Pandering To Women

December 17, 2012 By Jay Brooks

women
I may not be a woman, but I grew up around them quite a lot as a child, perhaps more than some others (my folks divorced when I was one and I spent most of my formative years among my mother, grandmothers, aunts, etc.) and am fully in touch with my feminine side. Plus, I love quite a few women — one a lot more than others — but count quite a few among my closest friends. So I cringe every time I read about the efforts of big companies to market beer directly to women, believing all it will take to increase market share is more attractive packaging or sweeter flavors. How many of these failed efforts have we endured in just the last decade?

A few days ago, yet another one surfaced, in a Fast Company interview with Carlsberg Group CEO Jorgen Buhl Rasmussen entitled Carlsberg Taps The Next Big Beer Market (Really): Women. This morning, I saw quite a few exasperated tweets and posts from women in the beer industry that I respect, and decided to read the interview. It’s a head-shaker, alright. Riddled with so much wrong, it’s hard to address it all, so I won’t. I’m sure someone will dissect it better than I can.

But, just a few points. First, Rasmussen claims that the “beer category has been suffering in terms of image,” but for just “the last 10 to 15 years.” Um, I can’t actually remember a time when beer wasn’t marketed almost exclusively to men. There are a few post-World War 2 ads that reach out to women — primarily because they were the ones doing the grocery shopping — but by the 1960s it was all men, all the time. And it’s been that way ever since, from the Swedish Bikini Team to Miller’s infamous mud wrestling. But he soldiers on.

Rasmussen and others still think product innovation and marketing brewed drinks toward women is possible. Increasingly, women know about different, palate-friendly beers like Abbey Ales, fruit lambics, ciders, ginger beers, and dark stouts — as well as about the more varied glassware they require and how to pair them with foods. Women want “a less bitter, non-bloating beer that does not give you a malty/hoppy aftertaste and breath,” says Carlsberg spokesman Ben Morton. “Flavor proliferation has become a key feature of beer innovation.”

So what’s the plan? “[H]e wants to come up with new types of drink recipes that can be made in Carlsberg-owned breweries but are lighter in alcohol, refreshing in taste, and perceived as healthy enough to take on wine, champagne, and other drinks vying for women’s dollars.” Rasmussen used to work for Duracell, Gillette Group, Mars, and Unilever, and seems to believe that beer is just the same as marketing razors and candy, but I don’t think that’s true.

Then there’s this bit of wisdom, by Carlsberg’s VP of Marketing, Kirsten Ægidius. “Many young people aren’t keen on the bitter aftertaste of beer.” Uh, huh. That’s why IPA has been the fastest growing category for years.

So I know they can’t help themselves, but I really wish the big beer companies would just stop this insane, asinine belief that reaching women is a matter of finding beer that’s female friendly and is marketed to them like Virginia Slims’ “you’ve come a long way, baby” pandering.

Not surprisingly, I have a lot of female friends who love beer every bit as much as I do. My wife is a beer lover, and probably drinks more beer at home than I do. I know countless female brewers, beer writers and female fans who love craft beer. This is the same craft beer, mind you, that I love, and that every other beer-loving male loves, too. There doesn’t need to be gender-specific beer. That’s a ridiculous notion, but one that keeps resurfacing, even though it fails every single time. I remember an “I Love Toy Trains” video that Porter used to watch when he was younger that showed how in the 1950s Lionel created a toy train set aimed at girls in which all the cars were pastel colors, pink, lavender, etc. It bombed, because the girls who wanted to play with toy trains wanted the same trains that the boys had. It’s hard to imagine why anybody would have thought otherwise.
Young blond woman with glass of beer
So while I hate to speak for women beer lovers, who are quite capable of fending for themselves, I’m just as eager for this nonsense to stop. So here’s a few tips I have for the big beer companies on how to reach women:

Stop pandering to women, just treat them like people.
Stop the obvious sexism in most of your advertising.
Stop ignoring your own involvement in creating the perception that beer is not for women.
Stop assuming women won’t drink anything bitter; coffee is bitter and you don’t see this issue in the coffee industry, do you?
Stop creating packages that you think will appeal to women.
Stop believing that marketing is the answer.

Parents Drinking Weakens Children’s Vitality

December 9, 2012 By Jay Brooks

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Here’s an interesting piece of history, during the temperance movement of the early 20th century, when propaganda as a science was still in its infancy. Propaganda has been around almost as long as we’ve had civilization, but really came into its own with World War I, so these prohibitionist efforts were just before that, around 1909. And it would just be a curiosity, an artifact of another time, if not for the fact that the neo-prohibitionists today continue in the sad tradition of this same kind of nonsense, never missing an opportunity to chastise adults for their parenting in an effort to demonize alcohol and remove it once more from society. For the sake of the children continues to be a popular rallying cry, and just as ridiculous today as a century ago.

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Safeguarding the Babies, apparently a popular poster from the time, argued that if you as an adult drank alcohol then you were creating weak children, ones with diminished “vitality,” a term never really defined. This, the poster claims, is based on science and states that families where the parents are teetotalers only have 1.3% weakly children while families where the adults drink have kids who are 8.2% weakly. Oh, the horror! It’s a little hard to read that in the poster, but a lantern slide made a few years later by the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in 1914, using the same data, is more clear and even goes on to suggest that in drinking families almost of a quarter (24.8%) of their children will die while abstaining families kids will perish only 18.5% of the time. So that must mean the 6.3% difference is due entirely to their being drink in the house, right? I mean, what else could it possibly be?

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Yet another version, this one from 1913 and created by the Scientific Temperance Federation of Boston, Massachusetts, is one of at least 50 such poster that they made available to their followers, and through their “Scientific Temperance Journal,” which is about as scientific as you might expect. At least this one actually reveals the source of the “science,” which was a survey of 109 families in a single village in Finland. In 50 of those families, the adults didn’t drink, while in the other 59 they did. That’s the study, conducted by a professor Taav. Laitinen of the University of Helsingfors, which is the University of Helsinki, and apparently published as “Report XII International Congress vs. Alcoholism.”

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This study, and many other similar ones, was published in the “Handbook of Modern Facts About Alcohol” By Cora Frances Stoddard, a secretary in the Scientific Temperance Federation.

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It’s hard to say if the 109 families in Laitinen’s “study” is a statistically significant cohort, but it seems unlikely. But Laitinen continued to expand his research to include more finnish families, eventually including nearly 6,000, and he continued to get predictably similar results.

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But scientific hooey aside, the message was clear. Drink, and your children will suffer. Drink, and your children are more likely to die. I tend to view the early 20th century as a more gullible time, and I can only assume many more people believed this nonsense without questioning it. Neo-prohibitionist groups today employ the same pseudo-scientific balderdash, only now they dress it up with degreed researchers and publish in slightly less questionable scientific journals, or at least ones that hide their true purpose better. But then, as now, it’s still laced with naked agenda to promote a specific cause, not to enlighten or educate for the sake of that knowledge. It is propaganda, pure and simple. The scare tactics are particularly offensive, since it calls into question the parenting of virtually anyone who drinks alcohol as somehow caring less for their children than parents who abstain. I’d love to say we live in a more enlightened age, but today’s anti-alcohol organizations continue to stoop just as low as cries of “think of the children” ring just as hollow now as when they questioned the “vitality” of our children merely by growing up in a household where drinking took place.

Nine Beers Experiencing Titanic Sales Drops

December 9, 2012 By Jay Brooks

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24/7 Wall St. had an interesting look at some beers that have fallen on hard times over the last five years. Entitled Nine Beers Americans No Longer Drink, it lists some mainstream beers that have experienced some amazing drops in sales from 2006 through last year. The data is from Beer Marketer’s Insights and the list includes nine beers that have experienced more than a one-third drop in sales — and in two cases two-thirds — over that five-year time period. Here’s the list:

Michelob: 72% drop in sales, 2006-2011 (ABI)
Michelob Light: 66.3% drop in sales, 2006-2011 (ABI)
Budweiser Select: 60.8% drop in sales, 2006-2011 (ABI)
Milwaukee’s Best: 57.1% drop in sales, 2006-2011 (MillerCoors)
Old Milwaukee: 52.8% drop in sales, 2006-2011 (Pabst)
Miller Genuine Draft: 52.3% drop in sales, 2006-2011 (MillerCoors)
Amstel Light: 47.7% drop in sales, 2006-2011 (Heineken)
Miller High Life Light: 37.6% drop in sales, 2006-2011 (MillerCoors)
Milwaukee’s Best Light: 35.5% drop in sales, 2006-2011 (MillerCoors)

That’s a pretty remarkable list. A few of those used to be truly successful brands. The article also details how “to combat the growing popularity of craft brews, major breweries such as Anheuser-Busch Inbev and MillerCoors have aggressively marketed their own specialty beer.” Those include such stealth beers as Blue Moon, Shock Top, et al. That’s in addition to buying up craft brands such as Goose Island or creating separate marketing arms, like Tenth and Blake.

It will be interesting to see what these companies will do next as these brands drag down the ship with such titanic sinking sales. Will they take steps to reinvigorate these brands or jettison them from their portfolios and instead concentrate on craftier brands?

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We Didn’t Repeal Prohibition So …

December 5, 2012 By Jay Brooks

lucky-bucket
Regular readers of the Bulletin know my feelings about low-calorie light diet beer, so this poster by Lucky Bucket Brewing in Nebraska gave me quite a chuckle. “We didn’t repeal Prohibition so we could drink light beer.” Amen, brother. Truer words were never spoken. Happy Repeal Day, everybody.

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Queenan Country: Where Beer Ignorance Frightens Cranky Old Man

November 10, 2012 By Jay Brooks

wall-street-journal
Wow. Just, wow. Rarely have I seen such naked ignorance on display in print, and in the Wall Street Journal, no less. “Self professed negative styled humorist” Joe Queenan has written a piece for the Journal entitled Foaming at the Mouth About Craft Beer that packs in more idiotic commentary per column inch than I’ve seen in a long time.

Queenan begins by admitting that he knows nothing about craft beer and that everybody else seems to be talking about it, causing him great consternation. Then he drops this bomb.

It doesn’t help that I don’t drink. I used to drink a long time ago, but back then we didn’t talk about beer. We merely drank it. We might occasionally discuss wine—especially if we were in France—but beer wasn’t viewed as a suitable topic for conversation. Beer was simply an ingenious device one used to get hammered.

As a teetotaler, there’s little chance he’ll understand craft beer. It’s a bit like teaching a fish to ride a bicycle. Or as my friend and colleague, drinks writer Stephen Beaumont put it. “And what is a teetotaler doing writing about beer, anyway? [It’s] Like me writing about nuclear physics.”

On and on he goes, presumably trying to be funny but missing the mark by a country mile. And everywhere he goes, people are talking about craft beer. And he finds himself increasingly “frozen out of conversations because [he] literally know[s] nothing about craft beers.” Of course, he could pick up a book, use the internet or even ask a few questions of the throngs of craft beer drinkers he’s surrounded by. That appears to never occur to him. He could educate himself, but he voluntarily chooses ignorance instead. He’d rather be pissed off than join the conversation.

Of course, he also admits that talking about beverages is nothing new, when he notes that he and his friends used to “occasionally discuss wine — especially if we were in France — but beer wasn’t viewed as a suitable topic for conversation.” Hey Joe, guess what? That was then; this is now. You’re about to take Andy Rooney’s place, imagine this next sentence in Rooney’s voice. ‘You ever notice how people know more about beer now than when I was a kid?’ Times have changed, Joe, and apparently you’re not too thrilled that you’ve been left behind. People discussed wine in France for the simple fact that it was an engaging, interesting subject. When you came of age in the 1970s, American beer was almost all the same, so you can be excused for thinking beer wasn’t a “suitable topic for conversation.” At that time, it wasn’t. But that changed. A lot. And given that you’ve been a “media figure,” a commentator on public life and pop culture for many decades, there’s simply no excuse for not noticing that the status of American beer has been on the rise for quite some time. After all, it’s been in all the papers, even some of the ones you write for. To have missed what’s been going on would be to display monumental willful ignorance.

It’s especially odd when you write that “on a trip to Philadelphia, I happened upon a local magazine called Philly Beer Scene,” and you note it looked like Vanity Fair. But you failed to mention that you’re from Philadelphia, indeed grew up there and went to college at Saint Mary’s University. Ignorance about beer is one thing, but about your hometown? Is that a literary license? A plot device? Or has it really been that long since you’ve made the trek all the way from upstate New York to Philly? Surely you could not have failed to notice that Philadelphia has become one of the premiere beer cities in the nation. It should have been obvious in nearly any restaurant or bar you happened upon.

But okay, fine. You’re an idiot about beer, and apparently you like it that way. Nobody’s forcing you to keep up with the times, appreciate that beer is different now than when you were a child or do even a modicum of research on the subject. Ignorance is indeed bliss, and by your own admission you must be the most blissful man in America.

All well and good, but then you had to go and try to persuade others that your point of view has some legitimacy, merit or even a chance in hell of turning back the clock to the good old days when everybody was just as ignorant as you are about beer with these statements. “I want people to cut this out right away” and “I want the madness to stop.” I got bad news for you, Joe. Craft beer is here to stay. The madness will indeed continue. You might as well get used to it.

ignorant

James Bond Skyfalling For Heineken

November 9, 2012 By Jay Brooks

Okay, we’ve been inundated with ads lately, so you probably know that the new James Bond film Skyfall opens today, at least in the U.S. I’ve been a huge James Bond fan since I saw my first one in the theater, which was Thunderball, when I was six. I read all the books, and needless to say, saw every film multiple times. I’ve really been enjoying the reboot with Daniel Craig and will be taking my son Porter to see Skyfall this afternoon. This will be his first Bond film in the theater, though he’s seen a couple of them on DVD. I’m looking forward not just to seeing the movie, but in some ways I’m even more excited that he’s really jazzed to see it and has been talking of little else for the last week. There’s just one tiny problem.

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Heineken has been associated with the Bond franchise for some time now, but the $45 million deal for Skyfall also requires Bond to actually drink some. Now drinking beer is fine, even for Bond, of course. He styles himself as a hedonist, a man who enjoys the finest pleasures across the board. He soliloquizes on that very subject in the pages of the novel Casino Royale. Especially re-set or rebooted here in the present, where beer is every bit the equal of wine and spirits, you’d not only be unsurprised that Bond drinks beer, you’d be downright shocked if he didn’t. If you read the books, you’d know he’s never restricted himself to martinis but usually drinks the preferred alcohol wherever he happens to be, and has enjoyed beer in several of the novels.

I took a detailed look at this six years ago, when it was rumored that Bond would drink Heineken in Casino Royale — which turned out not to be the case — but which caused all manner of odd denunciations that the character would never stoop so low as to drink that swill reserved for the Hoi polloi. I don’t mean Heineken, I mean beer in general. Journalists, who could have done a little research, just went apeshit. Check out James Bond’s Beer. I’ll wait here.

So as you can see, beer and Bond have been together for quite some time now, just not in the way the media has portrayed it, as usual taking the propaganda and marketing given them at face value and regurgitating it without doing any fact-checking or wondering at how convenient it all seemed. Watching the first Bond film, Dr. No, with my son last weekend, I again noted that in Jamaica he’s talking with Quarrel at a bar and Red Stripe can be seen behind the bar. A few minutes later, fighting in the back room of the bar, Bond is pushed over onto a pile of empty Red Stripe cartons that go flying everywhere. Why they’re empty is a bit of a mystery, but the fact is although he never drinks any, there’s been beer front and center since the very first official film. In the novel, The Man with the Golden Gun, he finally manages to drink some Red Stripe. In fact, he drinks three of them waiting for someone in a cafe.

But in Skyfall apparently he’s seen drinking a Heineken from the bottle, while in bed with co-star Tonia Sotiropoulou. MGM has circulated the still below showing just that.

Skyfall

Here was a portion of my take on Heineken and James Bond from six years ago:

Propaganda aside, I’m certainly in favor of James Bond drinking beer. If they’re trying to re-invent (or reboot) James Bond — which is my understanding of what the new film represents — it makes sense that a modern Bond would have embraced good beer along with the other pleasures of life today. That would be in keeping with the character’s philosophy. Undoubtedly one of the reasons that Bond was not a beer drinker in 1953 and beyond, when Fleming began writing the Bond novels, was that there were not many good beers widely available worldwide and what was available was not often written about. Remember Michael Jackson’s first beer book wasn’t published until 1977. And American wines were held in no better regard during that time period, either. So keeping Bond’s tastes and preferences rooted in a time fifty years ago, when the diversity and quality of alcohol beverages was vastly different than it is today, doesn’t make sense anymore, if indeed it ever did.

But Heineken? Not Heineken. Bond’s character would never drink such swill. He wouldn’t be a snob about wine, food, clothes, cars and practically everything else and then drink such a pedestrian beer. In fact, in the novel Casino Royale, in Chapter 8, just after ordering champagne, Bond makes the following pronouncement:

“You must forgive me,” he said. “I take a ridiculous pleasure in what I eat and drink. It comes partly from being a bachelor, but mostly from a habit of taking a lot of trouble over details. It’s very pernickety and old-maidish really, but then when I’m working I generally have to eat my meals alone and it makes them more interesting when one takes trouble.”

So there is absolutely no way someone who would say that would turn around and order a skunked green-bottle of Heineken. Maybe a Thomas Hardy 1968, a Samuel Adams Utopias, a Deus, or a Cantillon Rose de Gambrinus. He’d more likely order something showy, expensive and impressive; something that showed he had good taste. And that would never be a Heineken. Often Bond orders local specialties in the novels and films, and Casino Royale takes place in northern France. The fictional resort town where most of the novel takes place is supposedly near the mouth of the Somme River in the Picardie region, which is only about two hours from Belgium. So while France is not known for its beers, a good selection of Belgian beers would likely be available at the casino and area restaurants. That’s what a beer savvy Bond would order.

To which today I would only add that he’d never, ever drink it out of the bottle! Well, maybe not never, but if he had the choice, he’d do it the proper way, out of a glass because his character is all about knowing what’s the right way to do things and then taking a particular pleasure in doing them correctly. And what self-respecting English gentleman — or for that matter any Brit — would drink Dutch lager over his native ale, especially when his job was protecting the British way of life? It’s unseemly.

To take unseemly a few notches further, Refined Guy reported that Heineken USA will release two special metal bottles of Heineken using James Bond imagery. Known as “Star Bottles, on the plus side, at least the beer won’t get skunked as easily as in the green glass bottles.

heineken-bond-2012

According to the website Bond Lifestyle, Heineken pulled out all the stops for the Amsterdam premiere of the film, with an obscene amount of product placement for the event. And I’m not alone in believing this tie-in is not the best idea, at least the way it’s being done, with many, many pundits weighing in across the globe. But I think an Australian commentator, Lucy Clark, summed it up best in B&T, when she said. “In the golden era, products were chosen because they fitted with the character. The sad thing is that, in the modern era, the character and plot is decided by sponsors.”

So while I’m really looking forward to seeing the film today — and hoping this will be one of those father/son moments that Porter remembers long after I’m gone (as it is for me) — what I hope above all else is that seeing that out-of-character Heineken won’t break the fourth wall for me and make it harder to immerse myself in the experience and just enjoy it. Fingers crossed.

Bud Going To The Dark Side?

November 7, 2012 By Jay Brooks

Maybe it’s Deschutes’ Black Butte Porter or Guinness that’s making Anheuser-Busch InBev (ABI) come over to the dark side? But whatever the reason, ABI is apparently poised to release at least five, possibly six, new beers which, if not actually black, have significantly more color than your average ABI beer. And apparently they’re also more extreme beers — which for ABI means 6% a.b.v. (it’s all relative). The first of these, Bud Black Crown, is described as a “golden amber lager” so it would appear “Black Crown” is more of a ceremonial title than a beer descriptor. According to one label I saw, there’s apparently a website set up — www.budweiser.com/blackcrown — though so far there’s nothing set up there yet. The Black Crown came from the Budweiser Project 12, specifically the Los Angeles entry. According to AdAge, there will most likely be a big marketing push behind this release, which may include a Super Bowl ad, and — ooh boy — a specially designed bow-tie can. The Black Crown is expected to be launched in early February.

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Next up is Michelob Black Lager, a “Special Dark Lager” and advertised as a “German-style Doppelbock.” There’s not much information I could find on this one, so it’s anybody’s guess what this will be like.

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Then, from the Busch family comes Busch Black Light. So either they’re going after the old hippies with their black light posters or having a bit of oxymoronic fun like “jumbo shrimp” or “black gold.” This one’s also something of a head-scratcher. It, too, is 6% a.b.v. — high for a light — and also mentions being “ice-brewed.” It couldn’t be a “black light,” like a black IPA, could it? That seems way too far-fetched, doesn’t it? So what is it? I’m stumped.

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And let’s not forget the Newark, New Jersey (née Latrobe, Pennsylvania) brand Rolling Rock. They’re coming out with Rolling Rock Black Rock, an “Extra Dark,” which presumably means it’s as “extra dark” as their regular beer is “extra pale ale.”

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Lastly, there’s ABI’s German brand, Beck’s, which is brewed here in the states. Beck’s will apparently be launching two brand extensions, presumably hoping to squeeze more shelf space out of Bud-friendly retailers. The first of these is Beck’s Black Jewel. It appears that it was also be 6% a.b.v. — which I’m starting to think is a magic number — and is brewed with Liberty hops, and could possibly be a single-hop beer. No world, however, on the beer’s color.

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Lastly, this one’s more of a stretch, darkside-wise. Beck’s Sapphire looks like it will either be a single hop beer or at least feature the German hop Sapphire (a.k.a. Saphir). But it does have a dark green and black label, so who knows? It, too, will be 6% a.b.v. (so that’s four out of six). Also, I always thought sapphires were blue and my understanding is that if impurities like chromium get into the gem, then it’s called “red corundum,” or more commonly a “ruby.” So who knows what the deal is with the red sapphire?

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So why is ABI suddenly going over to the dark side with beer color, labels and in their naming strategies? Your guess is as good as mine. It’s not as if dark beers have suddenly started taking off last week. Guinness has been around for a very long time, and most craft breweries have included a porter or stout in their portfolios for decades. Although we don’t even know if these will even be black in color. It seems doubtful, more likely they’ll just be darker in relation to Bud’s other offerings, in much the same way the original pale ales weren’t really pale, just paler than the popular dark beers at the time of their introduction. Again, it’s all relative. Plus, calling beers “black” this or that just sounds cooler, especially to the hipster millennials they’re obviously targeting with these beers. Some have speculated that it’s in response to the recent success that Yuengling has enjoyed with their (slightly) darker beers, but I don’t know. It certainly will be interesting to see how this all plays out in the coming months.

I’m A Craft Beer Drinker And I Vote

November 5, 2012 By Jay Brooks

A couple of months ago, my friend and colleague, Don Russell — who often writes under the non de plume Joe Sixpack — wrote a provocative article declaring Craft-Beer Drinkers to Decide Election. With the presidential election tomorrow, I thought it fitting to take another look at that.

Russell ranked “the states by brewery density — the number of breweries per 1,000 square miles.” From that, a pattern emerged. Of the 25 states with the highest concentration of breweries, all of them voted for the Democratic candidate in 2008; what statisticians call a “positive correlation.” His interpretation:

The density of breweries in a state is at least partly related to the density of its population; the more people, the more breweries. Obama performs better in densely populated states because urban populations tend to be more diverse and liberal.
Naturally, the reverse is true: States with fewer breweries per square mile overwhelmingly vote Republican.

blue-vs-red-states-2010

Another colleague, Jeff Alworth in Portland, Oregon, disagreed with Russell’s analysis and said so in Gerrymandered! Craft Beer Is No Proxy for Political Leanings. He believes brewery density is the wrong metric to use, preferring breweries per capita. I confess that’s a statistic I’ve never warmed to, for no particular reason except that it seems to unfairly favor states with less people in many cases.

Russell doesn’t examine that, but he does also look at states by per capita beer consumption. In that instance, no illuminating trends appear. “Of the 10 biggest beer-drinking states, five voted for Obama in 2008, and five backed Sen. John McCain of Arizona.”

In the end, according to Russell. “What’s really important here is the type of beer voters are drinking.” Whichever way the election goes tomorrow, it will be interesting to see if any of this holds true. I can’t help but like the idea of craft beer deciding elections, however far-fetched. Still, the important thing is to drink craft beer … and vote. I want to see that bumper sticker: “I’m a craft beer drinker and I vote.”

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UPDATE: As Stan Hieronymus points out, I was remiss in not including Beer Drinkers For Obama.

Beer Prices By Football Stadium

November 4, 2012 By Jay Brooks

Given the NFL owner’s wanton disregard for their fans with the labor dispute debacle earlier this year, I’ve been paying much less attention to the football season. I check in to see if my beloved Packers have won, but that’s about it. For a number of years now — since I’ve had kids — I rarely go to a live game, usually because it’s such a time-consuming hassle and so expensive, in part because there’s four of us so costs rise exponentially. That’s especially true when it comes to beer, if you can even find anything worth drinking.

To help find a better deal, and to prove my point, Save on Brew looked at beer prices at the 32 NFL stadiums in a post entitled the 2012 – 2013 NFL Stadium Beer Price Infographic.

SOB-2012-2013-nfl-stadium-prices

Here’s what they found:

Going to the game? It’s gonna cost you. According to FanCostExperience.Com (and the source for our stadium data), prices are rising across the sport. The average beer is up 15 cents from last year at $7.28. In this economy, every cent counts.
Rounding out the price-assault on the American public, the average NFL ticket is $78.38 (that’s a regular ticket, the “premium ticket” average is $243.70), a soft drink is $4.57, a ‘dog is $4.84, parking is $27.35, a program is $4.06, and a cap celebrating your favorite team will set you back $21.38 (on average) and, of course, a few of those $7.28 beers adds up pretty fast. In fact, a family of 4 will spend, on average, $443.93.

So wow, that’s even more expensive than I’d thought. That makes movie theater food and drink look like an absolute bargain. I guess they need to make that much profit so they can pay the referees. I feel so sorry for the owners, that they must be struggling so much that they need to charge close to six times the retail price for a beer. Because if the average price for a beer at an NFL stadium is $7.28 for 17 oz., that’s 42.8 cents per ounce! That works out to be about $5.14 for 12 ounces. A six-pack of Bud Light at my local BevMo costs $5.79, making it pretty close to six times the price. Now that’s gouging.

For a mainstream craft beer it’s almost as bad. A six-pack of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale costs $8.99 at BevMo, meaning 12 ounces of pale ale will cost you more than half of the price of an entire six-pack outside the stadium.

Notice the average cost for a family of four? $444! Seriously, how many people can afford that on a regular basis? Another similar survey of NFL prices on Visual.ly, entitled The Real Cost of Attending a Game, likewise concluded that the average cost to a family of four is $427.42. In that survey, they found the average price for a small beer to be $7.13, a pretty similar result. Given how much money the owners make, it it really reasonable to charge so much for tickets and other concessions at the game? I understand that in some sense they’re market prices. There are enough people willing to pay that much, and many games are sold out or nearly so. But does that make it right? Especially when owners complain they can’t afford to pay the refs. Every few years they fleece the community in which they live, threatening to move the team if they’re not given free money, or at least tax relief, to build a new stadium they probably don’t need. Don’t believe that? Read Field of Schemes.

It’s really a shame. I love the game. I like watching the games, cheering on my favorite team, especially with my son. I know it’s a business. I get that. But sports is really a part of the entertainment industry, so it’s not exactly like other businesses. As the recent strikes in baseball, basketball and football have shown, team owners really seem to believe that the people who consume their products — the fans — don’t matter all that much. But they could ease up on the beer prices and still make a healthy profit. That’s a decision I could drink to.

the-real-cost-of-attending-a-football-game

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