In gearing up for Ontario Craft Beer Week, it made sense to me to take a look at the latest promotion offered by the Ontario Craft Brewers: OCB Discovery Pack #5, or as the packaging refers to it OCB Discovery Pack Summer 2010.

The discovery pack is priced at $9.95 and contains four 473ml cans of beer, which google tells me is about $0.0052/ml or approximately $1300/hogshead for those of you really sticking it away. It’s quite reasonably priced, but that’s not the thing that’s immediately obvious. The first thing you notice looking at the thing is the relatively cheery packaging. The OCB logo is prominently displayed on both sides and the top of the cardboard sleeve, and the logos of the beers involved in the discovery pack are on both sides. There are tasting notes scrunched down into a tiny font on the top of the package. Included within is an OCB Style Guide, which is really more of a product catalogue than an educational tool. The 2010 Summer Pack includes four beers from different breweries:

First, there’s Trailhead Premium Lager. Maybe it’s just me, but I always sort of viewed this beer as being Wellington’s attempt at a mass market discount beer. If you look at the pricing on a case of 12 at The Beer Store ($16.45), it’s more affordable than Canadian or Blue and only slightly more expensive than Lakeport. There’s a separation of branding on this beer, and it doesn’t bear the Wellington name. Whether that’s a thematic concern because the Wellington range of beers are Ales or because they’re premium products in a way that Trailhead simply isn’t is a moot issue. Trailhead is refreshing and affordable, but not very interesting. It’s a good summer beverage at 4.5% alcohol and there’s a cute little cartoon salmon on the tin.

There’s Elora Grand Lager from Trafalgar, which is similar to the Trailhead. It’s got more flavor than mass produced lagers while remaining quaffable. At 5% alcohol it is exactly the same strength as mass produced lagers. I have to be honest and say that I don’t think I could pick it out of a lineup, which is one of the problems with craft brewers attempting to compete with mass produced lager. If the claim is being made that craft beer is better than mass produced beer because it contains more flavor, the question is always going to be “well, how much more flavor, exactly?” The answer, invariably, is “some.” The mere existence of the product invites comparison to the thing it claims to improve upon in a manner vaguely reminiscent of New Coke. I don’t know how productive the competition is, but I suspect probably not very.

There’s Devil’s Pale Ale from Great Lakes. I like this beer. I like the gimmick. I like the packaging, which is practically iconic. It stands out in the package as the only variety of English Ale. It’s darker and has a lot more malt and hop flavor than the lagers. At 6% alcohol it’s the strongest of the four and it’s a pretty good representation of what Great Lakes does: customization of a standard style to create a unique product.

The dark horse here is the Muskoka Hefe-Weissbier. How much of a dark horse, exactly? The tasting notes provide a pronunciation guide, meaning that they’re assuming that you don’t know what a Hefe-Weissbier is. I hadn’t tried this before and I have to admit, it’s enjoyable. It has a nice mouthfeel and the sort of clove-y banana thing you expect from a quality Weissbier. It’s refreshing and at 5% alcohol, it’s not overpowering.

The thought that snuck up on me, about halfway through the Devil’s Pale Ale, was a sort of typical beer nerd thought: “I’m not really blown away by this package. It’s fair to middling at best. And look at the breweries involved. All of this stuff is already in the LCBO. I bet you could get this stuff any time you want. Who is this helping, exactly?” I looked it up. Trailhead is available in 29 LCBO locations and Beer Stores province wide. Elora Grand Lager is available in about 55 LCBO locations. Muskoka Hefe-Weissbier is available in 53 LCBO locations. Devil’s Pale Ale is in 106 LCBO locations.

The simple fact of the matter is that the OCB isn’t catering to beer nerds this time around. Instead, they’re trying to do something clever and important.

If you look at the distribution of the LCBO stores where these products are already available, they’re pretty close to the breweries. I mean, the Great Lakes stuff got to Ottawa, but that’s really only about four and a half hours from the brewery (longer during the G20). What the OCB has done is to go province wide in a legitimate way. The 2010 Summer Pack is available in 236 stores as of this writing. It hasn’t made it to Moosonee, but these beers are now in Dryden, Elliot Lake, Thunder Bay and Fort Frances.

It’s easy to become critical of the pack if you live in Southern Ontario, mostly because with the improving quality and omnipresence of craft beer, whatever pub or LCBO you step into is going to have something tasty, enjoyable and local. There are millions of people and there’s the ability to support the industry. Fort Frances, on the other hand, has got 8300 people. Maybe 8350 if you count commuting Minnesotans.

So, let’s say Gord from Fort Frances is drawn in by the cheery packaging and looks the 2010 Summer Pack over. The choice of beers makes sense. The lagers are accessible and they’re there to draw in somebody who doesn’t know a whole lot about craft beer, but since they’re improvements on the mass market stuff they’ll be impressive. The pale ale is a good opportunity to introduce a balanced, hoppy range of beers. There are maltier beers and hoppier beers, but this is a good introduction. And then there’s the Hefe-Weissbier. That one is the risk. Maybe he won’t like it. Maybe he’ll surprise himself. Call it 50/50. Besides, it’s only $9.95. If Gord really likes one of these things, he might even ask his LCBO to start carrying it regularly.

What the store distribution, pricing and product choice suggest to me is that the OCB feel confident that they’ve solidified their base in Southwestern Ontario and the Capital Region and are now looking to start competing properly on a province wide level. In order to do that, they have to offer some basic products of established quality to draw people in and then something interesting as an attention getter. I don’t pretend that any of the OCB members have the production to be able to distribute province wide at the moment, but some of them might get there in a couple of years. That’s what makes the 2010 Summer Pack so clever. It’s accessible, but also educative. Given a couple more packs like this with a little more educational material (maybe providing a link to their website and a video for explanatory purposes) they’re building demand in northern and rural areas at a rate that will probably approximately match their increased production and distribution.

Long term marketing and planning. These guys are good.