. The smaller batches can go crazy. Nothing prevents them from going the traditional model, but this seems to be a perfectly respectable stage for many many breweries. (It's also part and parcel of why I love craft breweries - the sense of the people behind the joint)

The HyperSpan: (Jolly Pumpkin/Bruery/Anchorage Brewing) This is the model for the full on nutbars of the brewing world. Most brewers start wisely with the "Hyperlocal" model and then expand. In the much better educated and enthusiastic market of today, a brewer with sufficient resources and steel hard belief in their product can swing wide across many territories and be crazy while doing it. Jolly Pumpkin is the first brewery I think of when I think this model. They started with their little brewery doing wild and wacky barrel aged beers as their sole lineup before anyone would even think to do that. Ron succeeded by sending small allotments widely across the country to find the people who were ready for his craziness. Similarly, Patrick Rue and the Bruery followed this model - go wide and shallow - to provide a net growth of people interested. Patrick added a masterful use of the "hyped beer" trend to promote the brand and his success. Anchorage Brewing is a special case of this because there the brewer had a special relationship with a distributor that could buy all of their product and send it nationally. If that's not the easiest distribution plan in the history of brewing, I don't know what is. In the non beer world, you can see this play out with micro-craft spirits or with Michael Fairbrother and Moonlight Meadery. Go wide with a niche product for success.

The Sam Adams: Please note, this model only applies if your name is Jim Koch and you entered the craft beer game early. This is the master plan of world domination via clever allocation of contract brewing, marketing and business savvy. I don't have it, but Jim Koch apparently has enough of it to be a billionaire now. The core of this plan is to do two thing: find your one great idea that is approachable, educationable, has snob appeal without being destructively so (aka Sam Adams) and find a partner who can grow your volume to match pace with your ability to market. Then you have to have the wisdom to anchor your product in the Hyperlocal (aka Boston Beer Company), use that market for wide research (Sam Adams Cream Stout) and have the good sense to bury your failures (Light Ship) and ignore them when "amking history" (Sam Adams Light). Once firm, you have to have the courage to actually break with your partners and fly fully on your own (with what 3 breweries now?). Plus, you have to be willing to entertain other business lines as needed to keep the company growing correctly. (Twisted Tea, Angry Orchard). Oh and win back the parts of the craft beer world, that hate you because you succeeded by "not being a real brewer" (really? shut up), by running programs that come directly to people's aid (the hop purchase program, small brewery loans etc) or promote the love of the stuff (Longshot). Ok, that seems like a really hard model to pull off!

Ok, so have I forgotten something or someone? Unfairly characterized someone? Missed a model?