It wasn’t long after the Stroh Brewing Co. bought the Jos. Schlitz Brewing Co. in 1982, that Stroh decided to roll out their brands nationally using the Schlitz distributor network. My Schlitz distributorship was located in far South Texas, where, depending on your definition of what “summer” is, can last up to eight months. Stroh decided to brew the liquid in Detroit and ship it to the Longview brewery for packaging. We introduced Stroh to the South Texas market in the middle of the summer. Miller Lite was on fire at that time, and we were excited to have Stroh. Schlitz still had a sizable market share itself. Stroh’s liquid from Detroit was much heavier than Schlitz’s, and even more so than Miller Lite. We got great distribution and trial, but given the heavy liquid, the brand never got accepted. The rest, as they say, is history.
Later that decade I was in Oregon running Coast Distributors. In September of my first year, I overheard some ladies in the office discussing how hot the Oregon summer had been! I said, “You mean that one week where it was 90 degrees?” A summer in Oregon is more like a winter in south Texas!
Crafts in the northwest were beginning to grow in popularity with a 1%+ share and breweries like Rogue, Full Sail, Red Hook, Widmer, Portland, and Bridgeport, were full flavor and high ABV. In other words, easy to drink in that mild and cool climate. As you know, crafts now enjoy over 30% share of the volume in the northwest.
A recent addition of Modern Brewery Age highlights several of the sessionable light craft beers: Deschutes River Ale (ABV 4.0%), Avalanche Ale (ABV 4.4%), Kentucky Light (ABV 4.3%), and Starr Hill Grateful Pale Ale (ABV 4.7%). Recently, I sampled some of Mill St. Breweries products from Canada, two were around an ABV of 4%, and one was 5%. These included a wheat and stout beer.
More and more, breweries are making lower ABV crafts, which, could, and should, bring more of the domestic drinkers to the craft segment. In fact, the craft definition of “sessionable” according to the Brewers Association is “it can be a beer of any style with alcohol strength of 5.1% ABV or lower, while exhibiting a balance of flavors and high drinkability.”
For years in Texas, the TABC, required that manufactures label beers with over 5% ABV, either an “ale” or “malt liquor.” So, if you had a German Pilsner with an ABV over 5%, you had to place the word “ale” somewhere on the label. Fortunately, most of these regulations in Texas have now changed to allow beers to be labeled correctly, as is done in other states.
Historically, all breweries either adapt to the market place or they die. Now that the industry is experiencing this movement to sessionable beers, just how many IPA’s do we need? So the question is: are sessionable beers, crafts’ definition of “light beers?” For the smart breweries, winning is not a sometime thing, it’s an all the time thing!
Leave a Reply