St. John's Wort Beery Musings and Amusing Beers

Tag Archives: Molson

Discount Beer February – How We Got Where We Are

February 6, 2013 6:38 am ⋅ 4 Comments ⋅

(Much of the background information for the following comes from Allen Winn Sneath’s excellent book Brewed in Canada. I borrowed Ken Woods’ copy, but you should probably buy your own.)

The DISCOUNT BEER CATEGORY at The Beer Store exists for two reasons:

1)      Canadians didn’t drink enough Amstel in the late 1980’s

2)      You really liked those President’s Choice Decadent Chocolate Chip Cookies as a kid.

Clearly, this is going to take some explaining.

Picture it: Canada in 1992!

Brian Mulroney and his chin share the role of Prime Minister. Kelly Gruber is a sex symbol. Much Music is playing actual videos and the CBC is starting to phase out Beachcombers re-runs. The fine, stalwart, slightly inebriated people of Ontario cry out for cheap beer and their call is heeded by two men: Bill Sharpe and Dave Nichol.

Bill Sharpe had worked for at Pacific Western Brewing in BC and had done pretty well by them. He thought that he could make a go of private label contract brewing and approached Loblaws to gauge their interest. In order to take advantage of the situation, he would need a brewery and he would need financing to purchase a brewery.

He approaches Cott, who already produce the President’s Choice soda brands. They agree to finance the purchase of a brewery located in Hamilton, which until recently had been owned by Heineken and was used to produce Amstel. It was an unprofitable venture unless it was running at the full capacity of 330,000 HL and they unloaded it in 1991. The brewery is christened the LAKEPORT BREWING COMPANY and is operative by June, 1992. It brews a brand called Around Ontario. By September, they have created Laker and Laker Light. On December 11th, they launch President’s Choice Premium Draft.

You have to understand that Dave Nichol was as much of a rock star as a bespectacled, middle aged man with a canine sidekick who’s hawking a line of private label dipping sauces with names like “Memories of Bangkok” can possibly be. Personally, I think it was the chocolate chip cookies that did it. That, or the chocolate fudge crackle ice cream. The thing was that President’s Choice did really well as a store brand. Still does. They have their own TV show.

In 1992, they expanded to beer. The first batch of President’s Choice Premium Draft sold out basically immediately. In a genius marketing move, Lakeport takes out a full page newspaper ad, putatively apologizing to Dave Nichol, but really, capturing the attention of the public. The public ate it up and by June, 1993, Lakeport had 3% of the Ontario Market.

Was the beer any good? In a sense it didn’t matter. Dave Nichol was behind it. Did it matter that Dave Nichol didn’t drink beer? No, because the beer was cheap. At launch, Around Ontario was $5.95 for a six pack. PC Premium Draft was $12.50 a case. That undercut Molson and Labatt by about a dollar a case.

A dollar in price difference, or about eight and a half cents a beer, and suddenly, there’s an entire new category. In the summer of 1993, Molson introduces their Carling brand as a competitor and Labatt brings in Wildcat. The category is now 15% of the total Ontario Beer Market because “Hey. Eight and a half cents, man.”

The next few years are a little like a shell game run by a paranoid schizophrenic.

In 1994, President’s Choice decides to change over to Labatt. Dave Nichol, wheeler dealer that he was, still owned the recipes to Premium Draft, so they start brewing that at Lakeport under the name Dave Nichol. Essentially, there are now two identical beers competing against each other with no real differentiation in price.

In 1995, Cott sells the marketing rights to the Dave Nichol brand to Molson, meaning that Molson is now marketing a beer identical to the one Labatt is marketing. In the same year it sells Molson the rights to the Laker brands. Since Lakeport no longer has any brands to speak of, they launch a range simply called Lakeport, which uses the same recipes that Laker had used.

In 1996, Molson, possibly because they realized how bizarrely incestuous this was getting and decided that discretion was the better part of valour, sold the Laker brands to Brick, acquiring a small percentage of the ownership of that brewery in the process. Since Molson is fighting a battle to consolidate the ownership of their own company, using Brick as a cat’s paw to force Labatt to continue competing in a market segment is sheer Machiavellian genius, if not elegance in its simplicity. This puts Brick in a position where it can start acquiring other brands as well, like Formosa Springs.

In 1998, since the Lakeport Brewery hasn’t been running at full capacity, they go bankrupt. They’re taken over by Alpha Corporate Holdings.

By 2005, the discount category is a really big deal. That year, Brick sees a 325% rise in sales of their Laker brands. Lakeport has about 7% of the Ontario market share. President’s Choice, possibly sensing a shift in the wind, contracts their brews to Brick.

In 2006, the high point of the Buck-A-Beer craze, Lakeport has 11% of the Ontario Beer Market share and two of the top ten brands at The Beer Store.

In 2007, Labatt decides enough is enough and buys the Lakeport Brewing Company for 204 million bucks. That’s a pretty small price to pay for 11% of the market. (To give you an idea, that is 4% more than all of the craft beer market share in Ontario in 2013). They acquire the Lakeport brands and Brava.

In 2008, the Buck-A-Beer craze ends when Ontario raises the minimum beer price to $25.60. This obsoletes the incredibly catchy “Make ‘er a Laker, it’s a buck a beer” radio commercial, which we can all be thankful for.

In 2010, Labatt does something incredibly clever and decides not to sell a brewery capable of producing 10% of the beer in the province to a smaller, hungry rival in Minhas brewing. They do the sensible thing by gutting the brewery and figuratively salting the earth. This prevents anything like this concatenation of circumstances from ever occurring again, since no one really has the capacity to compete. It angers the Teamsters Union, but tactically it’s the best option.

In 2012, the minimum beer price in Ontario is raised to $29.35. There is no convenient way to turn this price into a catchy radio jingle, and for this we owe our thanks to the AGCO.

So, that’s why everyone owns all of the brands that they own even if many of those brands are more or less identical, historically. This sequence of events accounts for approximately 2/3rds of the entire market segment.

Wouldn’t it have been easier to just put down the cookies and enjoy an Amstel?

Posted in: DISCOUNT BEER FEBRUARY, The Ontario Beer Revolution ⋅ Tagged: , , , , , , ,

Molson’s New Packaging Line

June 28, 2012 6:44 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

I have a mildly complicated relationship with Molson.

This is probably because reality isn’t white hats and black hats. Craft beer isn’t Alan Ladd and Macro isn’t Jack Palance. Molson has a lot of strong points. They employ a number of immensely talented people, some of whom I like personally. My co-author Mark Murphy works out there, and he’s a heck of a guy. Also, most of the PR team people seem like nice folks who understandably remain vigilant about what they say around me.

They make beer extremely consistently in huge volumes, which is not an easy thing to do. Some of those beers are not to my taste, but you’ve got to respect that effort. I will admit that there’s nothing wrong with an ice cold can of Coors Light on a really hot day. You could do better, but you could also do worse. It was good enough for Burt Reynolds.

It’s also worth mentioning that I like their long term strategy with Six Pints. I believe the thinking is that promoting all beer is better than warring within the industry over a couple of points of market share. Plus, their management strategy seems to be that they should take the talented microbreweries they buy and throw resources at them to make their lives easier and their products better.

There are a lot of problems with Molson as well. They are owned by Americans, which I wouldn’t mind so much if the transitive property didn’t dictate that The Beer Store is currently experiencing 0% Canadian ownership. That’s not any one person’s fault, so it’s hard to get angry. It is problematic, though. You have to assume that they know there’s a coming push to review that situation and you have to assume they’ll fight tooth and nail to keep the 48% or so they own. They’re sort of obligated to. Doing anything else would be silly.

I think one of the reasons I have a decent working relationship with Molson is that I’m honest about the fact that they’re pretty largely a bunch of decent folks operating under a corporate mandate, and not some kind of dragon to be slain. Because of this, sometimes I get invited out to the Downsview plant to cover events and have a look at their new toys. The first time I went out there was to get a sense of the place. Craft brewing is all well and good, but a 10HL brewhouse is a human scale. To get a sense of what Molson does daily, you really need to stand next to a row of fermenters you could hunt for Red October in.That was not a press event. That was a personalized tour, which doesn’t seem to happen very much.

This was a press event. There were cameras and dignitaries and high ranking officials within the company. It was all to show off Project Acrobat. Project Acrobat is a 13.5 million dollar project that involves transforming an area of the Downsview Molson plant into the home for a new Krones flexible packaging line.

The new Widemouth bottle is a screwtop kind of thing.

I think that for most of the journalists and dignitaries in attendance, the story was about the economic development. Molson employs 1400 people in Ontario alone, which is pretty neat. The Downsview plant produces 45% of their national volume. 13.5 million dollars is a lot of money. All of this is good news for the economy in a vague, “look, people are still investing locally” kind of way that is reassuring even though it’s not specifically obvious what it will do in the long term. In order for it to seem important, you need the specifics.

It’s a 473 ml package, essentially meaning it is the same size as a traditional can, but with a gimmick.

Here they are:

The flexible packaging line is a beast. It’s all sleek stainless steel and precision calibrated automation. The installation took approximately 2.5 months beginning in February and included fixing up the environment the line would go in with new floors and stripped, cleaned and repainted ceilings. It can package in a number of different formats, including bottles, cans and the new widemouth aluminum bottles, which were on display at the event.

The automated 120-head filler can manage 300 units a minute. It is currently being operated on a single shift when needed, which can process 100,000 HL a year. According to Martin Gonzalez, who is currently in charge out at Downsview, if it went to three shifts, it could go as high as 350,000 HL annually.

When I saw the counter on the can QC, it had processed something like 160,700 units of which 54 were duds. That’s a success rate of something like 99.9997%. Jeff Nancekivell, who was giving me the detailed tour was quick to point out that that was “40 too many.”

That’s practically a Charles Bronson line. Jeff is awesome.

The press release and the dignitaries talk about innovation. That’s not entirely what this is about. This is about flexibility to respond to the market. If you have brands like Molson Canadian and Coors Light, which are key to your success, you can’t change them. The best you can do is figure out which way the public best enjoys them. Are bottle sales up over the last three months? This machine lets you produce more bottles. Are people buying the 355ml cans? Well, normally, with your canning line going at full tilt, you’d be hard pressed to keep them on the shelves. Not so in this case. Just use the flex line for more cans. It even introduces a third packaging option: the widemouth aluminum bottle. Maybe it will go over big with the public, maybe it won’t. The point is that the flex line ensures that even if it falls flat on its face, the production capacity won’t be wasted.

Because they’re the same size as a can, they palletize easily.

This is about Molson becoming lighter and quicker. They’ll be able to respond quickly and quietly to what people want based on sales data. In an era with giant monolithic brands, this is what catering to public taste looks like. It’s a clever way of maximizing the efficacy of your production capacity, leading presumably to less loss of volume through old product on shelves. It will save money and provide flexibility to move against AB InBev, who are their real competition. That’s why it’s important.

If the mayor drops by, people come to see the speech, even if they’re up in the rigging, so to speak.

On the widemouth bottles, I have an observation, and it is not really about the beer. I had Molson Canadian out of the widemouth bottles, and my feeling is this: You can actually drink out of them, which is what they’re designed for. You don’t get the metallic can taste you might from the lid of a can. The odd thing is that I, at least, felt compelled to screw the top back on to the bottle after each sip. I did it without thinking. I guess it might be a holdover from when you’re drinking a bottle of water. It’s a pretty odd sensation that I neither like nor dislike, but mention by way of pointing out that I think it means the packaging will sell.

People are used to the sensation of a 500ml screw top.

Posted in: Uncategorized ⋅ Tagged: , , ,

In Which I Tour The Molson Plant or How Blue Were My Coveralls

September 4, 2011 1:00 pm ⋅ 11 Comments ⋅

(Disclaimer: This is essentially twice as long as most of my blog posts. Go make a sandwich or something and then come back and read it.)

Do you know, as I was walking along Renforth drive over the 427 on my way to the Molson plant this week, I was looking at it and thinking to myself “how can I fit a death star joke in here? Is there an exhaust port slightly smaller than a womp rat?” The plant is huge. You know this already. You’ve passed it on the highway. I turned on to Carlingview drive, where the brewery is situated and huge semis with Coors Light logos emblazoned on their sides buzzed past me as I trudged along.

This is the degree to which the prevailing wisdom of the craft beer movement has poisoned us against large brewers: I was instantaneously looking for comparisons to a fictional evil empire that blows up a planet to make a point. The kind of Zoroastrian binary dualism between good and evil is so inculcate in craft brewing and in beer reviews that I wound up reflexively leaping to that defensive position.

I didn’t know exactly why I was being called out there. Forest Kenney was good enough to set up a tour for me. I suspect he did this probably just because he thought I would think it was neat. I’ve pulled some shifts in small craft breweries on bottling and packaging lines as a sort of work-experience thing. I’m going to Niagara College in the fall, so any experience I can get is useful. Just walking around looking at stuff and seeing how it’s done is educational to me at this point. Backbreaking bottle packing is similarly educational.

Now, I thought, going in, that I’d maybe get trailed around and given the regular tour. This was not to be the case. I was given a reflective safety vest (that it took me the better part of thirty minutes to figure out had adjustable Velcro straps) and ushered into the brewery manager’s office. I was a little bit astounded to find out that it was going to be a tour of the entire brewery, led by the Brewmaster, Brewery Manager, and Director of Packaging Development. I don’t want to guess at the hourly salaries of the folks involved, but I’m guessing that’s probably the most expensive brewery tour I’ve ever been on.

The interesting thing to me was that they weren’t exactly sure why I was there either. I’ve written some fairly scathing things about MolsonCoors. They had actually read them and laughed at some of it. I didn’t know quite what to make of that, but I went gamely along and joked with them. Eventually Jim Pomeroy, the Brewery Manager, asked what I hoped to get out of the tour.

Now, I’ve been sort of working on a theory for the last little while. Spearhead, whose beer you may have tried employs an Ex-Labatt brewer. Hogtown, who have yet to launch (but whose IPA is going to compete with the best in the province when it does), also employs an Ex-Labatt brewer. Cameron’s is run by an ex-Molson fellow. My hypothesis therefore, was that brewing is basically brewing on any scale and that most of the guys who do it are probably pretty much the same guys, doing it for the same reasons.

So that’s what I said.

Everyone seemed to perk up a bit.

I had showed up insuitably attired for the tour. Apparently shorts in a brewery of that size are a no-no. Jim found me some beer journalist sized coveralls and off I went, steel toed slip-ons making me feel only slightly ridiculous.

There’s not a whole lot that I can tell you about the brewery tour itself that you don’t already know if you’re interested in beer. The processes are the same everywhere. Mash Tun, Lauter Tun, Kettle, Fermenter. The thing that I want to impress upon you is the sheer size of the brewery. That’s really the only difference. They produce four million hectoliters of beer annually. Their kettles have a 667 hectoliter capacity. For reference, some of the smaller members of the Ontario Craft Breweries would only have to do three brews a year on a system that size.

Dave Sands, the Brewmaster, took me on the brewery portion of the tour. He’s the youngest member of the team by years.

The first stop was the grain loft, but there’s not actually very much to see outside of the size of the grain hoppers, especially when they’ve already done that section of the brew. At that point it’s sort of like a giant empty metal funnel; like a Kinder Egg without a toy inside.

Yes, this is a picture of a giant, empty metal cylinder. Who says blogging isn't glamorous?

You could smell the next stop coming from down the hall through a thick wooden door. If you like hop aromas, do yourself a favour and see if you can get out to the Molson plant. Pallets of boxes of just about everything you can imagine. We stood there, talking about the things beer nerds talk about, holding handfuls of Citra and Goldings, crushing the hops and appreciating their aromas. I asked about hop extract, which they have on hand and Dave started explaining to me about aroma fractions and bittering fractions of the hops.

The door to the hop room, where they keep the snozzberries.

He said something exceedingly intelligent which I have not heard put forward elsewhere. If you can separate just the properties of the hops that you want, doesn’t it make sense to do that? Essentially it’s a deconstruction of the ingredient, not unlike molecular gastronomy. You’re taking the essence of the thing and using it in the way that you want it used. How is that different than Heston Blumenthal or Wylie Dufresne? I’m not sure I buy the analogy completely, but I’m sure that given some time and thought it could be a very convincing argument from a purely intellectual standpoint. Heck, I may rip it off and do it myself.

I finally got my Death Star/Evil Empire moment when we got to the brew house. Amongst the four 667 hectoliter kettles is a small room that actually looks like something out of a supervillain’s lair. It’s a squat control room built out of gunmetal struts and black tinted glass. “Ah-HA!” I said to myself.

We went inside and we found two French-Canadian brewers, Mike and Jean-Luc, who have been working for Molson for something like 60 years between them. They sat in front of three monitor computer setups, with a lot of data on them. Mike sipped at a ten year old travel mug that might have been filled with something like coffee. Jean-Luc sat in a chair that was mostly held together by duct tape and willpower.  They had a downbeat samba version of Dave Brubeck’s Take Five playing on the stereo. “Oh-HO!” I said to myself. The Death Star doesn’t have muzak.

667 Hectolitres. That's only 666 Hectolitres more than my last batch. Unintentionally metal.

I was becoming increasingly confused about the whole good/evil thing.

The next stop didn’t help. One of the things that I had noticed about the brewery is that nothing really matched. I mean, sure there are a number of vessels in the fermentation area, but the style differs by room. In room one, huge horizontal numbers with more head space and welds that looked like something out of a picture of a wartime shipyard. In room two, there were more modern cylindrical fermenters. In the newest sections, the huge jobbies that came down the highway last year.

I like that the fermentation plant looks like something out of Terry Gilliam's Brazil

The thing I didn’t appreciate was that originally it had been a Carling O’Keefe plant (Molson took it over in 1989). Nowhere is this more evident than in the fire doors between sections of the brewery. The oldest doors are easily four inch thick oak slabs that are probably original, but there are also heavy metal doors with mesh glass windows that I remember from high school corridors. The very newest sections have brand new state of the art fire doors. From a historical perspective, it’s fascinating. The brewery is a mesh of various kinds of industrial architecture from the last sixty years. It also points out that all across the industry people suffer from the same limitations: All of the equipment is cobbled together into a system that you make work. You figure out how to make the pieces go together and you tweak them to get the best results.

The next part of the tour was packaging. For this part Jim Pomeroy and Jeff Nancekivell showed me around.

Jeff is the kind of guy that you want running a warehouse that size. I’d bet he knows every inch of his department. The thing that surprised me a little about him was the exuberance about the various parts. He’s got two bottling lines that do a thousand bottles a minute. He’s got a canning line that automates an ungodly number of seals a second. He knows down to a less than a tenth of a percent what the failure rate is on it. He knows what percentage of recycled bottles fail standards and get crushed (it looked like just over 1% to me, which is reasonable even by Six Sigma standards.)

He also knows exactly how cool all of this machinery is. My head would whip around when I’d see some new automated process that I didn’t know existed, and he would explain to me what it did and how it impacted other parts of the line.

1000 BPM, which is impressive even for house music.

Jim was interested in showing me the day to day decision making process. In the packaging wing, they have a room with day to day statistical information for the entire brewery. The entire process is analyzed on charts spread across an entire room of cork boards. It’s set up for internal transparency. Everyone can see how the entire system works from nose to tail. This is because they want people to take ownership of their position in the system, make decisions and suggest improvements. That’s just good business sense. The way he put it was that it allowed people to walk around with their chests puffed out because they knew exactly how good a job they were doing.

To me the highlight of the tour was the palletizer. I have loaded cases of beer onto pallets. It’s tiring. They have a machine that does that. My envy was palpable. From the palletizer platform, you could see the warehouse. I did a double take. It’s like Raiders of the Lost Ark. They’ve got something like 1.2 million bottles and cans of beer moving through there a week. You’d need a map to find your way through the warehouse. It’s large enough that they have a traffic system in place for forklifts.

They've got top men working on it... Top men.

So I stood there, looking out over the warehouse and I looked at Jim and Jeff for some kind of explanation, some kind of handle to grasp the thing by. They just stood there looking at it and beaming with what I have to suggest is entirely warranted pride. If you’re in charge of a system that large and it runs like clockwork, you should be proud. If your day job is supplying something upwards of 40% of the beer to Ontario and Saskatchewan, and you do that unfailingly week in and week out, you get to be proud.

After that, we went for a beer. Rickard’s Blonde, as it turns out. They’re really pushing that one.

Here are the conclusions that I’m taking away from this experience. They are not going to be all that popular:

People talk about macro beers and craft brewing. I do. It’s a useful rhetorical device for driving sections of the industry and promoting public interest in small breweries and certain types of beer. Near as I can figure it, it’s all just brewing. Brewing is the craft. Whether you’re using adjuncts or you’re brewing with all organic malt, it’s just brewing. The goals are different, and the end products are different, but the actual art of the thing is identical.

More importantly, the guys working in the brewery at Molson could pretty much be working in any brewery. Dave Sands, for instance, is kind of a nerd. So much so, in fact, that he was worried about pointing out that he has a Ralph Steadman bumper sticker on his truck just in case it didn’t jibe with his image. Jim Pomeroy reminds me of most of the other people I know running a brewery, with that sort of fatherly, proprietary air about him. It’s unsurprising that he should demonstrate that sense of pride. He’s been there 35 years, which is long enough to grow a pretty kickass moustache.

What I have essentially learned is that there’s only one reason why you do the job. It’s not a good way to make money. If you wanted to make money, you would do something else. You pretty much have to love brewing. You have to love beer and you have to love making it. It’s a craft that requires patience and objectivity and consistency across the board, from 50 litres to 4 million hectoliters. I’ve seen the same expression of pride on the faces at each of those levels and it’s identical.

The other thing, that strikes me as more than a little unfair, is that you probably won’t ever hear about these guys in the press. They’re pretty much unsung and will largely remain so, doing relatively thankless work with a level of attention to detail and consistency that is truly impressive.

I can’t hate these guys. I respect them too much. They do what I’m learning to do, and they do it well. I wouldn’t order most of the beers they make. I find adjunct beers give me headaches and I really like flavours that their brewery isn’t about. I can’t argue with the skill and dedication that goes into making their beers, though. I can’t praise the beers, but I can praise the brewers.

It doesn’t really change how I feel about the marketing, which I find semiotically offensive from time to time. And it doesn’t change how I feel about The Beer Store’s situation. These aren’t things that get a pass. What it does mean is that if I encounter a macrobrewery product out in the world, I’m going to try not to dismiss it out of prejudice. I know now that somewhere out by the airport, someone is really proud of that beer and I don’t see why I shouldn’t afford that brewer the same amount of respect as any other.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in: Accounting for Taste ⋅ Tagged: , ,

Detente OR How I learned to stop worrying and love Labatt

July 22, 2011 4:54 pm ⋅ 8 Comments ⋅

This week, I received an email from Labatt. They’re launching three new beers. Usually, they’ll put one beer out at a time and get some marketing behind it as an individual property. In this case, they’ve launched a platoon. There’s Blue Dry, a 6.1% version of Blue with a dry finish. There’s Blue Lime which is Blue with a real lime flavour added. They want me to tell you that it’s only available until September 30th. Finally, there’s Blue 55, which, as you may have guessed, is a version of Blue with 55 calories.

Now, It’s fairly obvious to anyone who has been following Canadian macro brewing in even a cursory way, that we’ve reached a state in the industry where MolsonCoors and AB-InBev are pretty much unwilling to let each other take a unique step forward. For two of those beers, it’s pretty clear that Labatt is shoring up their lineup to compete with Molson. Blue 55 is clearly a response to Molson Canadian 67. Blue Lime is pretty clearly a response to Molson Canadian 67 Sublime. I’m sure that Blue Dry is an answer to something, although I’m not sure what. Maybe Coldshots.

I’ve been trying to find something to compare this to, and the only thing I could think of is nuclear detente. Each company seems to be unwilling to allow the other an edge. Development of products is frequently retaliatory, and sometimes the launches are so close together that you realize there must be some corporate espionage going on.

Look at the launches, which occurred within a month of each other, of Rickard’s Blonde and Keith’s Ambrosia Blonde. Some detractors will point out that Rickard’s is a lager and Keith’s is an ale. It seems like a major detail, but in truth what you’ve got is two huge multinational companies with faux-craft subsidiaries launching similarly named products into the same market within four weeks of each other.

The details are meaningless beyond that point for the sake of my argument. I am not, as you will notice, pointing out anything about the quality of the beverages, which for all I know might be quite high.

I suppose that the train of thought must be “We cannot afford a trend gap. If we allow the other company to have a brand that we don’t have, they will develop an edge on us in the market. Their German-trained brewers might be better than our German-trained brewers.” In some ways, it’s a miracle that neither company has launched a dog into space for publicity.

Judging by that set of behaviour, it follows logically that they actually believe that a single brand from the other company making it big with the public could be the turning point that will lead to decreased market share, decreased revenue and eventual collapse.

I disagree. The problem with an arms race is that you’re in an arms race. The structure of the problem is the real issue. Think for a moment about the amount of money that the US and the USSR sank into their respective militaries and think about the cost of developing 7500 megatons of nuclear weaponry. You’ve got to keep it somewhere, after all. There’s so much funding invested in R&D and prolonging the stalemate that it eventually becomes untenable. Not only that, but you’re eventually committed to upkeep.

Between them, Molson and Labatt have enough brands to get us all really drunk several times over. And they’re locked in a stalemate because they seem to think that the best way to succeed is to thwart the movements of the opposition. The problem is that the stalemate is untenable as a corporate strategy for the reason that these are consumer products and not impersonal weapons.

Bob from Bala, Ontario has no preference about nuclear weapons other than that they not go off anywhere near Bala, Ontario. You can’t market various kinds of warheads as being “explodier” than others. There’s no ratenuke.com, although there may be a nukeadvocate.com run by either neo-cons or alternative energy lobbyists.

Bob might have a preference for a kind of beer, though. Let’s say that Bob started drinking Labatt Wildcat in 1994 or whenever it came out. He’s been drinking it for 17 years and it’s now the only thing that Bob will drink, since Bob’s a creature of habit who mows the lawn Friday afternoon and goes to church on Sunday and never puts the lid back on the toothpaste.

If Labatt were to discontinue Wildcat, they might really piss off Bob. And the same goes for all the other people out there like Bob who enjoy that beer. The really bad part is that for each company there is a similar base of customers for each brand. So, while each company can continue to increase the number of beers that they offer, they can’t really remove any without annoying the consumer base. This may go some way to explaining why we still have ice beers 15 years later. New brands don’t actually bring in new customers. They spread out the customer base that already exists. There are not magically more people just because you’ve got a marketing campaign.

If you think I’m exaggerating, I’ve actually done the research. Here’s a spreadsheet including many of the brands that each company has in The Beer Store. I’ve lined each product from each company up with what I feel is the opposite brand from the other company. You may not agree with some of them, but part of my decision making process in this case was to look at price structure. I have listed the prices for 12 bottles and 24 bottles where applicable. I have left out the European Imports that each company represents. I think you’ll be astonished by how little wiggle room there is between companies.

Here’s the thing, though, and it is pretty obvious. Molson’s Six Pints division under Creemore is a quanitity that doesnt exist at Labatt, and it’s Molson’s best chance at gaining an insurmountable advantage. If Labatt doesn’t acquire some craft brands in a desperate bid for Perestroika, the detente will be over within a matter of years. It will not have much immediate effect on the craft beer market, since the brands chosen will be unobjectionable to the majority of consumers and therefore of little interest to craft beer drinkers.

I hope that they acquire some craft properties. The detente is great for craft brewers. While Molson and Labatt fight over turf that no one really wants (55 calorie, 2.3% “beer” vs 67 calorie, 3.0% “beer”) we get to run amok with innovation and educate people who are starting to realize that flavour might be more important than advertising. It would be cynical to suggest that it’s important that Labatt holds a market share similar to that which Molson holds for as long as possible so that the overall market share of both companies can be chipped away at by the craft industry. It would also be pretty objectively accurate.

Something to ponder, anyway.

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Interesting Facts About The Beer Convoy

January 14, 2011 5:23 am ⋅ 5 Comments ⋅

One of the problems that I encountered when reading about the convoy of beer fermentation tanks that have received so much publicity lately is that they don’t come across on a human scale. It’s hard to imagine a kilometer long convoy of vehicles necessitating the combined efforts of police services, public utility companies and a fleet of trucks from Challenger Motor Freight. For this reason St.John’s Wort is pleased to provide you with a loose guide to help you picture the exact dimensions and potential importance of such an influx of brewing volume.

According to the Toronto Star, the tanks can hold 5.86 million bottles of beer. According to City TV’s website, they can hold 1.4 million bottles a piece (for a total of 8.4 million bottles). Such a discrepancy is worrying. I mean, 2.54 million bottles of beer are missing. I think we should be on the lookout for a moustachioed man in a black Trans-Am and a trucker with a dog named Fred.

Let’s assume, though, that the Toronto Star has the figure right. 5.86 million bottles of beer (assuming that the bottles are 355 ml) translates to roughly 2,080,300,000 mililitres of beer, which is 2,080,300 litres of beer or 4,160,600 pints. That translates to roughly 346,717 litres or 693,434 pints of beer per fermenter.

Assuming, for legal reasons, that you don’t actually drink anything prior to your nineteenth birthday and that you lived until 70, you would have 18,615 nights where it would be possible for you to drink beer. Given that a reasonable night down at the pub might see you drink four pints of beer, you would within that time consume 74,460 pints of beer. In order to finish the volume of beer within the fermenter there would either need to be 9.31 of you (out of the question with current cloning technology and besides, what would you talk about?) or you would need to live 494 years. I suppose you could just find 8.31 friends to help you, but what if Verne Troyer is unavailable? Regardless, you’re going to want to lay in plenty of pedialyte and advil.

This is not a challenge that I recommend undertaking. After all, a pint of 5% beer typically contains about 250 calories. A fermenter therefore holds 173,358,500 calories of beer. No registered dietitian would take you on as a client. Also, it’s probably going to be filled with Molson Canadian… so, y’know.

In terms of sheer volume 346,717 litres of beer is 346.717 cubic meters of volume. My apartment in midtown Toronto is 450 square feet and has ceilings which are 7.75 feet high. The volume of space within my apartment is 98.75 cubic meters. This means that you could fit 3.5 of my apartment into one of these fermenters with enough space left over for a brand new chaise longue.

Interestingly (if you want to take wikipedia’s word for it) Canada consumes 2,183,000,000 litres of beer annually. You would need to fill these tanks 1049 times in order to reach that amount.

According to the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service in the United States, if you wanted to keep two Killer Whales in captivity you would need to provide a tank capable of holding 615 cubic meters. Theoretically, you would need 1.77 fermenters worth of beer in order to do that. I think it would probably be a bad idea to fill the Killer Whale tanks with beer, though. After several hours they would get maudlin and try to start fistfights with each other, which would be unsatisfying given that you can’t really make a fist with a pectoral fin. Additionally, given that their diet consists of 227 kilograms of fish daily, they might think that an average serving of bar peanuts is a little skimpy. Eventually, their whale song would start to sound like “Louie, Louie.”

According to the St.John’s Wort Expensive Liquids Equivalence Chart Molson Canadian costs approximately 0.0056 cents per milliliter. This means that the total street value of the beer that these fermenters would hold would be $11,649,680.00, which is approximately enough money to get David Beckham out of bed. If, on the other hand, you were to fill just one of the fermenters with Sam Adams Utopias, it would cost you $53,047,701.00

Interestingly, the entirety of the transport operation for the convoy was slated to cost $24,000,000. This means that the tanks will pay for their own transport from Burgstadt, Germany within two brew runs.

Posted in: Accounting for Taste ⋅ Tagged: , , , ,