Beer Wars (2009)

Beer Wars is a 2009 documentary film about the American beer industry. In particular, it covers the differences between large corporate breweries, namely Anheuser-Busch, the Miller Brewing Company, and the Coors Brewing Company opposed to smaller breweries like Dogfish Head Brewery, Moonshot 69, Yuengling, Stone Brewing Co.

, and other producers of craft beer. Also covered is how advertising and lobbyists are used to control the beer market, implying that these things harm competition and consumer choice. USA loves beer and increasingly consumers are shifting from mass produced beers to the artistic, custom brews. US today has the biggest selection of beers globally. The total market in US is $97 Bn big. Anot Baron was typical corporate stooge before she started her own consultancy and then in 2003 took hold of Mike Beer co, and that's how she got into the beer wars. Thats how she got unique insights into how 3 companies cornered a major part of the US beer market. The big three firm's owners came to the US in the 1800s. They build a vast empire of breweries in 1900s, which got dismantled in prohibition and got rebuilt again in the 1950s. They used huge marketing budgets to kill local and regional brands. Since 1970, 35 local brands have been shut down. By 1978, only 45 brewers were left in USA. AB today has 47% share, Miller 18% and Coors 11%. And for a product that no consumer can reliably tell apart in a blind taste test. It's all about the advertising. Total advertisement spend is $1. 5 Bn. Today there are 1400 independent breweries that make up less than 5% of all beer sold. They are driven by the passion for their craft and their ability and desire to produce a beer that excites its drinkers. Their combined total production is the industrial waste from the packaging lines of the big 3 beer producers. Every new brewery has to learn how to seed a brand in this new century. Its hand-to-hand combat in the stores and the bars to understand consumer reaction. While the big players simple introduce new products (that still taste the same), just to crowd out the competition at the retail stores where 80% of the beer in USA is sold. The big retailers let the beer companies decides how to stock shelves and each category has a captain, and for beer that's typically an exec from AB or Miller/Coors. They decide how each beer shelf in a store is stocked, even if its not their store. Thats cause the store has 350 other categories and they believe the category leader would know more about maximizing sales than them. beer is actually drunk at room temp. But in ads the big 3 always talk about a chilled beer as at that temp its difficult to make out the taste between a mass produced and a custom beer. Leave advertising. AB spend $ 300 MM on sports sponsorship every year. They even sponsor the Presidential debates. The small brewers then started their own Great American Beer Festival in Denver Colorado, where beer lovers every year to taste new beers and their makers. Then AB takes advantage of their huge scale to keep prices low on their craft beers (similar in flavor to the better selling small competitors), to crowd them out at the turnstiles. They also mask their products to sound like they are from small sounding Breweries that actually don't exist. Throughout the film there is a theme that the smallest breweries have next to no chance to compete due to the sheer volume of advertising and outdated beer distribution laws. The original laws demanded a three-tier system to separate the powers of selling beer. The law demands that the beer brewer cannot deliver directly to the consumer, supposedly creating a separation of powers resembling the US government's legislative, judicial, and executive branches. The film claims these laws are now inhibiting growth of smaller brewers and therefore allowing the largest brewers (Coors, Anheuser-Busch, and Miller) to maintain an oligopoly on beer. Thats cause today 70% of AB distributors will only carry their product, shutting out all competition from the market. The beer industry now has a lobby group that outspends the gun and tobacco lobby combined to ensure that the 3-tier system remains in place which ensures the dominance of the big brewers. Big became bigger when Millers and Coors merged. InBev bought out AB to make the world's largest beer company.