Author: PeteBrown

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The earth didn’t move. But that’s OK

In the end it was typical Brew Dog: a good, original, interesting idea, overhyped so ludicrously that the reality was a bit of a letdown, but having created enough debate and discussion to make you suspect this is what they intended all along.

If this blog is the only thing you’ve ever read on the internet, you may be unaware that yesterday, after teasing us for months, Brew Dog announced the launch of Equity for Punks, essentially an IPO offering fans of the beer the chance to own a tiny sliver of the brewery. The money raised by the share issue will finance the building of a new brewery.
It’s certainly had a mixed reaction. The shares are stupidly overpriced – the 10,000 shares represent 9% of the total equity which, at £230 a share, would mean the brewery itself is worth around £23 million. It’s not.
But that’s not the point. I doubt Brew Dog will sell all 10,000 shares, but the people who are buying are buying something more than a 0.0009% stake in the most exciting brewery in the UK. The people buying are people who don’t normally buy shares. They’re buying this share because they want to align themselves with something interesting and iconoclastic, to be part of an adventure. Think of it less as a share, more like a T-shirt or badge saying “I’m one of these cool, interesting people who’s part of this cool, interesting thing.” And remember the lifetime 20% discount on the beers too.
Will I buy my share? Probably. The only thing I’ll say though is that if the shares were a tenner each, I’d probably have bought £500 worth. Many Brew Dog fans won’t be able to afford the £230 price of entry. There’s an exclusivity here that’s not very punk. It’s actually going to be a stretch for me, but I don’t want to miss the ride.

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New Beer Club

Just received an introductory box of beer from myBrewerytap.com, a new mail order beer club. (Disclosure: they sent me the box for free in return for me writing about them).

The idea is that you get 13 bottles of beer each quarter – not enough to keep you going, I know, but the first box certainly provides an interesting addition to the cellar. It’s a really thoughtful selection of beers and the ones I’ve had so far – Burton Bridge’s Burton Porter and Eccleshall Brewery’s apallingly-named ‘Top Totty’ (Please, guys. Stop it. Now.) were really great beers.
I may be wrong – I may just have been lucky – but I suspect that there’s some quality control happening on beers that are included. There are ones I recognise from Meantime and Breconshire, but most of them are form micros around the country I haven’t come across before.
And you get free glasses and bottle openers and stuff too, and some notes about each beer.
Well worth checking out.

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Inside Beer, and inside my book

Jeff Evans is a veteran beer writer and very nice bloke, editor of the Good Bottle Beer Guide, author of loads of books and winner of a pile of awards.

He recently launched a new website, Inside Beer, which is far, far more than just a blog or place to plug stuff. You can get lost in there with loads of features, reviews and handy hints.
Right now there’s an interview with me about Hops and Glory too.
What more could you ask for?

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More good beer stuff in a national newspaper

Today The Independent features their 50 best (bottled) beers. I was asked to be one of the contributors, along with Roger Protz, Jeff Evans and Zak Avery.

I submitted about 18 out of the 50, but obviously there was some overlap between us so not all of mine are in. But it’s a great selection overall.

The website navigation is pretty dodgy, so if you’re interested, I’d suggest buying a copy of the paper if you can.

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How to sell barley wine

If you’re interested, here’s the text of my speech from the Guild of Beer Writers seminar last Monday – it seemed to go down pretty well.

The best book on marketing I ever read was called Positioning: the battle for your mind. It was the best book because it contained one simple idea. It repeated this idea over and over again, with countless examples, until you got it. And it’s an idea that can help you sell anything worth selling. Basically, the idea is this: the way the human brain works, when we are introduced to a new thing or idea, we automatically try to make sense of it by filing it in our brains next to things we already know. We understand it by relating it to things we’re deeply familiar with. The first cars were known as horseless carriages. Television was like radio, but with pictures. And Seven-Up launched in the United States as ‘the uncola’. In each case, the product is defined – positioned – against a product that’s already familiar. Think about when we write tasting notes for beers – the best way to describe an American IPA to a wine lover is to compare it to a Kiwi Sauvignon Blanc. Imperial porters are “vinous”. And who can say they don’t regularly describe the combination of hops, barley, yeast and water as chocolatey, fruity or biscuity? The term ‘barley wine’ is a classic piece of positioning thinking – we know what wine is. It’s made of grapes. This is wine that’s made from barley. Of course, technically its beer, not wine, but if a potential drinker, never having heard of it before, hears this phrase, they can decode a lot of product information from it. It’s going to be strong in alcohol and in flavour. It should be sipped and savoured from a small glass, not drunk in pints. It’s going to come in a 750ml bottle, designed for sharing, that’s going to look great and cost a lot of money and be suitable on a dinner table and… oh hang on. It’s quite interesting to see where the analogy breaks down, isn’t it? The very name, barley wine, sets accurate expectations about what the product will deliver. But not about what to expect from how it will be packaged and sold. And there’s another problem: if you say ‘barley wine’ to older drinkers, they have another concept in their heads which means they don’t actually get to wrestle with the metaphor of the name to unlock those rich associations. To them, barley wine is rocket fuel, cheap and nasty, something that was around in the seventies. To win them over, you need to do something that breaks the association between the term and the drink they used to know. The solution to both is simple enough: a different approach to presentation and packaging. If you package a very strong beer in the same type of bottles in which you package ordinary beer, give it a similar name and labelling, and sell it at a not too dissimilar price point, people are going to think that it’s like other beer – carrying the same associations, to be drunk in the same fashion. This is why people think of an 8% beer as insanely strong when they’re perfectly happy to drink 12% wine in similar quantities. Present it in a different way, a more premium way, and people will think of it differently. Drinkers have two sets of associations in their heads: beer, and wine. Barley wine can and should play with both. A clichéd advertising proposition for barley wine would be “the beer that thinks it’s a wine”. You can immediately see the associations that conjures up. But you have to do it justice. Think about quality. Presentation. Ritual. When you get a bottle of barley wine that looks like it’s worth paying seven quid for before you’ve even picked it up, you’ve probably got it nearly right. You might not like the fact that we’re using wine as a benchmark of quality. But you have to work with what’s already in people’s heads. And it is called barley wine.

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The business of beer

Had an interesting week that’s seen me on me feet three times telling people something about the selling of good beer: on Monday I was asked to do a short speech at the British Guild of Beer Writers Barley Wine seminar. On Wednesday I was asked to present the prizes for packaging and design at the International Beer Challenge, after chairing that part of the judging (the other tables got to drink the beers – we got to look at them!) And on Thursday I was asked to make a short speech and present the overall winner of the SIBA Business Awards.

This all represents a bit of a development for me – I haven’t been asked to present anything before and it was very nice to be asked now.
I thought it was interesting that all three were linked to the marketing and selling of beer – I suppose that’s my strong point, if I have one – and that all three fell in the same week.
At the SIBA awards I said that marketing has long been a dirty word in beer circles. Because global bland brands use a lot of marketing to sell beers that have very little character, marketing itself gets the blame. But what we’re seeing now is lots of brewers starting to engage with it.
On TV, megabrands spunk more in one commercial break than the vast majority of brewers will ever have to spend on marketing in a year. But the world is changing. If you bottle your beer, everyone has the same space on which to create an attractive label. Same with a standard handpull pumpclip. On Twitter and Facebook, everyone from AB-Inbev to that bloke down the road with a one barrel plant in his garage has the same space to play with. The playing field is level in many key respects. And the big brewers will tell you that TV is less effective these days – what you need to do is get in at a grassroots level and work closely with pubs and consumers to give them something they want in a more tightly defined target audience. Smaller brewers are at least as well, positioned, if not better positioned, to do community and grassroots stuff than big brewers are.
But as more people take an interest, the standard is improving. I’m not going to name names, but there were some truly horrible beers submitted to the IBC design and packaging awards – stuff that was meant to look premium and just looked cheap and tacky, and stuff where there had been no thought given whatsoever to how this bottle was meant to persuade someone to pick it up form the shelf. There’s nothing about being a great brewer that means you’re more likely to be a great graphic designer too. And small, independent designers are all over the place, looking for ways to prove themselves and not charging the earth to do it. Getting it done properly is a very worthwhile investment.
And at the SIBA awards, we saw an awful lot of entries where a brewer had created a one-off brew with a special pump clip to help celebrate an event, or to promote awareness of a charity and give a donation from every pint sold. This is sound business practice, solid promotional thinking and proves that small brewers are worthy members of their local communities. But it ain’t award-winning stuff. The winners went further and created big ideas, put marketing and/or entrepreneurialism at the heart of their thinking rather than a bolt-on at the end.
It’s a tough market out there – there’s no reason why any brewer can’t compete on equal terms. But it’s got to be done properly. And more and more brewers are realising that.

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Getting grumpy about beer provenance

So Scottish & Newcastle – the company that has already closed all its breweries in both Scotland and Newcastle – is going to start brewing Newcastle Brown in Yorkshire.

Now we all know that Yorkshire must be the best place in the world to brew beer, because Yorkshire beers are the best in the world. But this is a silly business decision because Newcastle Brown is a Newcastle beer and a Newcastle brand and a Newcastle legend.
OK, so Broon has been brewed in Gateshead rather than Newcastle for the last few years. That was bad enough. But it was just across the river and most people were prepared to overlook a technicality that only Geordies really cared about. It was still Newcastle really.
Now, S&N have taken a commercial decision which they think is a good one: to create vital cost savings by closing a brewery that, on paper, it no longer needs. There’s brewing capacity at Tadcaster, and Broon is produced on such a big corporate scale that moving it isn’t going to make the slightest bit of difference to the product as it now stands. In a declining market, big brewers can’t afford to be sentimental, and have to bow to the demands of the balance sheet and the stock market.
The problem for S&N is that this is not a good commercial decision. It’s a really, really dumb commercial decision.
It’s a dumb decision because it has really, really pissed off the brand’s core audience – in other words, the people who drink most of it. This decision is a slap in the face to the brand’s core drinkers. In fact it’s more than a slap in the face. It’s a happy slap and a really offensive “your mum” joke and pinning the drinker to the ground and farting on their head all rolled into one. It’s saying that local provenance in beer and local pride is less important than short term balance sheet savings.
It’s a dumb decision because even if you don’t live in Newcastle, beer provenance is part of why you choose a brand. A lot of people think Geordie style and culture is quite cool in a strange way, and they buy a bit of that cool when they buy a bottle of dog (which is what they call it cos they’ve heard that’s what real Geordies call it).
It’s a dumb decision because it’s called Newcastle Brown and has a picture of Newcastle on the label and if it’s brewed nowhere near Newcastle then it’s just a deeply average brown ale with no roots, provenance or authenticity.
It’s a dumb decision because premium bottled ale has been in steady growth for ten years – up 5% last year – as most other sectors of the beer market are in decline. Broon is the market leader in premium bottled ale. To make such a public statement of disinvestment and deprioritisation of a brand that is brand leader in the most successful segment of the beer market is, to put it a little too bluntly, really fucking stupid.
Next month, S&N are changing their name to Heineken UK, after being bought by the Dutch brewer at the start of 2008.
And that reveals why this decision is not just stupid, but really insulting too.
Because it would be easy to say that Heineken simply don’t understand the role of provenance and place in beer brands, in the way that, say, Inbev clearly don’t. But Heineken understands this very well.
Ten years ago Heineken in the UK was a standard lager brewed here under licence by Whitbread. It was the fourth biggest beer brand in the country, with over 1.1 million barrels sold annually. But it was an anomaly to a company that is passionate about the quality and consistency of its product. They axed the standard Heineken. Heineken in the UK is now a decent quality 5% premium pilsner lager, brewed in Holland and imported to the UK – because to build the brand, they feel it’s important that it comes from where it claims to come from.
So here’s a company that’s saying its own brand, with its name on it, is very important. Its provenance is a crucial part of its appeal and that’s why we only ever import it from Holland. But Newcastle Brown? This brand we inherited when we bought a company to get our hands on UK on-trade distribution for our beloved Heineken? Well it might be important to you northern peasants, but we couldn’t give a shit about it. Yorkshire? Newcastle? It’s all the north, innit? What are you complaining about? That’s what they’re saying. Honest it is.
I’m not one of those reactionaries who slags big breweries just because they’re big. I like some of what Heineken do. But this is nasty, stupid and offensive.

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Festivals and that

My latest pieces in the Publican:

I’ve been inspired by all the different kinds of festivals I’ve been privileged to appear at this summer, and it made me think about how pubs might benefit from the psychology they create. I wrote about it here.
If you read this blog much you’ll have read about the Cask Report already. But if you’d like to read me writing about the same points using slightly different words, you can do so here, and see a nice chart I’m quite proud of.

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Cask Report update

Amazing response to the Cask Report – we printed 10,000 copies and they’ve all gone. Hopefully printing more.

The Publican‘s Dan Pearce came along to the launch on Monday and brought his clever little phone. He did a video and put it on YouTube. Apart from convincing me to go on a diet and detox for a month before I ever allow myself to be filmed again, it’s quite good:

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