Behind Expensive Beers

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“We just want to make sure everyone gets a chance,” says brewer Barnaby Struve. I know people who drive to Indiana from Philadelphia and New York for Dark Lord Day. Struve says that there were people in April 2007 who had traveled all the way from Japan and Denmark for the beer. Yes, it’s expensive, Struve acknowledges, but it includes a lot of expensive specialty malts and hops, and the tiny brewery doesn’t get the bulk discounts on malt, hops, and packaging that larger places do.

Most of the beer geeks I know are kind of, well, price sensitive. There are exceptions, of course, but not enough of them to snap up 12,000 bottles at $140 a pop, or even the full run of Dark Lord. The geeks have even complained about “other” people buying these beers, saying that they won’t appreciate them, and that they only want them in the first place because they’re expensive.

Jeff Coleman imports Fuller’s ales from Britain, and he sees a much broader crowd buying Fuller’s Vintage Ale, a $16 bottle in restaurants. One account in New York told of firms of lawyers coming for holiday lunches, specifically to drink the Fuller’s. “They’ll still be there at 5 o’clock, smoking cigars and drinking Vintage Ale,” he says.

If it’s not mainly the beer aficionados who are buying the big-ticket beers, then perhaps expensive beers represent a real breakthrough for craft brewing. Higher prices mean higher perceived quality, and if that gets people to take a sip of a great beer with an open mind (in other words, without thinking about ice-cold brews alongside hot dogs and pizza), then it could also mean customers looking at the whole range of beer in a new way. And that bodes well for the boom in craft-beer sales.

A while back, in a story for New Brewer, a brewers journal, I quoted Fritz Maytag, owner of Anchor Brewing and the so-called grandfather of the craft-brewing movement, on what small brewers could learn from small winemakers. “How to brew and sell a $50 bottle of beer,” Maytag said. Apparently some brewers were paying attention.

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