Chicago's Goose Island Brewery is now owned by Anheuser-Busch

I'm Chris. I live in Brooklyn. I like craft beer, geography, travel, hiking, biking, news media, and a lot of random things that are mostly of little or no consequence.

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March 29th, 2011 at 10:40AM

Chicago's Goose Island Brewery is now owned by Anheuser-Busch

themuppetpants:

beerbeer:

The brewmaster has quit, cease supporting.

Macrobreweries (the big guys, A-B, Coors, Miller, etc.) buy microbreweries to undermine the microbrew industry. They buy brands like Leinenkugel and Blue Moon, use their macrobrew market share and economies of scale to undercut real microbreweries on price while getting their products better placement at bars and liquor stores. It’s an effort to kill the microbrew industry and limit consumer choices. If you support brewer creativity please cease purchasing Goose Island (or, for that matter, Blue Moon and Leinenkugel) immediately.

Bullshit. It’s an effort to profit off of changing consumer tastes without having to adapt their own product line. Domestic beer has been losing market share to craft beer consistently for the past five years, so turning Goose Island into shitty beer isn’t going to help them grow their market share. And if you read the interview with their departing brewmaster, you’ll see that his reasons for leaving have little to do with A-B and more that it was a convenient time to leave. And for Christ’s sake, their new brewmaster came from Deschutes, a bastion of brewery creativity.

Not to mention A-B has had a 35% stake in Goose Island since 2006 and here’s what changed about the beer: nothing. Zip. Zilch. A-B’s interest improved their distribution channels significantly, and it gave them a big boost in equity to expand the brewery and its marketing efforts. A-B already announced they’d be expanding the Chicago brewery, which Goose Island desperately needed last year when they had to discontinue three of their beers. And there’s absolutely nothing to suggest that anything will be brewed outside of the existing Chicago and Portsmouth, NH facilities that Goose Island has already been using.

So, nothing’s changing about the beer. So here’s the worst-case scenario: they use their macrobrew market share and economies of scale to undercut real microbreweries on price while getting their products better placement at bars and liquor stores. Except A-B has already been doing that with their 35% stake in Goose Island, and nobody seems to have been in an uproar about it. A lot of times, it’s the only craft option in bars I’ve been to that serve primarily B/M/C products. It’s not a bad thing that better placement gives people the option of real, flavorful craft beer in a desert of macrobrew options. It might even open a few people’s eyes to craft beer.

I can’t believe I’m defending Anheuser-Busch, but to suggest boycotting Goose Island is absolutely absurd when we have (a) no track record on the part of A-B in diluting Goose Island’s product over the past five years and (b) no indication from anyone involved in the deal that there will be changes that would alienate consumers.

If you just hate big corporations, fine, boycott Goose Island. But you’re a hypocrite if you weren’t already boycotting them, Widmer, Red Hook, and Kona for the past five years.

(via fungazi)