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Craft Beer is Booming but Some Brewers Worry About the Future

Looking at the wide array of taps at bars these days, we seem to be in a golden age of beer. The world is awash (containing large numbers or amounts of someone or something)in ales (forming the names of orders of plants), lagers (a kind of effervescent beer which is light in colour and body)and porters (a person employed to carry luggage and other loads, especially in a railway station, airport, hotel, or market), many made by small breweries (a place where beer is made commercially), which are gaining an ever bigger share of the market.

Brooklyn Brewery, a pioneer in the craft beer renaissance (rebirth or revival)along with Boston Beer Company and Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., is doing such brisk (keen or sharp in speech or manner)business that it plans to build a second brewery on Staten Island in 2017. Small companies like Brooklyn sold 11 percent of the beer Americans bought last year, up from just 2.8 percent in 2004, according to the Brewers Association, a trade group.

But even success with consumers isn’t enough. Small brewers have good reason to fear that mergers (any combination of two or more business enterprises into a single enterprise)among the industry’s giants will make it harder for them to sell their products if those companies also come to control big beer distributors around the country.When Brooklyn Brewery began selling its lager in 1988, few people took it seriously. Steve Hindy, one of the founders, said some people even sneered (to smile, laugh, or contort the face in a manner that shows scorn or contempt)that it made no sense to name a beer after a place as gritty as Brooklyn.

“We distributed our own beer for 15 years because none of the big distributors cared about us,” he said recently. Brooklyn and other craft labels caught on as more Americans began experimenting with imported beers from Europe. The growth was helped along by the local and artisanal (pertaining to or noting a high-quality or distinctive product made in small quantities, usually by hand or using traditional methods)food movements. And the growing cachet (the state of being respected or admired)of Brooklyn, the place, has helped with marketing, too; international sales of the company’s beers have boomed, growing about 25 percent a year.

Yet while Brooklyn lager can be found in Stockholm, it can’t be found in many states, like California. That’s partly because beer distribution is mostly through wholesalers, some of whom have been acquired (to come into possession or ownership of)by giant beer corporations like Anheuser-Busch InBev. Reuters reported this month that the Department of Justice and regulators in California were investigating whether InBev, which makes Budweiser and Bud Light, was buying up beer wholesalers to curb sales of craft beers in bars and grocery (a store selling foodstuffs and various household supplies)stores.

“When a big brewery buys an independently-owned distributor they would evaluate each one of those brands and not keep all of them,” said Tom McCormick, executive director of the California Craft Brewers Association and a former beer distributor. “The bulk of their attention would be on their in-house brands.”

That fear has been heightened (make or become more intense)by the announcement (a formal public statement about a fact, occurrence, or intention)earlier this month that InBev, the world’s largest beer company, has proposed buying SABMiller, the second-biggest company, for $104 billion. InBev produces about 45 percent of all the beer sold in the United States while Miller Coors, a joint venture (a risky or daring journey or undertaking)between SABMiller and Molson Coors, sells 26 percent, according to Beer Marketer’s Insight (the capacity to gain an accurate and deep understanding of someone or something).

Source : http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/22/opinion/craft-beer-is-booming-but-some-brewers-worry-about-the-future.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

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