Ryan Moses
Sep 4, 2018 · 5 min read

It’s a holiday weekend and you walk into your local bottle shop with a friend whose from out of town. He has come in part for a beercation. North Carolina’s beer reputation has grown in the last couple of years. While in town, he wants to have some beer from the best North Carolina has to offer.

You’re in the local section of the shop and you see bottles from Wicked Weed. Your friend was at the Great American Beer Festival a couple of years before when they ran out of beer at the booth because of the demand.

He wants to buy some. What do you say to him?

If this was April 2017, the answer would be an unequivocal yes. Wicked Weed sat as the exemplar of what North Carolina beer could be. It was local with good ambitions, a good product, a good reputation, and a hip tasting room. Its growing profile helped shine a light on the growing craft beer industry in the state.

Then, in May 2017 ABInBev announced it had purchased Wicked Weed and would add it to its stable of brands under its High End umbrella.

What would have been an easy suggestion for your friend now begs the question: Should it matter who owns Wicked Weed?

Yes, it matters.

This is more than a simple discussion about the Craft Beer vs. Big Beer wars. This is a discussion about large multinational corporations versus small businesses.

Shareholder’s needs versus local focus

Large multinational corporations and smaller local businesses focus on different things.

Let there be no doubt that ABI, MillerCoors, Heineken, and Constellation Brands are large multinational beer companies. With holdings, breweries, and markets on different continents they sit at the top of the beer business world.

To survive, these beer companies will build breweries where ever they need to, they will buy whatever materials they need to from where ever they need to from whomever they need to, and they will hire and fire how they see fit. All these decisions are to guarantee survival and growth. Like any other animal a corporation has as its primary purposes survival and propagation.

Small businesses are by their nature locally focused. The owners are more connected to their employees and to their communities because there exists little to no distance between them. They are as dependent on their community as their community is dependent on them. Since 2007, the Small Business Administration estimates that small businesses have created two-thirds of all new jobs in the US.

Those jobs and the money they put back into the economy via wages and taxes stay in their local community.

This is why supporting craft breweries and local businesses is important. Thinking about where you put your money and supporting local businesses is hard. Yes, if you have a cell phone it is more likely than not an iPhone or a Samsung purchased from your carrier or a huge box-store chain. That doesn’t mean you cannot make purchasing decisions geared towards supporting independent and local businesses in other parts of your life. A great place to start is food and craft beer.

The beer is what should be important

ABI, and the other big beer companies, are large industrial manufacturers. They could be making ball bearings for all they care as long as it sells for the highest possible margin. These companies do not care one whit whether their beer tastes good. They just want you to buy it. Their only concern about the quality is that it is high enough for you to keep coming back.

The big beer companies start with how much do they need to sell, then work backwards to engineer a product that will achieve those goals. Your local craft brewery operates differently. They start from idea of making a quality product and then figure out how to sell it.

Do you gain anything from choosing craft beer?

You drink better beer, you help the local economy of that brewery, you gain a better experience.

Craft beer has a story to tell. Almost everyone who starts a brewery has an origin story that highlights how much they love craft beer. You don’t get that from big beer. Even the brands purchased by the big beer companies lose that over time.

Craft beer has and must continue to exploit those stories to connect with more and more people. If you get in front of people no matter their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and tell your specific story, you will touch them and expand your customer base.

One of the truest tenants of fiction is specificity is universal. Every great short story, novel, play, or movie is specific to those characters, but it is in those specific details each reader sees themselves. Telling your story to everyone and not assuming they won’t get it because they don’t look like you is the best way to exploit one of the primary advantages craft beer has over big beer.

How did we get here

Craft beer was born in the wasteland that was beer in the 1970s. Depending on how you measure it in the early to mid-70s there were only 50 brewers in the United States. In 1978, the same year home brewing became legal, Anheuser Busch accounted for almost a quarter of all beer sold in the US. By 1980, when 90% of the beer in the US was brewed by the top 10 breweries in the US, Anheuser Busch accounted for almost 50% of all the beer in the US.

To get to the point where you sell that much beer, you are pandering to the lowest common denominator. You are only creating a product that appeals to the broadest range of taste buds. Creating a product that has little if any taste. That also means, you have no want or need to innovate or make a better product. The sheep are already buying it by the truck load.

People argue that there are degrees of malevolence within big beer companies. They argue that ABI is the apex of bad behavior and the other big beer companies are not so bad. Their argument is based on the idea that the other companies have not been caught doing the things ABI has.

That argument misunderstands the nature of corporations. They are simply large animals intent on securing their own survival at any cost. Much like the kaiju.

The kaiju or strange beast comes from Japanese folklore and has become the basis of a science fiction genre about large monsters destroying the world.

All the big beer companies are kaiju. Sometimes they rip and shred their way through the beer world and sometimes they sit satiated waiting for the next hunger pains. You must always remember these kaiju are always a moment away from tromping across the world flattening your city. Even if a large multinational corporation has not acted (or been caught acting) with ABI’s blind malevolence doesn’t mean they are any less capable of doing so.

So, stay away from all those companies if you want to see craft beer succeed and you want interesting and great tasting beer to continue.

Don’t support the kaiju. Support your local brewery.

Ryan Moses

Written by

I love writing and talking about craft beer as much as I love craft beer. I want to help people learn about beer, but not forget that craft beer is still fun.