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Beer giant ABI bought many craft brews and is now buying beer rating websites
- sushisource 9y agoI have a hard time getting worked up over these acquisitions. If the beer is still good, who cares? If you're really upset about it, there are still literally thousands of other craft breweries to choose from.
- hylianwarrior 9y agoNice sentiment, but it's a bit unnerving to see an industry consolidating like this while ALSO buying out sites that review the beer. Having few large, central corporations control both the market and the medium by which the products are reviewed is not a good thing.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- civilian 9y agoThe reviewing sites thing is silly. However, it sure seems like an opportunity for new beer reviewing websites to pop up!
- usrusr 9y agoIf Underarmour refuses to buy your running tracker, pivot to a beer review site!
- jxramos 9y agoI guess the tricky thing would be measuring what they do the site. If they take it down or delete negative reviews, etc, that would be some questionable behavior. If they use it to gain honest feedback and funnel it into development channels of some kind that could prove interesting. Overall seems like a conflict of interest. I wonder how much appetite they'd have to buy up the next review site that pops up and catches on. Sort of like review site whak-a-mole. It would be very disconcerting to say the least if a company went out and bought up all new and fledgling review sites of interest to them.
- cma 9y agoA public review site is public. You don't need to buy it to gain honest feedback.
- jxramos 9y agothat's true, but I'm thinking they'd bake in some in-house custom API for organizing it all and rendering it into some sort of data analytics repo. I guess this could be accomplished too via the public interface and just work around things indirectly.
- sp332 9y agoHow do you know the beer is still good if the manufacturer owns the review site?
- cbsmith 9y agoTaste it?
- aj_g 9y agoWhat if you can't taste it because your local grocery store stocks its beer selection based on what beers are the best according to the beer review site owned by ABI? It's not as simple as "just make a different choice", monopolies can exert control over the whole system the consumer lives in, not just the small decisions.
- TylerE 9y agoDon't be naive. They stock beer based on who PAYS THEM the most for their shelf space. Same goes for any other product.
- AnimalMuppet 9y agoDon't be too cynical. They stock beer based on who pays them the most for shelf space, and based on what sells. You can get them to carry your dreck that nobody wants if you pay them enough, but you can't get them to not carry what people are buying.
- sp332 9y agoAs in, assume the review sites are compromised and ignore them, but also give money to the company that might or might not be posting biased reviews there? So you're only denying yourself the potential benefit of the review site while still giving up your money.
- kiddico 9y ago"there are still literally thousands of other craft breweries to choose from." Taste all of them? I'm not an alcoholic by trade man, reviews are necessary.
- unethical_ban 9y agoBrewing these days is uniquely local. When buying craft, you're buying not only good beer, but you're supporting your neighbors and fellow enthusiasts in the craft. When a beer gets bought by the big conglomerates, the feeling of supporting "the little guy" goes away. I know multiple people who stopped buying Karbach beers after they got bought. Sure they'll drink it if it's free, but why support bean counters and 1%ers when you can give some money to the people doing it for love?
- jdavis703 9y agoWhat people don't like are the bad business practices, like buying up review sites (can anyone spell "conflict of interest"), locking in alcohol distributors to certain brands, etc. They're limiting consumer choice, locking out competitors and potentially misleading consumers. I'll agree with you, if it tastes good it tastes good. McDonald's also still tastes good to me, but I abhor their business practices so I avoid eating there. A lot of economists like to cite this model of a "rational agent," but consumers have more dimensions than just price and quality, increasingly they also see ethics as either a part of quality, or an additional dimension, when judging which product they should buy.
- sushisource 9y agoI get that, but, as I mention you've still got thousands of other options to choose from
- itchyjunk 9y agoYes, this was one of the thousands of other options. Emphasis on was. What guarantee do I have that once people move to another platform and start trusting it, they won't purchase that?
- thinkling 9y agoWhen restaurants and bars use an AB InBev-owned distributor and thus are restricted to only having AB InBev brands on tap, I lose the choice to drink one of those thousands of other beers when I'm there. Not going to a concert because the venue has the wrong beer distributor is not really tractable.
- s73ver_ 9y agoThat's not really an excuse.
- tomc1985 9y agoIt won't be that way much longer if these events are allowed to happen
- svarrall 9y agoThat was my initial though to. Here’s a good discussion from Sessionable on the subject from independent breweries perspective and their main concerns seem to be around access to taps and consumer awareness when independents get bought out. https://overcast.fm/+BwaxYul7M https://overcast.fm/+BwaxYul7M
- gniv 9y agoThe beer is still good, until it isn't. As an anecdote: A Lagunitas beer [1] used to be a favorite of mine. At some point I didn't like it anymore, and stopped buying it. I didn't know they got bought by Heineken, and I don't know if the events are related, but it's possible. [1] Little Sumpin' Sumpin'
- mohaine 9y agoSmall changes over time is what killed Schlitz. A once famous brand that you probably haven't heard of if under 40. https://beerconnoisseur.com/articles/how-milwaukees-famous-beer-became-infamous https://beerconnoisseur.com/articles/how-milwaukees-famous-b...
- uxp100 9y agoSince that article is from 2010, it's worth noting that Schlitz was relaunched, probably shortly after that article came out. Mainly in tall boys, boasting the original 1960s recipe. It is what it is.
- elliotec 9y agoI'm getting a 500 "Error establishing a database connection"
- firloop 9y agoGuess ABI got the site too...
- danschumann 9y agoAw man, I was going to say that.
- jrs235 9y agoCached: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qhVnlV7FxGUJ:www.foodandpower.net/2017/11/02/abis-venture-capital-fund-quietly-expanding-the-mega-brewers-reach/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qhVnlV7...
- macNchz 9y agoHere's a cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qhVnlV7FxGUJ:www.foodandpower.net/2017/11/02/abis-venture-capital-fund-quietly-expanding-the-mega-brewers-reach/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qhVnlV7...
- arkadiyt 9y agoThis article about Casper purchasing mattress review sites was making the rounds recently as well. Great read: https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-bloggers-lawsuits-underside-of-the-mattress-wars https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-blogg...
- Aloha 9y agoI love my Casper Mattress, I think longingly of it when I'm on the road for work... but this gives me pause.. just a little.
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- dabockster 9y agoNice, just bought 100k!
- ktta 9y agoHope you're coming to the local meetup this weekend. Btw, were you lucky enough to get tickets for the yearly Casper retreat?
- j_s 9y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15489344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15489344 Zinus' claim to fame: replace your mattress at least once more for the same total price. Based on the anecdata I was terrified it would attack me! (Verdict: a bit more firm that I prefer, but still an improvement on ancient of days.) https://amzn.com/dp/B00Q7EPSHI https://amzn.com/dp/B00Q7EPSHI - $261.28 for me
- PatientTrades 9y agoIf the beer taste great and is inexpensive I don't see how anybody can have a problem with that.
- tomc1985 9y agoSome care about where it's made, how it's made, who made it The beer that "tastes great" and is also "inexpensive" usually cuts corners in one of the above areas
- rockostrich 9y agoTo be completely honest as someone who loves craft beer, homebrews, and hopes to open up a brewery of my own one day, ABInbev is a brewery operations wonder of the world. Yes, they use a ton of rice as one of their fermentables which cuts down on calories, alcohol, body, etc., but that's sort of what the american light lager has evolved into anyway. The real amazing thing about ABInbev is how they have production breweries across the world making the same beers and no matter where you are they taste exactly the same. They sell in the hundreds of millions of barrels annually while the best small breweries that have recently expanded rapidly and are battling with quality control (Trillium and Tree House are the 2 that come to mind) still only sell tens of thousands of barrels annually. Beer aside, ABInbev is the definition of an evil company. The beer industry is known for being a community more than a competitive industry. Craft breweries collaborate with their "competitors" all the time. Even in close quarters such as Brooklyn/Queens, Other Half, Interboro, Transmitter, LIC Beer Project, Threes, Grimm, and Evil Twin are collaborating on beers with each other every other month or so. It's one of the reasons why I love the industry so much. ABInbev does pretty much the opposite. Sure, Goose Island still collaborates with breweries as a subsidy of ABInbev, but as a company ABInbev offers incentives to bars/bottle shops/wholesalers/distributors that require them to only carry ABInbev owned products or a certain percent of their products. For example [1]: > Under the new incentive plan, AB InBev refunds 75 percent of this money if its beers make up 98 percent of the distributor’s sales, according to documents provided to lawmakers by AB InBev. Even with these incentives, craft beer is slowly taking market share away from ABInbev and they're are starting to feel it (although they still have something like a 40% market share so it's not that huge of a blow). I can't speak for other beer conglomerates (SABMillerCoors, Heineken, etc.) and if they try and give similar incentives, but I know for a fact that ABInbev is trying to kill any competition in an industry where everyone is rooting for their "competitors" to succeed. [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-a-b-i-craftbeers-probe-exclusive/exclusive-u-s-queries-ab-inbev-on-distribution-incentives-amid-merger-probe-idUSKCN0YG0EG https://www.reuters.com/article/us-a-b-i-craftbeers-probe-ex...
- baq 9y agovertical integration!
- gervase 9y agoGiven the remarkably shady business practices of the entrenched players (past and present), I don't consider this relentless consolidation to be desirable. Additionally, in other markets where such consolidation has happened, it has historically not been beneficial for consumers (internet access, cell providers, etc). I primarily interact with this market via the grocery store, not the bar tap, but I find this app [0] to be useful in that context. It makes it relatively painless to leverage my (minuscule) purchasing power to support small businesses, and reject these kinds of intentionally-obscured corporate maneuvers. [0]: http://www.craftcheckapp.com/ http://www.craftcheckapp.com/
- splatcollision 9y agoIf you don't want the barcode scanning feature, and just want to type in a name and see who owns it, why can't this be a plain old website? Or to say it another way, is there a web-based interface that does the same thing?
- njarboe 9y agoWikipedia seems to work well for this. For the few breweries I looked up Wikipedia it has a box at the top with a summary of info which includes "Owner" or "Parent" or "Manufacturer". For Lagunitas you get:Heineken International For Blue Moon you get:MillerCoors For Anchor Steam you get:Sapporo Holdings
- kodt 9y agoI don't really understand their interest in RateBeer, RateBeer really does not seem that relevant today. 10 years ago it was very important in the craft beer scene. Now it seems like a dying community. In terms of reviewing beers, most people have moved to using an app like Untappd. BeerAdvocate, another forum/beer rating site seems to have a more active userbase, but even that is becoming less relevant today as people move away from forum communities. Is that data on RateBeer of use to them? Are they planning on pouring money into it to position it as a competitor to Untappd? I'm not sure what the goal is. If the fear is they will secretly skew review scores to favor their product lines, that seems hardly worth the effort, as I don't think enough people use the site to drive purchasing decisions to make a meaningful impact. I think people need to be aware of which beer publications ZX Ventures owns, or owns a stake in, as that will help you identify marketing fluff pieces vs real reporting. The fact that they go to some effort to hide their ownership of several brands they have acquired is concerning to me, but I also understand it is not in their interest to promote that fact. Many people unknowingly buy ABI products without having any idea the beer they are buying isn't in fact locally owned.
- byproxy 9y agoI don't even care about other people's beer ratings. I just use RateBeer/BeerAdvocate to lookup ABV and caloric information.
- mywittyname 9y agoSame. As a whole, the American craft beer drinkers are obsessed with really hoppy beers, which I hate. So the ratings are completely useless, because a beer I hate will be like a 4.5 while a beer I love will be a 3.3. There's definitely an opportunity here for a better beer rating system. Get some equipment to analyze the chemical compounds of beers, automatically classify them and use it to recommend beers based on your personal flavor preferences.
- heywire 9y agoCheck out Untappd
- jakub_g 9y agoI got this on my Twitter feed yesterday: https://www.takecraftback.com https://www.takecraftback.com "Help us raise $213 billion we need to buy AB InBev" Biggest crowdfounding ever :)
- tptacek 9y agoConsolidation in the beer market bothers me less than it does my beer nerd friends. Many of the best-known, most-loved independent breweries run into major quality problems trying to scale up their output. ABI probably has advantages in regulating quality. Breweries that don't want to scale are unlikely to sell in the first place. The whiskey market is almost entirely consolidated; you have to go out of your way to find quality products that aren't traceable to large concerns, despite a proliferation of brands. But we're in a 2-decade renaissance in whiskey quality (despite the No Age Statement movement!) and availability. The median big-brand whiskey is overwhelmingly more likely to be good than the median independent whiskey. The barriers to entry for beer are far, far lower than for whiskey. We're not going to run out of microbreweries, or of interesting new beers. Why are beer nerds so freaked out about this? (I have nothing useful to say about beer rating sites, which I think are pretty sketchy to begin with.)
- pslam 9y agoThe UK was an example of consolidation resulting in terrible quality and limited choice. The "CAMRA" (CAMpaign for Real Ale) group is a result of push-back against this, and has been very successful: http://www.camra.org.uk/key-events-in-camra-s-history http://www.camra.org.uk/key-events-in-camra-s-history Distribution all the way down the chain was consolidated — i.e Pubs — and was only remedied through legislation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guest_beer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guest_beer The US is nowhere near the same setup, though, so it's doubtful it would end up quite as bad. For beer at least, every time there's a consolidation, there's an opportunity for a new player to enter the market they just left behind.
- Aloha 9y agoBefore prohibition, this kind of setup was actually quite common.
- PeachPlum 9y agoUK pubs closing at a rate of 27 a week, Camra says http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/uk-pubs-closing-at-a-rate-of-27-a-week-camra-says-a6853686.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/uk-pubs-clos...
- whipoodle 9y agoIt's getting to be like sunglasses, where you get your choice of branding and labels but it all costs too much and comes from the same place. These days I just stick to the cheap yellow stuff that comes in big cans.
- jimrandomh 9y agoA reviewer that represents themself as impartial, but is partially owned by a company whose products it's reviewing, is committing fraud. The only way to make it not-fraud is to put up disclaimers large enough that people will treat it like an advertising brochure.
- ben1040 9y agoThe Brewers Association recently put out a new label insignia that independent craft breweries could use, to signify they're actually an independent operation. I can see why they do it; my grocery store recently saw a huge influx of new craft brands in the refrigerated section and it turned out that _all_ of them were A-B products. A-B had a bunch of the former owners/brewmasters release a series of video interviews to dump on the idea. https://vimeo.com/223773287 https://vimeo.com/223773287 The video ends with the founder of Elysian saying to be truly independent and "punk" would be to do your own thing and not use the BA's logo. It's sort of funny in the face of Elysian scrubbing their website of mentions of their "Loser Pale Ale," a collab with Sub Pop Records. The label proudly declared, "corporate beer still sucks."
- eggpy 9y ago"We're all independent together!" Also, what's A-B?
- scrumbledober 9y agoAnheuser Busch. They were bought by Inbev a few years back to form ABI.
- eggpy 9y agoAh yeah, of course. Thanks.
- arca_vorago 9y agoIs it crazy my first thought is I wonder if I could make a beer website real fast and try and sell it to em. Prob would have to sockpuppet the traffic but nooo nobody in SV does that its immoral!/s
- jbigelow76 9y agoMaybe the Russians could help you out.
- TheTruestKyle 9y agoAn example of a company not necessarily doing bad things like ABI is Constellation brands. They seem to give freedom to Ballast Point which they bough a few years back. However, they also bought funky buddha and aren't giving them as much freedom, so who knows the point of selling to a bigger corp.
- m0llusk 9y agoNext they should consider expanding into the market for urinals.
- TaylorGood 9y agoTypically avoid beer purchased/ran by the big guys although beautiful businesses. How great to be in the reorder business at-scale. My knowledge comes from winemaking, but generally, the larger the volume the less ingredients matter. Obviously still palatable, but in comparison, those details really matter when you're a rising operation. A brand and/or breweries reputation is on the line if they are off with their production process. At scale, they can be off or less perfect but will add extra ingredients to curb the errors.
- colechristensen 9y agoThe pattern is to buy a brand that has developed an image and gradually lower quality bleeding everything from the reputation until it's meaningless. It's slash and burn economics.
- 659087 9y agoThe craft beer market has been dead to me for a long time. That's not to say that there aren't still a number of very good beers and breweries out there that I enjoy, but to say that the market is saturated. It's clear that many newer breweries spend more time on their label designs than they do on their beers, and trying to find the good ones has become tiring.. so I stick to what I know these days.
- nickbauman 9y agoIn Minneapolis there are too many microbreweries. I say this because more than half of them produce tooth looseningly bad beer. Or the beer actually makes me feel ill after I drink it. I've all but stopped drinking beer completely. Having said that, the bigger microbreweries now resemble AIB so closely they're not really microbreweries anymore. They have become what they were reacting to.
- jorgec 9y agoThanks heaven, i misread "Bear giant".
- thinkling 9y agoFWIW, the Ratebeer.com FAQ says: > Q. ZX Ventures, which is wholly owned by AB InBev, is an investor in RateBeer. What are you doing to ensure ratings remain fair and independent? > Answer > RateBeer is an independent and unbiased community managed by Joseph Tucker. We understand your concern and have developed quality protections to maintain our position as the most authoritative reference in beer. Among these are: > 1) RateBeer's reviews are crowd-sourced and not editorial content and as such are beyond simple influence by the site's managers and employees > 2) RateBeer offer a transparency measure in the form of an API through which other brewers, industry watchers and journalists can easily view and vet changes in scores > 3) RateBeer has existing policies against affiliated users adding reviews of their own or competitor products > 4) RateBeer is developing a system by which any user can indicate association with the industry as a means to void all of their reviews for score calculation, and public viewing, but be able to store them for personal use
- fizx 9y agoIt is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it! - Upton Sinclair
- mar77i 9y agoI just hope they do have a beer review process that ensures their craft beers are ABI compatible...
- crispytx 9y agoWhile I don't drink anymore, the truth is that the lagers all taste the same and you should just buy whatever's the cheapest.