Cheap Beer Disappearing Thanks to PBR

The main reason plenty of people have ever even tasted a Pabst Blue Ribbon is because they come cheap. However, its price has been rising in New York City thanks to the hipster population that has been consuming it, according to food and beverage sales analyst Restaurant Sciences.

The word is that PBR’s price increase has affected all the other “sub-premium” brands in the city and they’ve collectively gone up 9.4 percent in the last seven months, the New York Daily News reports. "I believe the single biggest driver in sub-premium beer price increases is indeed specifically PBR," said Chuck Ellis, the research company’s chief. "It has become quite fashionable."Continue reading...

Boston Beer Takes a Big Hit

America’s drinkers are putting down their Sam Adams. Its brewer, Boston Beer Co., which has gotten a bit of press recently for putting in a trademark request for Boston Strong 26.2 Brew in the wake of the bombings at the Boston Marathon, announced its quarterly earnings Wednesday and they were not good. The company earned 51 cents per share in this year’s first quarter, “down almost 9 percent from a year earlier and well below the 62 cents a share expected by analysts,” CNN reports.

That news sent shares of the country’s top craft brewer down almost 11 percent Thursday. Their spot at the top of the heap is hurting them, the company said, as consumers are turning their tongues to other smaller craft brews that are on their way up.Continue reading...

Boston Beer Aims to Trademark "Boston Strong 26.2"

Boston Beer Company, the maker of Samuel Adams, has been brewing up a special beer, "26.2 Brew," for the Boston Marathon for years. Now that the marathon has taken on a wider social significance in the weeks after the bombings, the company would like to change the brew’s name to "Boston Strong 26.2 Brew" and has applied for a trademark, the Boston Globe reports.

The plan is to use money from the sale of the beer to help victims of the tragedy. Boston Beer says it won’t hog the trademark but allow other beverage companies to use it as well as long as they commit to giving 100 percent of profits to charity.Continue reading...

AB InBev Finally Making Deal With US Over Modelo

Anheuser-Busch InBev NV, which controls close to 19 percent of the globe’s beer market, has been trying to buy Mexico’s Grupo Modelo SAB, which owns close to 3 percent of the world’s beer market, for months now, only held up by the pesky US government, which thought the merger could mean too much power for AB InBev. 

The two sides have been talking since at least February about how a deal might be structured so that everybody gets what they want. And now, just days before the two sides were requested to report to a US District Judge, the word on the street is that they have come to an agreement, Bloomberg.com reports.

In order to have this merger occur, Modelo will have to “sell control of all its brands in the US, as well as a brewery it built in Piedras Negras, Mexico, to Constellation Brands (STZ), a winemaker and drink-distribution company,” Bloomberg reports. As part of the new agreement, InBev “gave up an option to buy back a stake in Crown Imports LLC, the US distributor of Corona and the other Modelo brands.” Crown will end up being owned by Constellation.Continue reading...

Secretary of State Brings Home 24 Canadians

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry found himself to be the proud owner of a case of Molson Canadian Thursday after settling a bet with Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs John Baird.

The pair had wagered cases of beer over who would win the women’s world hockey championship and the US came through on Tuesday with a 3-2 win. Baird will have to live without the case of Sam Adams, brewed in Kerry’s home state of Massachusetts, that would have been coming to him. 

They made the exchange in London, where they are holed up for the G8 conference, leading one to wonder if they each always travel with a case of brewskis—just in case.Continue reading...

Gun Company Fires Back at Tommy Guns Vodka

Chicago mobsters back in the days of Al Capone favored a submachine gun known as the Tommy gun, which was then glorified in plenty of films and books about the era. But Tommy guns aren’t some relic of history. Saeilo Enterprises still makes them, and the owners aren’t very happy with Alphonse Capone Enterprises and its Tommy Guns Vodka, which is sold in a bottle shaped like the famous gun.

In fact, they are so annoyed that a lawsuit has been filed, the Chicago Tribune reports. Saeilo wants all of the Tommy Guns Vodka that is left to be turned over so it can all be destroyed. (Consumption counts as destroying, right?)Continue reading...

A Canadian beer brand (ostensibly), in a stroke of marketing genius, has major alcohol brands jumping on its ad bandwagon promoting “Responsibly Beer.”

It’s actually an ad campaign by the Alberta Liquor and Gaming Commission and there’s no actual beer brand—just pure advertising to influence drinkers to do so responsibly.

The provincial AGLC went all-out with the ploy, creating an age-verification splash page, a Facebook page, Instagrammed "Responsibly" beer cans on Twitter and a Pinterest, too.

“The idea was to play on the very common slogan ‘drink responsibly’ to catch people’s attention, which will hopefully get them to our website enjoyresponsibly.ca to find out more about the concept behind the fictional product," said AGLC spokeswoman Michelle Hynes-Dawson, FoodBeast reports. It's "about giving a definition to 'responsibly' and moderation.”

“In terms of Facebook and Twitter, it worked well with the campaign concept and the demographic we are trying to reach," she added of the focus on young adults between 18 (the province's legal drinking age) and 24 years-old.Continue reading...

Newcastle Gets Real

Newcastle has taken a new tack in its advertising and it’s all about turning old beer advertising on its head. Beer marketers love to throw “heritage” imagery at consumers to make beer drinkers feel like they are part of something bigger, so Newcastle decided to go back to its roots, the English town of Newcastle, where residents—known as Geordies—are filled with humor and realism. The result? Newcastle’s “No Bollocks” ad campaign.

“If you look at the Geordies, they’re very friendly, down-to-earth; they don’t take themselves too seriously, and tell it like it is. We figured that is a really interesting space for us to be in," says Newcastle Brown Ale Brand Director Charles van Es, according to Fast Company's FastCoCreate blog. "We wanted to use that wit and dry sense of humor as our brand voice. We want to be transparent about the fact that we’re marketing to you and the fact that our beer comes from England.”Continue reading...