this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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With sales steadily declining since 2016 it’s clearly not just my taste in beer. Maybe they should’ve adapted…
Marketing, competition, alcohol consumption going down per capita… your view that their product just sucks is simplistic, and, given their long life as a brewery, I would say demonstrably wrong. It’s easy to say, the day after they fold, “their beer obviously sucked.” But the question then is how did they remain in business from 1896-2023? Most brewers are far from demonstrating that kind of success.
Yeah, fair enough any business running for over a 100 years has done something right. However, the amount of (craft) beer competition in the last century just wasn't even close to the level it is today. In 1978 there were only 89 breweries nationwide. There's more than that in the Bay alone now. Considering how many really great local breweries and beers are now available, yeah I don't think their products were good enough to stand out. Then again this is a problem a lot of breweries are having, they are not unique. I never said their beer sucked btw.
Craft beer isn’t new though. It’s been booming for decades. We could say that they didn’t ride the IPA wave and maybe that marketing failure was just enough to sink them. Their distribution was also lousy. I never saw their taps out of state. After visiting them, my sense was that they were just a small-minded, small-scale business. And small businesses have a harder time surviving the ups and downs of the marketplace. They made a bad deal with Sapporo. They went under. None of this besmirches their core product, which is a classic and loved by millions.
Well I just saw the other comment with the vinepair article, and while I think competition from the explosion of craft beers is a part of it, the stories of mismanagement hurt to read :(