Malted Musings

World’s —–est beer

There’s been a lot of coverage/discussion recently of the battle for the title of World’s Strongest Beer, World’s Hoppiest Beer, World’s Most Extreme, World’s Bitterest Beer, World’s Lightest Beer, World’s Best Beer… etc. (I haven’t seen anyone vying for World’s Sourest Beer yet, although having tried this on Saturday, I can tell you what the winner would be).  The trend seems to be on the uptick recently and although the discussions always seem to promote much hand-wringing and head-shaking, it seems to me to be a natural extension of the beer world today.  Although craft beer continues to take a larger and larger slice of the market every year, it is still pretty small potatoes by standards of the macro brewers out there.

According to the Brewer’s Association, although growth in the craft beer segment of the market has been vastly outpacing that of the macros, it still only represents about 4% of the total by volume produced and 6.3% of the total sold in dollars.  Furthermore, the actual number of breweries operating in the United States (currently over 1500) is larger than at any point in the last 100 years.  These numbers demonstrate the great strength of the craft beer industry, but they also demonstrate just how hard it is for any individual brewer to make inroads.  In order to compete in this type of market, it is usually desirable for a given brewer to find some way of distinguishing themselves in the marketplace.  This can take the form of producing beer that appeals to local sensibilities (i.e.  producing only organic products, producing a vertical series or special anniversary brews that can be collected) in order to open up a niche in the local market that you can then build on.  You could also take the more aggressive approach by brewing high-strength/high-ABV beers and trumpeting that loudly.  This has worked very well for Stone Brewing (You’re Not Worthy) or for Dogfish Head (Off-centered Ales for Off-centered people) but they were pioneers ten years ago.  This type of marketing can only take you so far nowadays because you still have to run up against the guys and girls who started the trend.  Until you’ve built up a bit of following, it can be tough to convince people that your special release, high-gravity beer, is worth anything (even the big guys are producing seasonal beers, although I haven’t seen anything to indicate that they’ve been terribly successful at it).

So where does this leave the craft brewer?  You have a very competitive market and a need to distinguish your product and (hopefully) garner a bit of buzz.  How about brewing something and calling it the “World’s Strongest Beer“, the “World’s Hoppiest Beer“, or the “World’s Lightest Beer” (Okay, so that last one is really only a target that the macros are going after in their seeemingly never-ending race to the bottom of the proverbial barrel, but the point is the same).  Having a product that you can call the “Anything-est” cuts through a lot of marketing BS and gives people something that is easy to remember and hopefully translates into a curiosity for your other, less expensive (and usually substantially more profitable) offerings.

The obvious question remains, “Does it work?” and I think it will take some time to sort that out.  As I mentioned above, both Dogfish Head and Stone have been very successful brewing beers that were considered aggressive only a few years ago.  In terms of “extremeness” I think it’s safe to say that many of their offerings have been leapfrogged in terms of strength, ABV, and uniqueness and yet they continue to succeed.  The reason for this is fairly simple, but it often gets lost in all of the hype around the special release debates… they make beer that people want to drink… end of story.  It’s one thing to win in a contest to produce a single very high-gravity, highly hopped beer, but it is quite another to produce stuff that people want to drink over and over again.  Even though Brewdog produced a very interesting beer in Tactical Nuclear Penguin, sales of that product aren’t going to keep them in the black any more than will sales of the current title-holder of World’s Strongest Beer, Schorschbräu Schorschbock 40% will for them.  The same goes for the World’s Hoppiest Beer… when is the last time anyone reading this ever bought a six-pack of Mikkeller X Hop Juice (ignoring the impossibility of getting 2007 IBUs of alpha acid to actually dissolve in a given beer)?  I applaud these brewers for making all of these crazy, off-the-wall brews and for giving us nerds lots of stuff to argue about, but at the end of the day, the true measure of success is whether or not you can open your doors for business again tomorrow and hold your head high knowing that you make beer that people love… hopefully we’ll see even more of that kind of success moving forward in 2010.

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