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Before prohibition breweries owned the bars to the point sometimes you could only buy a single brand of beer for blocks to no end. That squeezed small breweries

Before prohibition breweries owned the bars to the point sometimes you could only buy a single brand of beer for blocks to no end. That squeezed small breweries out of the market. When lifting prohibition, Congress created the tier system to prevent something like it from happening again. Ken Burns' documentary about prohibition explains it really well.

whatusername 11y ago
That doesn't currently happen? I'm in Aus - so things are different - but certainly here there's an awful lot of pubs with only the one mega brewers beers on tap (aka - either SABMiller or Lion Nathan). In the same ways that most smaller stores have either coke or pepsi but not both. They are not forced they are just incentivised.
- arfar 11y ago
  I suspect if a brewery took this too far, they might be up for anti-competitive behavior related charges.
- rayiner 11y ago
  I've never seen anything like that in the U.S.
  - whatusername 11y ago
    Do coke and pepsi do it with smaller stores? It's not that it's only one brand of beer. It's just that of the 10 options - they're all owned by the same mega corp.
feld 11y ago
Sure, maybe there were rare situations where this happened but the truth is that before prohibition there were more breweries than we currently have even today[1]. These breweries were in larger towns and they cooperated with farmers in a tightly nit ecosystem: grain from farmers -> make beer -> spent grain back to farmers to feed cattle I fail to believe that "competition" was a problem because the infrastructure required to distribute beer far enough to kill the competition did not exist. Yes, perhaps the brewery and bar were owned by the same person and they didn't allow the competition's beer, but there were no laws stopping the other brewery from opening their own bar. And the fact is that today every brewpub I've ever been to has guest taps and beer from other breweries. I've never been somewhere that refuses to sell anything but their own. The real problem today is that thanks to the three-tier system being completely controlled by MillerCoors/InBev it is VERY difficult to get your new product into bars and stores. The documentary Beer Wars[2] covers this very well -- better than I could in this posting. tl;dr three-tier may have served a purpose 75 years ago, but it has been holding back competition and hurting consumers for at least 50 years. (At one point large towns also had their own local mayonnaise, too!) [1] https://www.brewersassociation.org/statistics/number-of-breweries/ https://www.brewersassociation.org/statistics/number-of-brew... [2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1326194/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1326194/

whatusername 11y ago

That doesn't currently happen? I'm in Aus - so things are different - but certainly here there's an awful lot of pubs with only the one mega brewers beers on tap (aka - either SABMiller or Lion Nathan). In the same ways that most smaller stores have either coke or pepsi but not both. They are not forced they are just incentivised.

arfar 11y ago
I suspect if a brewery took this too far, they might be up for anti-competitive behavior related charges.
rayiner 11y ago
I've never seen anything like that in the U.S.
- whatusername 11y ago
  Do coke and pepsi do it with smaller stores? It's not that it's only one brand of beer. It's just that of the 10 options - they're all owned by the same mega corp.

feld 11y ago

Sure, maybe there were rare situations where this happened but the truth is that before prohibition there were more breweries than we currently have even today[1]. These breweries were in larger towns and they cooperated with farmers in a tightly nit ecosystem: grain from farmers -> make beer -> spent grain back to farmers to feed cattle I fail to believe that "competition" was a problem because the infrastructure required to distribute beer far enough to kill the competition did not exist. Yes, perhaps the brewery and bar were owned by the same person and they didn't allow the competition's beer, but there were no laws stopping the other brewery from opening their own bar. And the fact is that today every brewpub I've ever been to has guest taps and beer from other breweries. I've never been somewhere that refuses to sell anything but their own. The real problem today is that thanks to the three-tier system being completely controlled by MillerCoors/InBev it is VERY difficult to get your new product into bars and stores. The documentary Beer Wars[2] covers this very well -- better than I could in this posting. tl;dr three-tier may have served a purpose 75 years ago, but it has been holding back competition and hurting consumers for at least 50 years. (At one point large towns also had their own local mayonnaise, too!) [1] https://www.brewersassociation.org/statistics/number-of-breweries/ https://www.brewersassociation.org/statistics/number-of-brew... [2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1326194/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1326194/