Big Beer complains Americans drink less and less of their beer, of their watery no-taste beer. And how do they react: they take even more taste out of the beer, and now advertise “No-Aftertaste” beer. No maltyness, no sweetness, no hoppyness, no fruityness, no nothing. Pretty soon, they will sell pure water, add a little bit of alcohol and all kinds of fruit flavors to it. Now that I think about it, they actually already do that with all their ‘malternatives’.

One day, the big brewers will wake up and see that they destroyed their own business, their own heritage, their own culture. We’ve already seen that in Belgium where market-leader InBev has destroyed most of the Belgian beer culture by buying smaller breweries and shutting them down, by buying the malteries and shutting them down, by killing off brand after brand, by destroying yeast string after yeast string, by buying the distribution level and kicking smaller brewers out, by buying the retail level and kicking all other brewers out. Luckily for us in the US, the 3-tier system somewhat protects the distribution level from dominant brewers, and protects to a certain degree the retail level from the same. Luckily for us, we see the sale of the full flavor beers, of the real beers, of the micro brews, of the good imports growing at a very healthy pace. Micro’s: + 7 % in 2004. Belgian beer: + 40 % in 2004.

In Belgium the market share of the Pilsners like Stella Artois, Bavik, Maes, Jupiler, Sparta etc. is already less than 70 % of the market.
In the USA it is still 90 %. But US big brewers better wake up. Or, let them sleep and fight each other with silly commercials and big discounts. The dinosaurs will kill each other, and the smaller players will grow and eventually replace them.