Early in the winter of 2007, Albert Cramer, the owner of Warsteiner Brewery, invited me to spend a weekend with him at his winter home in Florida. Albert had built an unusual house on the beach near Orlando some years earlier. The design of the house was similar to a castle with four turrets. The garage, which occupied the entire lower floor, boosted a German country side scene on the walls and a cobble stone floor. Every level had a clear view of the ocean. The bar, located in the upper middle floor had a view overlooking the ocean and was framed overhead by an old cooper kettle from the brewery. To say the house was unique is an understatement.
Albert invited me to his home to show me some new products he wanted Warsteiner to import into the US market. I had suggested to him that he should brew a light beer, given that Heineken had recently rolled out their light with great success.
Albert presented three new products, all Warsteiner mixes. These new products were 60% Warsteiner premium and 40% flavors: cola, orange and lemon/lime. Because they were a mix, they were low in ABV, registering in around 2.9% each.
Until this time, all flavored beers introduced into the market had failed. I brought this to Albert’s attention, including the fact that some of these failures had a sizable marketing budget supporting the product. Albert’s idea was to get ahead of future competition. He believed that in the coming years, flavors in beer would be the new big thing.
I suggested that we first test market these new products. He rejected that idea and wanted to roll out all three of these in all markets. My next suggestion was to do a sampler pack enabling us to pre-sell the pack to a big box store and find out the response from the consumers and retail market. This too, was rejected after Albert figured out that the brewery would have to manually put the bottles into the cases.
At the winter meetings in Germany, a few months later, and the idea of the flavored new products were on the top of the agenda. Only this time now the brewery added a Radler along with Warsteiner Light. The Radler made sense along with the light beer. What Warsteiner ended up doing was to sample all the US major light beers and from those, the brewery created a liquid based on those flavor profiles. The light turned out to be a very good light beer.
In the original plan, the brewery agreed to support the mixes with an initial marketing budget of $200K to be used in key markets. Once the beer was ordered and on the way, this support was changed to an incentive to be paid upon getting sales. Without the support, these products had no chance even though a number of distributors had done a great job of getting the beer out and to the consumer. Warsteiner ended up writing off most of the mixes.
Now, in 2015, the industry is seeing such mixes and flavors enter the market with great success. Not Your Father’s Root Beer and Coney Island, also a root beer, are the hot new flavors. Word on the street is that we will soon see a Wheaties Beer, Ginger Ale Beer, and just announced a Pop Tart flavored beer! Maybe we will soon see alcoholic products from coke. Instead of Coke Zero and Sprite Zero, how about Coke Plus and Sprite Plus?
Ten years later, it is clear Albert Cramer was ahead of the industry with his mixes and flavors. If Warsteiner had supported the favored beers with marketing, Albert’s products could have easily been the leader in this category. Business has only two functions: marketing and innovation.
BeerFodder ;
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