Brookston Beer Bulletin

Jay R. Brooks on Beer

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Next Session Pops Open The Good, The Bad & The Ugly Bottle Shops

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For our 128th Session, our host will be Jack Perdue, who writes Deep Beer. For his topic, he’s chosen one that’s been bottled up for some time now, Bottle Shops: Good, Bad & The Ugly. So what does he mean? Well, he introduces his topic with this:

I find bottle shops interesting and would like to learn other perspectives on these places many of us purchase our favorite quaffs. We love our beer and have a variety of options in acquiring it. Some home brew, others like to visit their local pubs, beer tourism and beer destinations have become a trend, but the ever popular bottle shop is often the best and most reliable means for finding our next beer.

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Of course, not all bottle shops are the same.

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Jack then follows up with some ideas to consider, but reminding us these are just some suggestions, and, of course, you should feel free to choose your own, and let your imagination run wild:

  • What defines a great bottle shop —selection, knowledgeable staff, location, prices, other factors
  • Iconic bottle shops — Like to share your favorite shops, surprising stories of discovery
  • Discovering great bottle shops — have successful methods for finding great bottle shops
  • Being a great bottle shop — If you own or work in a shop, do you have tips for success or precautions against failure
  • Hacking the bottle shop — secrets to getting what you want or How to Win Friends and Influence People
  • Bottle shop travel preparation — do you have a reconnaissance plan when you travel for finding good beer away from home or other beer travel tips
  • Other topics of bottle shop curiosity — you choose

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So visit your neighborhood beer stores between now and Friday, October 7, 2017, and then report back about the good ones, the bad ones, and yes, even the ugly ones. Simply leave a comment to the original announcement and post the URL to your post there.

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Patent No. 20090308879A1: Method Of Distributing Beer

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Today in 2009, US Patent 20090308879 A1 was issued, an invention of James H. Johnson, Jr., for his “Method of Distributing Beer.” There’s no Abstract, although in the description it includes this summary:

A method of distributing beer includes the steps of providing a beer staging structure adjacent a retail location for the sale of beer, stocking beer in the structure and advertising for the beer on the structure.

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Building The Good Hop

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I won’t even try to be unbiased on this one. Melissa Myers is a dear friend of mine. She’s one of my favorite people in the beer world, and I’m thrilled that she’s finally striking out on her own. Melissa’s also a talented brewer who’s made beer at Magnolia, Pyramid, Drake’s and many other breweries from Philadelphia to Denver to the Bay Area. Melissa knows her beer. She’s about ready to open her own bottle shop and tasting room in Oakland called The Good Hop, which is located at 2421 Telegraph Avenue. The Good Hop Bottle Shop & Tasting Room will be carrying around 600 different bottled and canned craft beers along with 16 rotating California craft beers on tap.

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But now that she’s in the final stages, she needs a little help, and has launched an Indigogo campaign to raise the remaining funds to open The Good Hop with a bang. Melissa describes what she’s trying to accomplish with The Good Hop as “your favorite watering hole meets the most well-stocked convenience store you’ll ever set foot in!” Here’s what she needs.

I love beer, y’all! But I need your help to finish construction. All those alcohol permits and red-tape stuff cost a ton of cash, and now we need funding for the fun stuff — the bartop itself, cool lighting, comfy tables and chairs, and most importantly, your beer mugs and the coolers that will hold all that beer. We estimate we need $20,000 for all the finishing touches and flourishes that will make it a chill bar where you can relax with your friends after work, before the big game, or on a lazy weekend.

I am thrilled that I’m *this* close to realizing my dream! I’ve gotten this far through the generosity of friends, family, and the community around me. Now I’m asking for help from my bigger community — YOU. You can help me complete my dream and open the doors to a great bar that you’ll want to spend time in. Please contribute in whatever way you can, even if it’s only five dollars, so that I can help the world get in touch with its inner beer geek. It’s a surefire way to bring some good karma into your life. And if you can’t contribute monetarily, but you like what I’m doing, please help me by getting the word out and sending this link to your peeps. We understand times are hard and money is tight. We’d love some financial assistance, but if how you can help is by spreading the word, we’ll take that gift too!

I can personally vouch for Melissa, she’ll create one hell of a beer destination. I’ve reserved my own bar stool at The Good Hop, and now I’m asking you to help out, too. Check out the video below and listen to what she has to say. If you agree with me that The Good Hop deserves your support, please join me in pitching in — or would that be mashing in? — to make it happen. You can help a little or a lot. There are a variety of levels you can weigh in with, from the very modest to the ostentatiously grand Ultimate Beer Lover.

Walmart’s New Beer Focus

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You probably saw the news over the past year that Walmart was going to be focusing to a greater degree on the sale of beer in their stores. Advertising Age had an interest glimpse into their plans, entitled How Walmart Plans to Double Beer Sales In Three Years . At the recent NBWA annual convention in Las vegas last week, Walmart’s Chief Merchandising and Marketing Officer, Duncan MacNaughton, said he was “pleased but not satisfied” with their progress so far, adding that he feels Walmart is “still ‘under-shared’ in beer sales compared with competitors.”

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Does this Walmart beer display give some indication of their strategy to sell beer?

Apparently there’s currently an uneasy relationship with Walmart and beer wholesalers, which should surprise no one. Walmart is so big they’re used to getting their way and dictating whatever they want — some might say bullying — even if what they’re asking for is unreasonable or even not entirely on the same terms as everybody else enjoys.

Because they use “just-in-time” ordering systems, “their backrooms have no storage,” David Black, CEO of Northeast Sales Distributing, said in an interview. His company’s territory includes some 50 Walmarts in portions of Georgia and North Carolina. “They refuse the order or they make you sit there for three hours while they take something else.”

That’s something most, if not all, of the big chains do, of course, but Walmart has supposedly raised it to a fine art. Walmart also told the assembled beer distributors that they’re not considering a private label beer, which from their point of view is good news.

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A battleship of Walmart beer sales.

Curiously, MacNaughton also said this. “We don’t want cute displays. We want ‘shoppable’ displays: item and price and can I get a case off the top. Sometimes we kid ourselves with pretty. Pretty is fun, but I want sales.”

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A tank of Walmart beer.

A couple of months ago, Bloomberg covered this in Wal-Mart Stacking Beer in Aisles to Double Alcohol Sales, detailing more of their overall plans. For example, only about 3,700 of their nearly 11,000 stores currently stock beer, which is roughly one-third. In the short term they’ll be increasing that to around 5,000 stores (45%) and hope to eventually sell beer in as many as 6,600 locations, or 60% of their stores.

The Bloomberg report also included a video in which one of the talking heads mentions that while beer sales are relatively flat overall, it’s craft beer that’s selling well. Apparently they’ve also hired more buyers who will be focusing on more local beers, and “craft is playing into that in a big way,” apparently. But as the video later points out, the biggest customers by far are still the big players, and although the Boston Beer Co. is there, it’s dollar amount is far less than ABI, MolsconCoors or Heineken. Samuel Adams sells less than 4% of the beer that Budweiser does and 3.4% of the other three combined. So while they speculate that craft is the key to increasing sales, it doesn’t seem like that’s what they’re actually doing, though to be fair images of Walmart shelves do show a bit more diversity. I confess I don’t really shop our local Walmart, so I may have to check out the beer section from time to time to see if they really are changing their approach.

Beer Goddess Becomes Co-Owner In Belmont Station

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Whew, some great news was finally released yesterday. I’d known this was coming for many months, but was sworn to secrecy, so it’s terrific to now be able to spread the word. My good friend, and colleague, Lisa Morrison — a.k.a. the Beer Goddess — has become a co-owner of Portland’s well-known beer store, Belmont Station. According to the press release:

Belmont Station owner Carl Singmaster announced today that he is bringing on a new business partner, Lisa “Beer Goddess” Morrison, to manage the day-to-day operations at Portland’s most highly regarded beer store and café.

Morrison is joining the Belmont Station family as co-owner, sharing financial responsibilities with Singmaster, in addition to managing the daily operations.

“When my bride Amy & I decided to move to Oregon years back,” notes Singmaster, “I had planned to be an investor & part-time adviser to Belmont Station to help them grow the business. Instead I wound up buying the majority ownership upon arrival in 2006 and have spent the past seven years working with a phenomenal group of beer lovers in the best beer community in the world to grow Belmont Station into the special place it is now. Having recently completed an expansion of our Biercafe, I believe it’s time for someone new to lead the next stage. When I realized that Lisa Morrison, an internationally revered writer and promoter of craft beer, was interested, it seemed the perfect match to ensure that Belmont Station continues to be a premier place for brewers to display their art and beer lovers to congregate and share good times with great beer.”

As host and producer of Beer O’Clock Radio, the Northwest’s only weekly commercial radio show about beer; author of the beer traveler’s guidebook, “Craft Beers of the Pacific Northwest”; and writer for several blogs and columns in national magazines, Morrison is one of the preeminent beer evangelists in the country. She also has taught dozens of classes on beer — from simple tastings to proper glassware — and has founded and organized numerous beer events and fundraisers. But Morrison says while her decade-plus of work has been mostly about broadcasting information about beer, she looks forward to working one-on-one with customers, brewers and distributors to craft a more personal connection with beer.

“When Carl asked me if I would be interested in partnering with him at Belmont Station, it was a dream come true,” Morrison said. “I am thrilled to be a part of such a well-known, highly respected, and well-loved part of Portland’s incredible beer community.”

Carl and Lisa will be celebrating this new chapter with a party at Belmont Station Friday, May 31 starting at 5 p.m.

As you probably know, Belmont Station was founded in 1997, and was originally located right next door to the Horse Brass, since Don Younger had a hand in its creation. It later moved four blocks away to its present location at 4500 SE Stark in Portland.

Congratulations to Lisa as she begins the next phase of her career in beer.

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America’s Geographic Beer Belly

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Here’s another interesting set of data from the curiously named Floating Sheep, this one regarding The Beer Belly of America. Essentially, what they did was “a simple comparison between grocery stores and bars.” They anticipated that they’d find more grocery stores than bars, and that did prove to be true. But they were surprised to find what they termed the “‘beer belly of America’ peeking out through the ‘t-shirt of data.'”
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In this chart, the size of the green symbols represents the number of mentions of bars in the Google Maps directory. To see it full size, click here. Chicago, Illnois had the highest number.

In the chart below, yellow dots are area where they found more mentions of grocery stores and the red dots indicate where they found more bars. And while there are red dots … well, dotting the whole nation, there does seem to be a definite concentration of red from Wisconsin/Illinois west to Idaho. That’s the area they refer to as The Beer Belly of America.
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To see it full size, click here.

They also compiled a list of each state and the number of bars per 10,000 people. I don’t know what it means that the top seven states were all within the The Beer Belly of America.

  1. North Dakota 6.54
  2. Montana 6.34
  3. Wisconsin 5.88
  4. South Dakota 4.73
  5. Iowa 3.73
  6. Nebraska 3.68
  7. Wyoming 3.4

I’m also not convinced that this type of per capita statistics are that useful. Because of economies of scale, it seems that states with less people always do better in per capita comparisons. The same thing happened when looking at per capita brewery distribution by state, with perhaps the exception of Oregon.

The final chart is similar to the first, but shows the number of bars “normalized” based on the average number of mentions for all locations. That means that where you see color are the places where there were mentions of bars exceeding the average. In this view, it’s easier to see where there are more bars, or at least more Google Maps mentions of them.
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To see it full size, click here.

New York Times Features Beer Stores

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Today’s New York Times has a great little article extolling the virtues of beer tasting bars, beer stores with tasting licenses allowing them to have limited taps and sample customers on the beers they carry. The story, Tastings With Craft Beers, features two Bay Area beer stores, Beer Revolution in Oakland, and City Beer Store in San Francisco, both terrific, relatively new, additions to the Bay Area beer scene. City Beer Store opened in 2006, while the Beer Revolution began this past February, during SF Beer Week.

If you haven’t been to either, now would be a good time to go. City Beer Store was founded by Craig Wathen, who formerly was with Pete’s Wicked Ales, and his wife Beth. They’ve created a cozy space on Folsom packed with over 300 beers, many of them hard-to-find elsewhere, and also managed to make the space comfortable and inviting.

Oakland’s Beer Revolution was started this year by Rebecca Boyles and Fraggle (a.k.a. Mark Martone — I didn’t even know Fraggle’s real name until just now!). I featured the pair in a long article I did on “Beer Geeks” for beer Advocate magazine several years ago. For them, this is a passion realized, a dream made real. In a larger space than their city doppelganger, Beer Revolution has a dozen taps and many, many bottles for sale. Both stores are constantly doing small, intimate in-store tastings and events.

The other three stores mentioned are all in Oregon, including the iconic Belmont Station in Portland. Only a few years ago, stores like these were a rarity, but their presence has been growing by leaps and bounds lately, and that’s great news for beer lovers.