American Craft Beer The Best Craft Beer, Breweries, Bars, Brewpubs, Beer Stores, And Restaurants Serving Serious Beer.
The beer biz never sleeps at American Craft Beer. And here’s some more of what’s been happening in the beer world, while you continue to drink yourself through a long Labor Day weekend.
Fat Head’s Brewery Wins Big At Annual Oktoberfest Competition (Middleburg Heights, OH) – For the fourth consecutive year, Fat Head’s Brewery has taken top honors at a beer competition held in conjunction with the Cleveland Oktoberfest celebration at the Cuyahoga County Fairgrounds.
Last year Fat Head’s Hellian Helles took “Best in Show.” In 2016, its Black Knight Schwarzbier took top honors at the fest. And in 2015 Fat Head’s Oktoberfest was ranked the top beer in the blind tastings by a consortium of beer experts.
Fat Head’s Alpenglow Weizenbock, which was a gold medal winner at the 2017 Great American Beer Festival, took top honors at this year’ Oktoberfest competition in Ohio.
Fat Head’s Brewery is also celebrating its new 75,000 square foot production brewery and tourist destination which opened its doors to the public on August 20th.
Words To Drink By (Middleburg Heights, OH) – “Sometimes people think we’re a manufacturing facility… What I want to create is a Bavarian beer hall” – Matt Cole / Fat Head’s Brewery
Big Beer Stocks No Longer Paying Off (New York) – When Big Beer consolidation began almost decade ago, it was supposed to be a big win for shareholders according to the Motley Fool. Anheuser-Busch InBev and Molson Coors now dominate the biz both domestically and globally. And in theory those companies should be able to use their scale and distribution power to grow sales and expand margins…but it hasn’t quite worked out for both the companies and its shareholders.
Market share for Big Beer brands is declining and pricing power is not what it once was. And big beer stocks are underperforming the market by a wide margin right now according to some business analysts. According to IRI Group scan data, brewers with over 1 million barrels in capacity had a 2.5% drop in volume in the first half of 2018.
But smaller brewery volume is increasing. Breweries with a 10,000 to 100,000 barrels production capacity showed a 5.4% increase in volume in the first half of 2018. And the even smaller breweries (those with 10,000 barrels or less) jumped an impressive 30.8%. These are the uber-local small brewpubs and microbreweries that popping up all over the country and eating away at Big Beer’s market share.
