If you’re in New England, you’d be well advised to go ahead and say your goodbyes to Buzzards Bay:
WESTPORT – Buzzards Bay Brewing will discontinue production of its eponymous microbrews.
“We’ve had a good run ” owner Bill Russell said, “but we have decided to head in a different direction.”
The surprise announcement Wednesday was influenced by a number of factors, Russell said, primarily a drop in demand. Sales had declined from a high of 5,000 barrels of Buzzards Bay brews in 2002 to a projected sale of around 100 barrels in the next seven months, Russell said.
That’s a hell of a drop in production. Where did it all go? Apparently right into the gaping maw that has swallowed many otherwise successful (but ultimately very small and by definition fragile) regional breweries:
“Our best years were when we distributed it ourself,” he said. “It’s hard to compete with national brands, representing huge corporate interests, that muscle their way into the marketplace.”
The big distributors could give a shit about anything that’s not called Bud/MillerCoors. And, let’s face it, nowadays almost all distributors are “big” (for a good rundown of the near-monopolistic situation, read this). If your beer doesn’t sell itself in business-sustaining volumes (complete with customers screaming for it at every store and bar if and when that tap or rack space goes away because your distributor had some big-assed Bud installations to do that week), you’d better self distribute or you will go out of business. Full stop.
Low volume, regional breweries like this depend on fanatical attention to every detail all the way from the grain to the tap handle. And, to you small regional brewers out there: If you are not on tap with at least one beer at every bar worth entering that’s located within 20 miles of your home brewery, change distributors or self-distribute. You are going to go out of business otherwise. It may already be too late. Seriously. Don’t kid yourself that breweries with good beers won’t fail. They do all the time. Even once mighty Celis was laid low on the altar of “better” distribution, and they had absolutely rabid, Smokey and the Bandit level fans.
But what about this so-called “different direction”; isn’t that just a pleasant euphemism for “closing the brewery”? Turns out it’s not:
“We are now producing a new product line called Just Beer that we can distribute ourselves locally,” he said. The new brands include John Beere, Moby D. and CIA (which the company Web site describes as “mysteriously smooth.”)
Ummm, okay. That sounds like a real winner. Something to base your future on. Nothing more profitable out there than gimmick beers and/or beers that try to out-Bud Budweiser. Newsflash: you will not be succesfull at trying to convert Bud drinkers to your Bud-alike. You cannot compete on price, and there is no bandwidth there to compete on taste. You think your quality is going to be better than a brewery producing a substantially identical yet biologically-derived product to the tune of millions of barrels at twelve very different locations? Why does anyone go after the American Premium Lager space? Even in a brewpub setting it makes no sense at all (time consuming and therefore costly with extremely marginal chance for success in terms of winning a steady and, by definition, choosy customer-base for craft beer).
Fortunately, it turns out they also contract brew for Cisco and Pretty Things, two fine product lines (we’ll forget for the moment some rather, uh, troubling bottles of Cisco I’ve encountered on various occasions and bask in the glory that is Indie IPA). But then comes this:
New ventures are also waiting, he said, including a partnership with an Irish brewer called Strangford Lough to produce and distribute some of their labels in the United States, one of which will be called St. Patrick’s Best.
“It’s very exciting for me since it’s part of my heritage,” he said. “They will ship us the syrup in 300-gallon boxes. It comes in a bladder inside the box. We will reconstitute it and ferment it here. It’s produced in County Down with Irish grain and hops, so it will have that unique taste and we will distribute it here.”
Indeed, reconstituted syrup will have a “unique” taste. Unique to Malt Liquor, that is… But with a name like “St. Patrick’s Best” I guess one should expect to wake up in the gutter (empty 40 nearby, natch) with what seems to be a tomahawk lodged in the front of one’s skull. Part of the heritage.
Lemkin 