I know marketing is necessary to sell things, to build awareness and demand. But I have this old-fashioned, almost quaint notion that the product should come first. I think brewers should come up with the best beer they can and from there the marketers step in and figure out the best way to sell it. There’s nothing wrong with looking around the marketplace and looking for a hole to fill, of course, that makes perfect sense to me. Or taking something people already like and tweaking it a bit, such as adding more hops to an IPA to create Imperial IPAs. But these days, increasingly the big company’s new products are being created by marketing and then the brewers create something to fit the marketing plan.
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I realize that’s how the modern commerce-driven world works, but it’s not always the best way to create a beer. Committees aren’t the best way to do everything. Last year, Coors’ “frost brew lined” cans put a blue film inside the can, with the potential to effect the taste of the beer, but the marketing plan trumped those concerns. Anheuser-Busch has taken a scatter-shot approach in which they test literally dozens of new products each year in the hopes some will stick, but because there’s so may they can’t really get behind any of them. It’s also the reason that over the years we’ve been subjected to “dry” beers, “ice” beers, “light (low-calorie)” beers, “low-carb” beers, tequila-infused beer, and other fad beers.
As the late, great Bill Hicks was fond of saying. “If you’re in marketing in advertising … kill yourself. Seriously though, if you are, do. Aaah, no really, there’s no rationalization for what you do and you are the ruiner of all things good, seriously.” Perhaps an extreme view? There was also this great episode (the Competition) of the animated Dilbert series in which Dilbert goes to work for a rival company, Nirvana Co., that is a dream company to work for. It’s a company with bosses who listen, employees that treat one another with respect and best of all — no marketing department. After Dilbert suggests they might want a marketing department to sell a new product they’re launching, they add one … and all hell breaks loose. Within days (or is it hours) the headquarters is destroyed and the company is bankrupt. It’s a hilarious critique on what happens when marketing calls the shots and goes too far. The newest example of a marketing-driven beer is Miller’s new Chill, a beer based on a Mexican drink — a chelada — and apparently aimed at Hispanic drinkers. For some reason that strikes me as odd, like making a malt liquor for African-Americans or a Sake-based beer for Asian-Americans. It’s one thing to create a product that you reasonably believe will appeal to a specific customer, but to so unabashedly go after an ethnic or cultural group just seems so, well, tacky. Most of the news reports about Miller’s new release used the AP opening. “Se habla Miller? Miller Brewing Co. is hoping Hispanics speak its name next month when the company introduces a beer flavored with lime and salt in Latino areas.” The initial test markets will be Arizona, southern California, Florida, New Mexico and Texas. Miller is calling it an “American take on a Mexican classic,” which may be good propaganda but that’s about it. Anytime we — and by “we” I mean America as a whole — do “our” version of something we tend to ruin it. Americanization is not always a good thing, especially when it happens to the stuff we eat and drink. Think what Taco Bell did for Mexican food, or Olive Garden for Italian, or American-light lager for an authentic pilsner. |
Chelada is essentially a drink you create at a bar, and one definition is a “cerveza that has been poured into a glass with a salted rim containing lime juice and ice.” So essentially that makes a chelada a drink that is prepared at the bar, like a black and tan or a shandy. And while there are pre-packaged versions of both of those, I’ve never liked the idea of pre-made cocktails. There’s just something about the process of them being create in front of you (or making one yourself) that can’t be duplicated by the pre-made variety. Maybe it’s the fresh ingredients. Maybe it’s something else — but whatever it is — they definitely taste different.
From the AP report:
The low-calorie beer will compete with mainstream light beers, such as top selling Bud Light and competitor Coors Light, Marino said. It’ll be priced slightly higher than Miller Lite to compete with premium beers such as Anheuser-Busch’s Budweiser, he said.
“It’s a different beer,” Marino said. “It’s a different take on light beer than what consumers are used to.”
The lime green bottles feature green and silver modular designs reminiscent of Aztec art, with the word “Chill” in bold black letters across the front and “Chelada style” below. A television advertising campaign with the slogan “Se habla Chill” will air in the test markets, Marino said.
And, of course, a light green bottle is a bad choice because it will allow beer photooxidation, meaning the beer can easily become lightstruck. This will make it taste skunky after even minimal exposure to light, especially direct sunlight. This is Heineken’s biggest problem. But again, marketing the green bottles is more important than what the beer tastes like because Heineken could obviously switch to brown glass any time they wanted to. It would throw off all their marketing and advertising and brand awareness, and that’s why they don’t and aren’t likely to change any time soon. It is interesting to note that in the Netherlands and indeed much of the rest of the world, Heineken does come in a brown bottle. (As an aside, actually brown isn’t the best, either, as it does allow some UV rays in. But brown bottles offer the best protection for the money. Dark red would be best, but red glass is prohibitively expensive. That’s the reason photographer’s dark rooms use red bulbs when working with photo paper and manually developing photographs.)
Miller has been putting several of their beers in clear glass for many years, but to a certain extent have solved the lightstruck problem by using pre-isomerized hop extracts, which don’t oxidize. The culprit is 3-methyl-2-butene thiol (from iso-alpha-acid hops) combined with another thiol radical (from compounds in malt) that form prenyl mercaptans. Lew Bryson, in his piece “How to Ruin a Beer,” explains it like this.
Miller Brewing takes a further step. They take the iso-alpha acids and hydrogenate them, much like is done at refineries, by forcing hydrogen through the oils at extremely high pressures. This produces rho-iso-alpha acids, also known as tetralones. These tetralones have intensified bitterness, increase foam stability and retention, and offer a better resistance to sunlight. They would be ideal, only they do not maintain the precise flavor of fresh hops. Hopping rates in mainstream American beers being what they are, this isn’t a serious problem as long as the bitterness is right.
There’s no word whether or not Chill is manufactured in this way or not, though I presume it must be. Unless, of course, Miller sees Chill’s main competition as Corona. Since Corona is another popular beer that comes in clear glass, it too is more often than not lightstruck. It may be the reason they market it with a lime in it in the first place, to mask the inherent skunkiness. But strange as it seems, it’s possible Chill could be marketed with the same defect customers have come to expect in their Corona, making switching to Miller Chill that much easier. After all, it’s the marketing that sells Corona, not it’s taste. For the big beer companies, it’s always about the marketing and rarely about the beer. Perhaps that’s why I have such a hard time chilling out.