HN Gopher Feed (2017-11-08) - page 1 of 10 ___________________________________________________________________
Beer giant ABI bought many craft brews and is now buying beer
rating websites
133 points by coloneltcb
http://www.foodandpower.net/2017/11/02/abis-venture-capital-fund...___________________________________________________________________
sushisource - 1 hours ago
I have a hard time getting worked up over these acquisitions. If
the beer is still good, who cares? If you're really upset about it,
there are still literally thousands of other craft breweries to
choose from.
hylianwarrior - 1 hours ago
Nice sentiment, but it's a bit unnerving to see an industry
consolidating like this while ALSO buying out sites that review
the beer. Having few large, central corporations control both the
market and the medium by which the products are reviewed is not a
good thing.
[deleted]
civilian - 1 hours ago
The reviewing sites thing is silly.However, it sure seems like
an opportunity for new beer reviewing websites to pop up!
usrusr - 1 hours ago
If Underarmour refuses to buy your running tracker, pivot to
a beer review site!
jxramos - 1 hours ago
I guess the tricky thing would be measuring what they do the
site. If they take it down or delete negative reviews, etc,
that would be some questionable behavior. If they use it to
gain honest feedback and funnel it into development channels of
some kind that could prove interesting. Overall seems like a
conflict of interest.I wonder how much appetite they'd have to
buy up the next review site that pops up and catches on. Sort
of like review site whak-a-mole. It would be very disconcerting
to say the least if a company went out and bought up all new
and fledgling review sites of interest to them.
cma - 44 minutes ago
A public review site is public. You don't need to buy it to
gain honest feedback.
sp332 - 1 hours ago
How do you know the beer is still good if the manufacturer owns
the review site?
cbsmith - 1 hours ago
Taste it?
aj_g - 1 hours ago
What if you can't taste it because your local grocery store
stocks its beer selection based on what beers are the best
according to the beer review site owned by ABI? It's not as
simple as "just make a different choice", monopolies can
exert control over the whole system the consumer lives in,
not just the small decisions.
TylerE - 59 minutes ago
Don't be naive. They stock beer based on who PAYS THEM the
most for their shelf space. Same goes for any other
product.
sp332 - 1 hours ago
As in, assume the review sites are compromised and ignore
them, but also give money to the company that might or might
not be posting biased reviews there? So you're only denying
yourself the potential benefit of the review site while still
giving up your money.
kiddico - 1 hours ago
"there are still literally thousands of other craft breweries
to choose from."Taste all of them? I'm not an alcoholic by
trade man, reviews are necessary.
unethical_ban - 1 hours ago
Brewing these days is uniquely local. When buying craft, you're
buying not only good beer, but you're supporting your neighbors
and fellow enthusiasts in the craft. When a beer gets bought by
the big conglomerates, the feeling of supporting "the little guy"
goes away.I know multiple people who stopped buying Karbach beers
after they got bought. Sure they'll drink it if it's free, but
why support bean counters and 1%ers when you can give some money
to the people doing it for love?
jdavis703 - 1 hours ago
What people don't like are the bad business practices, like
buying up review sites (can anyone spell "conflict of interest"),
locking in alcohol distributors to certain brands, etc. They're
limiting consumer choice, locking out competitors and potentially
misleading consumers.I'll agree with you, if it tastes good it
tastes good. McDonald's also still tastes good to me, but I abhor
their business practices so I avoid eating there.A lot of
economists like to cite this model of a "rational agent," but
consumers have more dimensions than just price and quality,
increasingly they also see ethics as either a part of quality, or
an additional dimension, when judging which product they should
buy.
sushisource - 1 hours ago
I get that, but, as I mention you've still got thousands of
other options to choose from
itchyjunk - 1 hours ago
Yes, this was one of the thousands of other options. Emphasis
on was. What guarantee do I have that once people move to
another platform and start trusting it, they won't purchase
that?
thinkling - 1 hours ago
When restaurants and bars use an AB InBev-owned distributor
and thus are restricted to only having AB InBev brands on
tap, I lose the choice to drink one of those thousands of
other beers when I'm there. Not going to a concert because
the venue has the wrong beer distributor is not really
tractable.
tomc1985 - 1 hours ago
It won't be that way much longer if these events are allowed to
happen
svarrall - 1 hours ago
That was my initial though to. Here?s a good discussion from
Sessionable on the subject from independent breweries perspective
and their main concerns seem to be around access to taps and
consumer awareness when independents get bought
out.https://overcast.fm/+BwaxYul7M
gniv - 1 hours ago
The beer is still good, until it isn't. As an anecdote: A
Lagunitas beer [1] used to be a favorite of mine. At some point I
didn't like it anymore, and stopped buying it. I didn't know they
got bought by Heineken, and I don't know if the events are
related, but it's possible.[1] Little Sumpin' Sumpin'
mohaine - 1 hours ago
Small changes over time is what killed Schlitz. A once famous
brand that you probably haven't heard of if under
40.https://beerconnoisseur.com/articles/how-milwaukees-
famous-b...
uxp100 - 47 minutes ago
Since that article is from 2010, it's worth noting that
Schlitz was relaunched, probably shortly after that article
came out. Mainly in tall boys, boasting the original 1960s
recipe. It is what it is.
elliotec - 1 hours ago
I'm getting a 500 "Error establishing a database connection"
firloop - 1 hours ago
Guess ABI got the site too...
danschumann - 1 hours ago
Aw man, I was going to say that.
jrs235 - 1 hours ago
Cached:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qhVnlV7...
macNchz - 1 hours ago
Here's a cached version:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qhVnlV7...
arkadiyt - 1 hours ago
This article about Casper purchasing mattress review sites was
making the rounds recently as well. Great
read:https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-
blogg...
Aloha - 1 hours ago
I love my Casper Mattress, I think longingly of it when I'm on
the road for work... but this gives me pause.. just a little.
Johnny555 - 46 minutes ago
People also love their Leesa mattresses and their Tuft & Needle
mattresses and their Purple mattresses and their Ghostbed
mattresses, and so on.Online memory foam mattresses have become
a bit of a commodity and the biggest distinguishing factor
between them appears to be the marketing (and legal) budget.
fluxic - 1 hours ago
I too love my Casper ? mattress, by far the world's best-ever
mattress, made from ethical mattress materials and guaranteed
to provide you with a sumptuous sleep, night after night!Here,
fellow sleepers, join our club of nocturnal nobles at
https://casper.com! Be sure to use my referral code "REAL_HNer"
when you place your order. With Casper ? you pay for
quality?but once you lay down for the first time, you'll
realize it's so, so worth it!?
dabockster - 7 minutes ago
Nice, just bought 100k!
j_s - 39 minutes ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15489344Zinus' claim to
fame: replace your mattress at least once more for the same
total price. Based on the anecdata I was terrified it would
attack me! (Verdict: a bit more firm that I prefer, but still
an improvement on ancient of
days.)https://amzn.com/dp/B00Q7EPSHI - $261.28 for me
jameskegel - 23 minutes ago
My Zinus mattress actually did attack me, but it is the best
thing I've ever slept
on.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15490495
paul7986 - 34 minutes ago
Your Casper matrress that they paid a Chinese outsourcing
company to make and paid less then $100 for one mattress. While
you paid $500 or more for it. Yet you could have gone to
AliExpress and bought the same none branded mattress for
$100.Also and hmmm does a hacker newser really love their
Casper or do they work for them? Casper obviously trolls the
Internet for the better of themselves!
eggpy - 7 minutes ago
HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15488618
username223 - 1 hours ago
LOL! I know Casper well from the skip button on my podcast
player, and could hardly care less about mattresses. This bubble
is getting pretty big.
PatientTrades - 1 hours ago
If the beer taste great and is inexpensive I don't see how anybody
can have a problem with that.
tomc1985 - 1 hours ago
Some care about where it's made, how it's made, who made itThe
beer that "tastes great" and is also "inexpensive" usually cuts
corners in one of the above areas
rockostrich - 1 hours ago
To be completely honest as someone who loves craft beer,
homebrews, and hopes to open up a brewery of my own one day,
ABInbev is a brewery operations wonder of the world. Yes, they
use a ton of rice as one of their fermentables which cuts down
on calories, alcohol, body, etc., but that's sort of what the
american light lager has evolved into anyway. The real amazing
thing about ABInbev is how they have production breweries
across the world making the same beers and no matter where you
are they taste exactly the same. They sell in the hundreds of
millions of barrels annually while the best small breweries
that have recently expanded rapidly and are battling with
quality control (Trillium and Tree House are the 2 that come to
mind) still only sell tens of thousands of barrels
annually.Beer aside, ABInbev is the definition of an evil
company. The beer industry is known for being a community more
than a competitive industry. Craft breweries collaborate with
their "competitors" all the time. Even in close quarters such
as Brooklyn/Queens, Other Half, Interboro, Transmitter, LIC
Beer Project, Threes, Grimm, and Evil Twin are collaborating on
beers with each other every other month or so. It's one of the
reasons why I love the industry so much. ABInbev does pretty
much the opposite. Sure, Goose Island still collaborates with
breweries as a subsidy of ABInbev, but as a company ABInbev
offers incentives to bars/bottle shops/wholesalers/distributors
that require them to only carry ABInbev owned products or a
certain percent of their products.For example [1]:> Under the
new incentive plan, AB InBev refunds 75 percent of this money
if its beers make up 98 percent of the distributor?s sales,
according to documents provided to lawmakers by AB InBev.Even
with these incentives, craft beer is slowly taking market share
away from ABInbev and they're are starting to feel it (although
they still have something like a 40% market share so it's not
that huge of a blow). I can't speak for other beer
conglomerates (SABMillerCoors, Heineken, etc.) and if they try
and give similar incentives, but I know for a fact that ABInbev
is trying to kill any competition in an industry where everyone
is rooting for their "competitors" to succeed.[1]
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-a-b-i-craftbeers-probe-ex...
cheeze - 1 hours ago
I have a problem with anticompetitive practices from ABI
barake - 1 hours ago
The big alcohol companies force distbutors to carry certain
products, or even not carry comepetitors products.An example: you
want to keep selling a macro like Bud or scopes that makes up 40%
of your revenue ? Drop that local brewery, we have a ?craft? IPA
to sub out.They get the revenue the same, you get the illusion of
choice, and the new company gets to pound sand.
yock - 1 hours ago
Many states have laws forcing producers of alcoholic beverages
to use distributors in the first place. It's state law that
creates the bottleneck which allows the big players to
monopolize the market in the first place.
barake - 1 hours ago
This would be a problem even with direct distribution. Just
replace distributor with retailer.Here in Kentucky, AB Inbev
owned a distributor and was quietly playing these games.
After some shenanigans, KY adjusted the three tier rules to
prevent breweries owning distributors, even if they?re from
out of state.FWIW the three tier system is dumb and should go
away. But removing it doesn?t automatically level the playing
field.
rockostrich - 55 minutes ago
> This would be a problem even with direct distribution.
Just replace distributor with retailer.This is false.
Breweries that make great beer have no problem selling out
of their beer when they only sell packaged beer at the
brewery. Examples include Tree House, Trillium, Hill
Farmstead, Other Half, LIC Beer Project, Interboro, Night
Shift (who actually own a distribution company now, but
they sell out of new releases at the brewery within a day
or 2), Monkish, Cellarmaker, the Veil, and many more in
pretty much any major city that you can think of. Hell,
Boston and New York have a half dozen each and new
breweries are still popping up that are selling out of beer
without distributing.I agree that the 3 tier system is
stupid, but breweries have proven over the past decade that
they can scale up to 10k+ barrels per year without
distributing a single thing.
barake - 34 minutes ago
Sorry I wasn?t clear, only talking about retail
distribution, not direct package sales.No question plenty
of breweries have found a way to be successful outside of
normal retail. But they should be able to distribute,
without large multinationals strong arming retailers in
to not carrying competitors products.Absolutely agree
that many breweries have been successful not distributing
[deleted]
lovich - 1 hours ago
The free market has an assumption on equal information between
agents in the system. If a company is buying up the sources of
information on it's product that usually leads to a massive
information imbalance
jakub_g - 57 minutes ago
I got this on my Twitter feed
yesterday:https://www.takecraftback.com"Help us raise $213 billion
we need to buy AB InBev"Biggest crowdfounding ever :)
baq - 1 hours ago
vertical integration!
gervase - 1 hours ago
Given the remarkably shady business practices of the entrenched
players (past and present), I don't consider this relentless
consolidation to be desirable. Additionally, in other markets where
such consolidation has happened, it has historically not been
beneficial for consumers (internet access, cell providers, etc).I
primarily interact with this market via the grocery store, not the
bar tap, but I find this app [0] to be useful in that context. It
makes it relatively painless to leverage my (minuscule) purchasing
power to support small businesses, and reject these kinds of
intentionally-obscured corporate maneuvers.[0]:
http://www.craftcheckapp.com/
[deleted]
jimrandomh - 4 minutes ago
A reviewer that represents themself as impartial, but is partially
owned by a company whose products it's reviewing, is committing
fraud. The only way to make it not-fraud is to put up disclaimers
large enough that people will treat it like an advertising
brochure.
kodt - 1 hours ago
I don't really understand their interest in RateBeer, RateBeer
really does not seem that relevant today. 10 years ago it was very
important in the craft beer scene. Now it seems like a dying
community.In terms of reviewing beers, most people have moved to
using an app like Untappd. BeerAdvocate, another forum/beer rating
site seems to have a more active userbase, but even that is
becoming less relevant today as people move away from forum
communities.Is that data on RateBeer of use to them? Are they
planning on pouring money into it to position it as a competitor to
Untappd? I'm not sure what the goal is. If the fear is they will
secretly skew review scores to favor their product lines, that
seems hardly worth the effort, as I don't think enough people use
the site to drive purchasing decisions to make a meaningful
impact.I think people need to be aware of which beer publications
ZX Ventures owns, or owns a stake in, as that will help you
identify marketing fluff pieces vs real reporting. The fact that
they go to some effort to hide their ownership of several brands
they have acquired is concerning to me, but I also understand it is
not in their interest to promote that fact. Many people unknowingly
buy ABI products without having any idea the beer they are buying
isn't in fact locally owned.
byproxy - 1 hours ago
I don't even care about other people's beer ratings. I just use
RateBeer/BeerAdvocate to lookup ABV and caloric information.
mywittyname - 48 minutes ago
Same. As a whole, the American craft beer drinkers are
obsessed with really hoppy beers, which I hate. So the
ratings are completely useless, because a beer I hate will be
like a 4.5 while a beer I love will be a 3.3.There's definitely
an opportunity here for a better beer rating system. Get some
equipment to analyze the chemical compounds of beers,
automatically classify them and use it to recommend beers based
on your personal flavor preferences.
newlyretired - 22 minutes ago
Check out beergraphs.com, it has lots of different
normalization lenses that might get you what you want.
Founded by some baseball stathead writers, so takes a lot of
the same approaches to data.
heywire - 39 minutes ago
Check out Untappd
bkjelden - 6 minutes ago
Expressing a beer rating as an average has always seemed
problematic to me because different folks' tastes in beer vary
so much.I'd rather have an app that looked at what I've highly
rated and either paired me with users who highly rate similar
beers, or just recommended beers those folks also rate highly
that I haven't tried.In practice, I just have a few friends
that I know have similar beer tastes as me that I regularly
swap recommendations with.
[deleted]
robryan - 53 minutes ago
Probably about the SEO, when you google most beers the RateBeer
page will rank pretty highly.
ben1040 - 4 minutes ago
The Brewers Association recently put out a new label insignia that
independent craft breweries could use, to signify they're actually
an independent operation.I can see why they do it; my grocery store
recently saw a huge influx of new craft brands in the refrigerated
section and it turned out that _all_ of them were A-B products.A-B
had a bunch of the former owners/brewmasters release a series of
video interviews to dump on the idea.https://vimeo.com/223773287The
video ends with the founder of Elysian saying to be truly
independent and "punk" would be to do your own thing and not use
the BA's logo. It's sort of funny in the face of Elysian scrubbing
their website of mentions of their "Loser Pale Ale," a collab with
Sub Pop Records.The label proudly declared, "corporate beer still
sucks."
eggpy - 2 minutes ago
"We're all independent together!"Also, what's A-B?
arca_vorago - 3 minutes ago
Is it crazy my first thought is I wonder if I could make a beer
website real fast and try and sell it to em. Prob would have to
sockpuppet the traffic but nooo nobody in SV does that its
immoral!/s
tptacek - 36 minutes ago
Consolidation in the beer market bothers me less than it does my
beer nerd friends. Many of the best-known, most-loved independent
breweries run into major quality problems trying to scale up their
output. ABI probably has advantages in regulating quality.
Breweries that don't want to scale are unlikely to sell in the
first place.The whiskey market is almost entirely consolidated; you
have to go out of your way to find quality products that aren't
traceable to large concerns, despite a proliferation of brands. But
we're in a 2-decade renaissance in whiskey quality (despite the No
Age Statement movement!) and availability. The median big-brand
whiskey is overwhelmingly more likely to be good than the median
independent whiskey.The barriers to entry for beer are far, far
lower than for whiskey. We're not going to run out of
microbreweries, or of interesting new beers. Why are beer nerds so
freaked out about this?(I have nothing useful to say about beer
rating sites, which I think are pretty sketchy to begin with.)
pslam - 14 minutes ago
The UK was an example of consolidation resulting in terrible
quality and limited choice. The "CAMRA" (CAMpaign for Real Ale)
group is a result of push-back against this, and has been very
successful: http://www.camra.org.uk/key-events-in-
camra-s-historyDistribution all the way down the chain was
consolidated ? i.e Pubs ? and was only remedied through
legislation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guest_beerThe US is
nowhere near the same setup, though, so it's doubtful it would
end up quite as bad. For beer at least, every time there's a
consolidation, there's an opportunity for a new player to enter
the market they just left behind.
mustacheemperor - 9 minutes ago
The problem with beer consolidation is what "regulating quality"
at scale entails. Consistent quality in gigantic batches often
translates to lower quality beer than pre-acquisition. Maybe it's
just not possible to scale every recipe to nationwide
distribution, but if that's the case it still means a small
brewery's acquisition and subsequent scaling to national levels
generally means the taste you were used to is gone for good.Case
in point, Magic Hat. The beers are entirely different since
acquisition by NAB, and terrible. There are nationally available
independent breweries that make quality beer - Oskar Blues comes
to mind. They scaled without selling, and I have no doubt NAB or
ABI would have absolutely destroyed the recipes in their own
scaling process.
tptacek - 6 minutes ago
But a case in the other direction is Three Floyds, which is
independent but scaling and suffering major quality
problems.You can lament your favorite beers attempting to scale
production at all, and that's an understandable feeling to
have, but it's ultimately no more reasonable a demand than that
your favorite band continue playing your favorite tiny local
club.The sibling commenter here said something I believe as
well, which is that in the US market at least, every
acquisition is just going to make room for a new independent.
brational - 5 minutes ago
I agree here - and many of my beer nerd friends religiously use
this app to rate every beer they drink (Untappd I think its
called?). Which I believe is free.So if said beer nerd had an
issue with the big corps buying up ratings... perhaps paying for
apps or donating in some way is what one ought to do.
SomeStupidPoint - moments ago
Consistently, my experience with market consolidation has been
lower quality products for more money so I can susidize the
wealth of merger consultants.If consolidation has such a prior,
why would I expect beer consolidation to end
differently?Similarly, I disagree about whiskey: distilleries
from my state consistently provide a better and cheaper product
than large firms, and are basically dead to me when they sell
these days, after a few bad experiences.