Beer Wars Essay

Beer Wars is a documentary film directed and produced by Anat Baron and released in April of 2009. It focuses on the struggle between the dominating corporate businesses of Anheuser-Busch, Miller Brewing Company, Coors Brewing Company, and the smaller independent businesses of “craft beers” such as Dogfish Head Brewery, The Boston Beer Company, and The New Belgium Brewing Company. The film covers many aspects of the beer “wars” between the companies such as competitive advertising, product quality, price, distribution, and government regulations.

Because of the enormous status and power of the big three, the ability to advertise and market their wares is significantly easier than for most other breweries. From being able to hire top dollar marketing experts to running multimillion dollar commercials during the Super Bowl, they dominate the beer advertising market. With their lack of ability to buy “shelf space”, smaller companies are often pushed out of the way and driven to less marketable places in the aisles of stores nationwide.

Rhonda Kallman, owner of The New Century Brewing company, known for its craft beer “Moonshot”, talked about how she often would put up a poster advertising her beer one day only to find it replaced by a competitor’s poster the next day. This is a glimpse at the competitiveness that small breweries face day to day. Today, The New Century Brewing company is currently shut down due to the FDA’s banning of caffeinated beers; Moonshot fell victim to this regulatory axe. This is what happens when the bread and butter of your company can no longer be produced.

The fall of Kallman’s company, however, is just another tragic story in the long history of beer manufactures. By the late 70‘s and early 80‘s, many people turned towards homebrewing to meet their taste needs because of the bland taste of the larger breweries products. Charlie Papazian was one of those people. A nuclear engineer at the University of Virginia, he started experimenting with homebrewing soon after it was legalized in 1978. His main focus was quality and diversity when out of his house he started the American Homebrewers Association; now a

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nationwide association of over 36,000 members with it’s own magazine. While giving a tour of his prized collection he made sure to point out that what he cared about most was “Quality. Not necessarily quantity, but quality. ” Papazian was not the only one who desired quality over quantity. Samuel Calagione was yet another man focused on quality. In 1995 he founded the company Dogfish Head Brewery naming it after Dogfish Head, Maine where he spent summers as a child growing up.

Starting out as a fledgling company in Delaware, and growing by nearly 400% between 2003 and 2006, it now is one of the most successful craft breweries in the U. S. A. The film went into great detail on the various struggles that small breweries went through. From the competitive advertising to the rules and regulations of the trade, small breweries are faced with many challenges day to day. After the Prohibition in the 1930’s, a three-tier system was set up by many states in order to control the flow of alcohol from producer to consumer.

However, this proved to be often times a problem for fledgling companies with little buying power. In order to get their beers out there and known, they must go through a wholesaler distributer first. The problem though is that often times the wholesalers favor the Big Three or other large companies because of their buying power. When it came down to having to choose whether to ship a Coors Light or a Moonshot, often times the well known brand would be chosen not only for it’s popularity but also because of the pay that the larger companies could give for their favor over others.

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Kallman learned that shelf space is yet another difficulty faced by the craft beer companies. If you’re most seen, you’re most bought and the Big Three knew this. Another difficulty faced is the temptation to sell out to the big companies. Over the years, Anheuser-Busch, Miller, and Coors all have been buying up the little companies as soon as they showed promise; all in order to try to get a bigger piece of the pie that is market share. If they couldn’t buy you, they would try to destroy you.

So in conclusion, Beer Wars is one of the first documentary films to go into great detail on the battle for survival and power between the various beer companies of America; showing the struggles of the craft breweries against the big companies and the fight for power among the larger companies and their major competitors.

Sources http://beerwarsmovie. com/tag/rhonda-kallman/ http://www. cnn. com/FOOD/resources/food. for. thought/beverages/alcohol/homebrew/papazian/.

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