Recently there has been quite a buzz in the craft beer world concerning Fedex and UPS discontinuing relationships with online beer retailers. I never really had a dog in that race, seeing as how shipping always outpriced the beer I was ordering, I never clicked past the total screen that gave me the shipping cost. I just couldn’t justify it in my mind…even for Pliny the Elder. <gasp>
All the Fedex and UPS stuff has done for me is further bring my hatred of the distribution model of beer in America to the surface. If you are not familiar with this system (even tho you really are), visit Wikipedia here. It is essentially an archaic set of rules born out of prohibition that regulate how beer is distributed. Wonder why you can order wine online and shipping companies will send it right along…but with beer, if you tell them what you are sending, they will not? This is why. You cannot ship across state lines into a state that obeys the 3 tier system rules because you are circumventing the middle man. I could drive over to Asheville, NC, buy up some Pisgah Brewing beer and ship it to someone in another state….as long as I never labeled it as beer. However, because that would leave the distributor out of the loop (thus the cash), I would be breaking laws.
Does this stop people? No. Does it suck? Yes.
I have always felt like we didn’t get the beers we should get in my area. I live at the cross roads of NC, VA and TN. I have to visit all 3 in a day to get the selection I really want to have. Is it my fault because I am a demanding consumer? I wouldn’t think so. Where is the fault?
A good way to see some of the fault placed squarely where it should be is to rent or buy the movie Beer Wars. It is not an overwhelmingly rapturous movie, however, it clearly states the issues facing smaller breweries and consumers in a world run by giant organizations. Because of the movie I now know that:
1. Budweiser spills more beer on their bottling line in one day than Sam Adam’s makes in a day.
2. Budweiser either owns or has a majority of the distributors under contract in America and typically will not deliver beer that is not under their umbrella.
3. MillerCoors and Budweiser HAVE seen losses over the last few years in market share, but still own enough of it to get eye level real estate in the cooler aisle…and where do most people find the beer they buy? Eye level.
So it is because of this wonderful system that brewers I would love to have cross the mountain from NC to TN cannot afford to do so. I can get what I can get and travel to get the rest. I am not complaining, BTW, about my selection so much as just venting about a system that hinders an even greater selection. I know now that beers I have heard hyped repeatedly online like Russian River’s Pliney the Elder, the Younger and others will never get to me unless something amazing happens to get them here. I am constantly surprised to see things get to my area and it just should not be that way.
We are clinging onto Prohibition era laws like a baptist to the KJV. These old laws make us feel safe because capitalism is “working”. In this case, however, it is not. Smaller breweries struggle to get their feet on the ground and we the consumers are making back alley trades via the intertubes to wet our appetites with new brews.
Watch Beer Wars and enjoy it. I did. Even for someone to whom all of this information is old hat, the movie is a good representation of the sentiment of a generation right now.
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