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In with a kind of a bang, but definitely out with a whimper, it appears that The Beer Necessities, a beer website underwritten by Anheuser-Busch’s The High End division is no more…
Launched early last year, we’d check in on them from time to time and we quietly wondered how well they were doing with the craft beer community, especially in light of their association with AB InBev.
The High End’s goals in launching the site were strategic from its very inception. And clearly, they saw their new media arm as way of normalizing their years of craft beer acquisitions… and breweries they now owned like Goose Island, Elysian, Devils Backbone and Wicked Weed.
And even though AB InBev It would never publicly acknowledge it, we can’t help but think that their short-lived publication was built to further blur what is seen as craft beer by the public and in doing so herald in a new “post-craft era.
The Beer Necessities positioned themselves as approaching “beer through the lens of culture…It was helmed by Ethan Fixell a NYC-based drinks professional and very solid writer.
As Editor-In-Chief of the handsome online beer publication, Fixell assembled a first-rate team of contributors, writers we enjoy like Tara Nurin who made regular appearances along with other great beer journalists.
And given that this thing was AB InBev funded we can only assume everybody was well compensated for their contributions to an effort that didn’t even survive a year.
Maybe The High End’s massive layoffs last May was indicative of a cost-cutting strategy or some change in direction on AB InBev’s part.
Maybe, in spite of some fine writing The Beer Necessities was doomed from the start…That it would never be able shake the stigma of its association with AB InBev and perpetually be seen as a front for the world’s biggest brewing conglomerate…and maybe it just wasn’t proving to be worth the time and money they had already poured into it.
Perhaps the growth of October a ZX Ventures’ supported beer site (AB InBev’s venture capital arm) made The High End’s site a redundancy…
But whatever the reasons, The Beer Necessities is over and done….
And we don’t expect to see a press release from AB InBev explaining its short life and untimely demise anytime soon.
