BeerMatt

Roger Protz has posted about the supermarket-led sales of beer in the UK and the power their supermarkets wield over even the brewers. This could easily be a pointer for what’s to happen in Australia with the supermarkets controlling a substantial portion of off-premises sales in Australia and quickly moving into homebrand beers to compete with even our biggest brewers. Brewers big and small should be very concerned at the prospect of less shelf space, less prominent displays and pressure for lower margins.

It’s worth revisiting a Four Corners report on the economic power of the big supermarkets from a couple of years back called The Price We Pay. We all like to save a few dollars, but it can end up being a false economy when this leads to higher prices or smaller range and selection.

It’s been a very busy week so I’ve only just been catching up on some reading of beer news from around the world, and a couple of things struck me as a I read a couple in succession. First I read this…

Leaving aside that fact that this 600 word self-congratulatory article about their marketing genius barely even mentions that the product is beer (the only words that indicate that this could be an advertising campaign about beer are the words ”clean, crisp taste”. The rest could be about anything. It is just a fast-moving consumer good after all.) But the point is to note that Lion “increased its spending into television, print and radio advertising to ensure its target audience of young metropolitan men are aware of the extra content such as websites, video diaries and the like that builds up the ”back story” essential to give a brand credibility.” Note too that they credited their six advertising and media partners.

Then read this story in marketing magazine B&T about Fosters whittling down a list of 117 agencies and selecting its stable of 21 marketing, advertising and PR partners (all good people, I assure you, many are avid readers this blog for some reason…morning all – congratulations on being selected!)

These show the cost of advertising in the world of commodity beer. Recently, the SMH noted that in the 12 months to November 2008, Fosters’ VB brand spent $5.3 million in advertising, up from $3 million in the same period in 2007. A recent article in the Financial Review, which has no weblink, said Lion Nathan’s CEO Rob Murray increased the company’s marketing spend by 30 per cent when he took the top job in 2006 to bring it to “between 8 to 10 percent of annual net revenue”. That’s revenue, not costs, this must make marketing the single most expensive ingredient of beer.

And then I saw this about Lion in NZ putting prices up, citing the cost of glass and aluminium.

It always seems that when beer prices go up, it’s the cost of ingredients that get’s the blame (though as I’ve noted, it’s never the cost of sugar which makes up more than a quarter of some of these beers – even when the price of sugar doubles), never the cost of the expanding teams of marketers or the advertising.

I wonder why that is.

An oak-aged, brett-infused hop bomb

Those who know me know that fashion is not my thing. I have no care for it. I’m the type that, when I find a shirt I like, I will buy three  (usually plain blue) so that I don’t have to worry about buying any more for a while. Clothes are a utilitarian thing. Shoes are to be worn, should vaguely match your belt and the colours of the pants and shirt shouldn’t clash.

So when my wife pointed to a picture of a shoe in one of those free ‘lifestyle’ (read advertising heavy) magazines that turn up in the mail weekly and pointed out how impractical, ugly and ridiculous it was, I was entirely in agreement. But then suddenly I had one of those moments. I realised that there would be people out there to whom fashion matters. People who would be able to lecture for hours about how, yes, the shoe isn’t to be worn day-to-day but that it pushes boundaries and shows the designer is rethinking the point of ’shoe’, crossing barriers and merging styles. That such discussions about such shoes are the point of the fashionista’s life.

It was a short leap from there to think about the discussions I have had recently about BrewDog’s Tactial Nuclear Penguin or Sink! Or discussions I have had about the characteristics of single hop IPAs, or the current debate about whether a dark IPA is a contradiction in terms or whether it should more appropriately be called a Cascadian Dark Ale.

For some people, who have the same view of beer that I have of shoes, beer is just something to be drunk. It can have flavour, it can have character, it can reflect their personality but at the end of the day these are just minor footnotes to the consumption rather than the reason d’etre for the beer.

Lately I have read more comments dismissing beers such as Stone & Wood’s Pale Lager, Mountain Goat’s Steam Ale and Matilda Bay’s Big Helga than praising them, or even just accepting them. Which is fine, except the fashionable way seems to be to dismiss them with the statement ‘meh’, which offers no insight or discussion, merely indicates disinterest. To dismiss these beers in such a way is pretty much to say that every beer needs to be oak-aged, brett-infused, hop bomb that is a trial by ordeal to drink.

These less exciting beers may be tennis shoes, but they are comfortable, well-made tennis shoes with genuine leather uppers and we still wear those more than anything else. And sometimes that’s the point.

If you find the shoe at right in anyway ridiculous or impractical as you schlep around in a pair of old Nikes, just bear in mind that it is the footwear equivalent of the extreme beer that we covet…and that somewhere, someone is quietly sipping on a well made Pilsener, from the bottle, and really enjoying it…all the while laughing at us.