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<\/a>In the spring of 2012, I was in Milwaukee to roll out Krombacher.\u00a0 While visiting accounts with one of the salesmen, we stopped at the Pabst Brewery, which had closed in 1997.\u00a0 Developers were in the process of turning the old brewery into a hotel, retail, and residential property.\u00a0 The hospitality building, executive offices and retail outlet had been purchased earlier, and the old hospitality bar was open to the public for meetings, weddings and receptions.\u00a0 The building itself had not changed in years and it was like walking back in time.\u00a0 The owner was there and allowed us to walk through the executive offices, which were connected to the bar.\u00a0 It was like a time-warp, with nothing changed since 1997, including the desks, that still had papers on them, and ash trays, complete with cigarette butts.\u00a0 It was as if time stopped 15 years ago.<\/p>\nLeaving the Pabst, we drove past the old Schlitz Brewery, also converted to\u00a0offices and used\u00a0for school administration buildings.\u00a0 Another sad sight for me as I had been in both of these breweries when they were at, or near their peak in sales.<\/p>\n
Similarly, the two San Antonio breweries, Lone Star, with its Buckhorn Hall of Horns; and Pearl Brewing, with the Jersey Lilly, have also been transformed from breweries into retail and residential spaces.\u00a0 Jax Brewery in New Orleans, is now a retail center; and the Falstaff brewery is mostly empty.\u00a0 Henry\u00a0Weinhard’s in Portland; Olympia in Tumwater;\u00a0and Rainer in downtown Seattle have all been closed for years, some transformed into offices and retail, others just sitting empty.<\/p>\n
There are many other stories of closed breweries around the country. What happened to them?\u00a0 All of these breweries were in business in 1970s, most still around in 1980s, but are now gone.\u00a0 If there truly is one point in time when the industry changed, one\u00a0could\u00a0point to the purchase of the Miller Brewing Co by Philip Morris\u2026the day the beer world changed forever.\u00a0 With the advent of PM’s millions in marketing, and the awaking of AB to their challenge, one could attribute the death of these breweries to these two factors.<\/p>\n
Was the growth of AB, Miller and Coors from their marketing investment? Or was it from the collapse of the other breweries, leaving millions of barrels of volume up for grabs?\u00a0 The logical answer is: both. But what would have happened had those breweries not made the mistakes they did and survived?<\/p>\n
Since InBev bought AB, their share of market continues to slip.\u00a0 In recent Nielsen scans, AB in down -5.6% in volume in the last four weeks, and down -4.3% in dollars.\u00a0 MillerCoors is down -4.3% in volume, too.\u00a0 Yet crafts are on fire, growing near +15% this year, on top of double digit growth in 2012 and 2011.\u00a0 Maybe crafts are taking advantage of what AB and MC did to the regionals years ago by sourcing their growth from the volume losses of AB and MC.\u00a0 As they say, “the sun don’t shine on the same ol’dogs rear end every day!”<\/p>\n
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