The sun don’t shine on the same ol’dogs rear end every day….

In the spring of 2012, I was in Milwaukee to roll out Krombacher.  While visiting accounts with one of the salesmen, we stopped at the Pabst Brewery, which had closed in 1997.  Developers were in the process of turning the old brewery into a hotel, retail, and residential property.  The hospitality building, executive offices and retail outlet had been purchased earlier, and the old hospitality bar was open to the public for meetings, weddings and receptions.  The building itself had not changed in years and it was like walking back in time.  The owner was there and allowed us to walk through the executive offices, which were connected to the bar.  It was like a time-warp, with nothing changed since 1997, including the desks, that still had papers on them, and ash trays, complete with cigarette butts.  It was as if time stopped 15 years ago.

Leaving the Pabst, we drove past the old Schlitz Brewery, also converted to offices and used for school administration buildings.  Another sad sight for me as I had been in both of these breweries when they were at, or near their peak in sales.

Similarly, the two San Antonio breweries, Lone Star, with its Buckhorn Hall of Horns; and Pearl Brewing, with the Jersey Lilly, have also been transformed from breweries into retail and residential spaces.  Jax Brewery in New Orleans, is now a retail center; and the Falstaff brewery is mostly empty.  Henry Weinhard’s in Portland; Olympia in Tumwater; and Rainer in downtown Seattle have all been closed for years, some transformed into offices and retail, others just sitting empty.

There are many other stories of closed breweries around the country. What happened to them?  All of these breweries were in business in 1970s, most still around in 1980s, but are now gone.  If there truly is one point in time when the industry changed, one could point to the purchase of the Miller Brewing Co by Philip Morris…the day the beer world changed forever.  With the advent of PM’s millions in marketing, and the awaking of AB to their challenge, one could attribute the death of these breweries to these two factors.

Was the growth of AB, Miller and Coors from their marketing investment? Or was it from the collapse of the other breweries, leaving millions of barrels of volume up for grabs?  The logical answer is: both. But what would have happened had those breweries not made the mistakes they did and survived?

Since InBev bought AB, their share of market continues to slip.  In recent Nielsen scans, AB in down -5.6% in volume in the last four weeks, and down -4.3% in dollars.  MillerCoors is down -4.3% in volume, too.  Yet crafts are on fire, growing near +15% this year, on top of double digit growth in 2012 and 2011.  Maybe crafts are taking advantage of what AB and MC did to the regionals years ago by sourcing their growth from the volume losses of AB and MC.  As they say, “the sun don’t shine on the same ol’dogs rear end every day!”