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Category Archives: The Beer Store

Discount Beer February – Labatt Products

February 13, 2013 7:51 am ⋅ 3 Comments ⋅

I have been a little bit surprised by the willingness of the large brewers to engage with Discount Beer February as a concept. So far, Labatt, Molson and Sleeman have all jumped on board and have either sent, or are sending, samples. I suppose it’s not that strange when you consider that these are brands that don’t get a lot of attention, especially from a credible reviewer. It also says a lot about each brewery’s self awareness that they have sent the things that they have sent.

As far as I can tell, the main component (possibly the only component) required for showing up in the Discount section of The Beer Store’s website is price. Since the minimum pricing for beer in Ontario is now $29.35 and nothing in the Discount section costs more than $30.00, I feel like it’s safe to assume that all 60 brands listed are competing on the basis of $0.65 worth of wiggle room per flat of 24. That’s about three cents a bottle in pricing variation when you factor in the occasional sale.

Labatt is responsible for 14/60 brands in the discount section of The Beer Store, which is not bad, when you consider that 9 of those are various Lakeport brands that they must have picked up in 2007 and which have not yet phased out of the market. The remaining brands are variations on Busch, Lucky Lager and Labatt Blue. The following paragraph will probably cause some consternation over there.

They didn’t send Labatt Blue, and I suspect that this is due to the fact that they don’t consider it to be a discount brand. The pricing falls squarely into the discount category. I don’t believe that it has been this way for very long; maybe three years.  It had been for a very long time the national flagship for Labatt, and I further suspect that the global focus of parent company AB-InBev on Budweiser, Stella Artois and Beck’s as their representative brands might mean that Blue is less relevant. For folks working in London, Ontario there must be some sting in seeing Blue priced as it is. I’m not busting chops here. I’m simply pointing out the cognitive dissonance that must be taking place as the global strategy changes.

Enough maudlin Canadiana. Let’s focus on what they sent over:

BRAVA (a taste of summa, apparently.)

The Brava brand was acquired from Lakeport in 2007. It’s meant to be a response to the popularity of Mexican lagers like Corona and Sol. That would have worked fine in 2007, but since the advent of lime flavoured lagers, you would have to wonder why a canned version of a beer whose main attraction is the ability to shove a lime in the bottle would be necessary.

There is definitely an aroma of corn here and what hopping there is is grassy. You could easily take the piss out of Brava, but you have to remember two things: First, the template is Corona, which is not exactly a palate wrecker. Second, it is designed to be drunk as cold as possible, not entirely unlike a Brazilian Chopp.

VERDICT: Unfortunately, it’s February, so cold beer in quantity is not really a priority. Were it summer, I’d suggest that you’re really only buying Corona for the iconography that goes with it, so why not Brava? Also, good luck getting the radio jingle out of your head anytime before march.

LUCKY LAGER

Lucky started in 1934 in San Francisco at the General Brewing Company. It has walked a long road to get where it is today, ostensibly including several rebrands under other labels. You know that generic white can with “BEER” written on it that shows up in the 1984 movie Repo Man? People think that was Lucky Lager. Ordinary People, man.

It is apparently to Vancouver Island what PBR is to hipsters. It was always a West Coast brand.

I find Lucky to be somewhat harshly carbonated. It has almost no hop character, a corny body and a relatively sour finish to it. I don’t find much to recommend it. I suspect that the reason it exists in Ontario is because it does so well out west.

VERDICT: I don’t get it. I think the cult following out west is probably a residual thing like Olympia has. The vaguely retro look can supports this theory. I guess they probably wouldn’t think much of Laker out there.

BUSCH

Busch was introduced in the 1950’s, the first AB product introduced after the repeal of prohibition. The website says they’re using two-row, six-row, munich malts and corn. It also lists four hop varieties, which doesn’t really make any sense to me, since at least two of those varieties didn’t exist in ’55. The slogan suggests that it tastes as smooth as its name, which also doesn’t really make any sense to me.

I am not the target market for this beer, which sponsors fishing tournaments, hunting and Nascar. It is 4.6% alcohol, making the existence of Busch Light somewhat questionable. The market exists, though. It’s 9 on the big 10 list at The Beer Store.

Busch is, well, it’s light and watery. Despite the fact that it’s an adjunct lager, there’s not a great deal to indicate that fact. There’s no DMS corn aroma, but there’s also not a great deal in terms of grain presence. There is detectable hop bitterness, but you really need to be wanting to find it. There are no off flavours.

VERDICT: I can see why people would drink this. If cold, it would be refreshing. As long as you were drinking it while doing something else, it would be fine if uninteresting. In fact, I suspect that when people say “hold my beer and watch this,” this is the beer you’re left holding as they are taken away in the ambulance.

LAKEPORT PILSENER

Number 8 on the Big 10 list at The Beer Store is Lakeport Pilsener. This is another brand acquired in 2007.

As you’ll recall from last week, Lakeport Pilsener is the beer that replaced Laker for Lakeport in 1996 or so. It was, putatively, brewed to exactly the same recipe as Laker Lager. I imagine that it has since evolved into a distinct product. Lakeport Pilsener has significantly more hop presence than any of the other Labatt offerings so far, but there’s not much in the way of hop aroma. The bitterness is all on the palate. What adjunct there is, is minimal and there’s a detectable cereal grain thing happening.

VERDICT: For the money, this entirely acceptable. You can sort of see why Labatt bought them out. I don’t think you’d want to drink it anything but really cold, or think about it too much.

Labatt did send one other product, which they seem to perceive as a discount brand despite the fact that it’s priced out of the category by six bucks: Labatt Crystal. I’m not going to review that at the moment, since I have plans for it for later in the month.

Posted in: DISCOUNT BEER FEBRUARY, The Beer Store ⋅ Tagged: , , , , , , ,

DISCOUNT BEER FEBRUARY

January 31, 2013 9:47 pm ⋅ 8 Comments ⋅

I have currently been writing professionally about beer for two and a half years. Next week will be the beginning of my third year with Sun Media. I’ve discovered that if you write about beer all the time, you run into a few small problems that nag at you.

The first is that you end up with fatigue. It’s not exactly palate fatigue. It’s not like hops have a cumulative effect and the alpha-acids aggregate in your cerebrospinal fluid. At least, not as far as I’m aware. It’s more like novelty fatigue. There are truly great and interesting things happening in Ontario as far as the development of new flavours go. Lackey’s doing good things. McOustra’s doing good things. Volo, Nickel Brook, Bellwoods, Indie Alehouse, Beaus… The envelope push is a constant in the craft beer scene at the moment. That’s a good thing, but familiarity with that breeds contempt for it.

At its purest, this kind of brewing is about innovation and it’s incredibly personal. This, when you strip away the marketability of the thing, is about a man and a conceptual vision of a product. The first batch might not make it. The third batch might not make it. It’s about honing a beer to make it adhere to a vision. This is part of what gives craft beer its wonderful appeal. The finished beer is the result of hours and hours of thought and inspiration and effort.

But it’s still, what, like, 60 litres of pilot batch? That’s like… 110 pints when you count spillage. If it’s 4oz glasses, it’s still not that many of them and probably less than the number you’d come up with because of more spillage in service. I have a national audience at Sun Media. I can’t write about a beer which, if it is any good and people come back for another sample, will get tried by maybe 80 people. By the time I write about it, it’s gone and it may never come back.

Because it’s not utile, I am thence forced to look at something that should be intellectually thrilling because it’s out there in bleeding edge, Chuck Yeager Stick Of Beeman’s territory with some amount of detachment.

It’s the detachment that’s fatiguing. I feel like I should be just tickled as all hell that I get invited to try this wild, wacky stuff, but instead it’s like “Uh… What can I write about this?” I can’t write about everything: Microsoft Word has a file size limit. I don’t want to offend people by not writing about them, especially if their only sin is being middle of the road. The end result is that I sit here in a deep blue funk, drinking too much coffee, afraid to go to events that I would probably enjoy.

Potentially the worst part of this is that when you’re talking about the entirety of craft and import sales in Ontario, and this is the bread and butter of every single one of us writing about beer, these market segments make up 20% of the beer market in Canada. There are just a huge number of people who are not drinking this stuff, and whose interest in reading about it is therefore pretty minimal.

This is why, for the month of February, St.John’s Wort will be hovering gently in the DISCOUNT BEER Category of The Beer Store.

You may consider it something of a busman’s holiday. The great thing about discount beers is that, as far as I’m aware, no one has ever bothered to cover them. These are brands which do not necessarily merit a PR representative. Let me tell you how I know: I have written to all of the producers (or will in the coming days) in order to request the standard two bottles of beer for review (In case one breaks in transit or there are off flavours or it’s any good and I’d kind of like a second one). There are 60 beers in the discount section. It is not worth the time of the producers of these beers to open a case and pick out two beers. They seem hell-bent on sending the minimum size of packaged beers.

They care enough to get some free publicity, but not so much that honest evaluation of the product will lead to tears in some delicate soul’s mash-tun. They know that it’s the discount section. Believe me. They know.

A friend of mine, Andrew Walsh (who judging by the photographic evidence in TAPS magazine is no stranger to the aftereffects of cheap beer) once claimed that his favorite beer was Brava. “What do you want for 30 bucks,” I am paraphrasing him as saying. In some sense, he’s right. These are utility beers, not really designed for maximum flavour. They aren’t hip. They aren’t trendy. The only way they’re getting near a barrel is if Donkey Kong throws one at the display. They are more or less likely to be consumed in great volume by people who think that a 24 is worth $29.95 and who are primarily concerned with the mood altering effect.

I’m not one of those people. I haven’t bought a 24 since student life in New Brunswick. I’m a prospective beer judge. I’m Cicerone Certified Beer Server and with any luck a Certified Cicerone by the end of the month. I went to brewing school (for a while). I’ve designed (in collaboration) some pretty well regarded stuff and I read voraciously on the subject of beer.  I’m decided to take this seriously.

Evaluations will be completed on all 60 beers listed in The Beer Store’s discount category. The samples will consist of 4-6 ounces. The notes will be honest, but will reflect the fact that these are not products intended to stand up to significant overthinking. Marks will not be deducted for the fact that the brewery has sent me 48 times the amount of beer I require and therefore forced me to find creative ways to get rid of it.

Look: Lager makes up something like 90% of the total beer market. Discount lager probably makes up something like 30% of that, which makes it larger than the entirety of craft beer. Intellectual honesty therefore demands that someone actually look at the Gorgon. If nothing else, by the end of the month, we will be able to crown a champion and we may have ushered in the era of the discount category beer snob. Even a trailer park beauty pageant has a winner.

I have the feeling that by March, I’m really going to be looking forward to a barrel aged something or other with six kinds of hops and 78 well chosen IBUs and a grain bill the size of Venezuela.

Posted in: The Beer Store ⋅ Tagged: , ,

The Beer Boutique

June 14, 2011 10:32 pm ⋅ 5 Comments ⋅


Yesterday, I went to the launch of The Beer Store’s new venture: The Beer Boutique.

See? It's pretty ok. Plus, later, I ate some of that cheese.

One of the criticisms that I keep hearing about The Beer Store is that it is something of a monolithic entity. As one of two corporate entities that is allowed to sell beer in Ontario (I am excluding brewpubs here for the simple reason that comparatively speaking their output is Lilliputian) it operates under a privileged position. For a very long time, there was no competition to speak of for The Beer Store. The difference between the LCBO and The Beer Store in terms of mandate is that the profits from the LCBO go to the provincial government and the profits from The Beer Store go to the owners of The Beer Store: Molson, Labatt, and to a far lesser extent, Sapporo.

If you’re the LCBO, it therefore makes sense to appeal to consumers. If remodeling the stores, as they did during the 1990’s, can increase profitability, it makes sense to do so. It increases the revenue for the province; People like to shop in places that cater to their tastes. If you have stands with samples and a wide selection of products and a pleasant atmosphere, consumers will spend more. Never mind for the moment that consumers don’t have a choice but to shop with them. They’re the only game in town for Liquor. Aside from The Wine Rack, they hold a monopoly on wine. The point that I’m making is that people will spend more if they like the store that they’re in. More sales equal increased provincial revenue. A remodel is a good long term investment, since the mandate is to create profit for government.

If you’re The Beer Store, on the other hand, and you control 85% of beer sales in the province, you don’t really need to do that. There are a number of protective systems in place. First of all, by its nature, beer is sort of unwieldy. The LCBO simply doesn’t have room to stock two-fours of beer. Or cases of twelve, for that matter. The Beer Store, for a very long time had the privileged position of being the only place you could buy beer in quantity. It still does, as a matter of fact. You had no choice but to shop with them, and if the store was dingy and grey or depressing and smelled like spilt beer because of the bottle return and you had to pick out which beer you wanted from a wall of empty bottles only to have them whisked out of the back room on a system of rollers, well… tough. In fact, the outsides of many locations are still dated from the last branding change.

Eventually, what I suspect must have happened was that the market changed sufficiently for the LCBO to take beer seriously. Since The Beer Store had a monopoly on volume sales due to space restrictions in the stores, the LCBO went after single bottles and high quality products. You can find some kind of craft beer in just about any LCBO south of Sudbury at this point. I’m told, for instance, that the Sharbot Lake selection is surprisingly robust.

The LCBO must have made enough of a dent in The Beer Store’s market to make them rethink their policy of having stores that sort of make you feel as though you’re waiting in the passport office (Passport to flavour country, amirite?!?!).

So you’ve got The Beer Boutique.

It’s a large box store with walls filled with cold beer. There are large concave shelves to show off a number of the products. There’s a large oak table as the room’s centerpiece, which is lit by hanging piping in which sections are replaced by fluorescent tubes. The floors are sort of a diagonal wooden parquet and the walls are brick faced. It comes in at 2700 square feet. They’ve chosen basic black for most of the accent pieces and those sections are periodically interspersed by monitors showing information about beer. It’s nice.

It reminded me of a Couche-Tard (Mac’s Milk) that I had been in in Outremont last week and I said as much during the event. I mean, it was a particularly nice Mac’s Milk. What I essentially mean by that is not that it’s low rent. The thing is that it’s obviously a scalable, reproducible design. You could work with the design in that store and send it just about anywhere. It would play equally well in Ottawa or London or Kingston.

The people I was talking to (some pretty high ranking Molson and Labatt guys and one Beer Store employee whose name I didn’t catch, but who reminded me of the Spiderman villain The Kingpin, mostly because of the baldness and pretty darn swanky suit and silk pocket square) seemed a little crestfallen that I thought that. But that’s surely the point of the thing, isn’t it? You want it to be repeatable. They seemed to be under the impression that they had created something unique and interesting, when in reality, that’s not what you want.

Look, if you’re in a Bed, Bath and Beyond, you know it. There’s branding everywhere. Usually, the layouts are similar to the point where you can find a terrycloth robe, a rattan hamper and a Shake Weight blindfolded. It’s a measure of corporate branding. It’s the bare minimum for a successful chain.

It’s just that these guys are new at this, so my comments may have seemed unnecessarily churlish, when in reality, I’m simply thinking ahead.

The thing that surprises me about it is the pervasive impression that I got that the store was an experiment. “We’ll see how it does,” said The Kingpin. I wondered if it would work with the Liberty Village demographic, being as how it’s a mix of young professionals and some people of artistic temperament. No one can really say. It seems like hip young people might be a hard market to sway. I wonder if they’ve done that on purpose to try it out in an area with a difficult population to project. That would be a good idea. They might surpass their expectations in other markets based on that data.

Understand, though, it is pretty much a window dressing. The products are the same. The policies are the same. The new design throws the size of the craft beer section into pretty sharp relief. It’s half the size (maybe two thirds the size) of the buck-a-beer wall. It showcases just about every brand they have. I had no idea until yesterday that we had Keystone Light in Canada. I could have lived without that knowledge.

This is the Craft Beer section. Nary a two-four in sight.

On balance, it’s a nice store, but I don’t understand the timidity. They shouldn’t call it The Beer Boutique. The concept is a fallacy, since the concept includes no additional boutique products. It’s just a nicer store. What they should do is invest in renovating all of The Beer Stores to make them like this. Sure, the initial outlay would be some gargantuan sum of money, but it might make people want to shop there. It worked for their competition.

Posted in: The Beer Store ⋅ Tagged: , , , ,