rrrx

My question is: This is a bad idea.

For your sake I do hope I'm wrong, but my intuition -- something developed from three decades of experience in the craft beer industry -- tells me I'm probably not. How much market research have you done, particularly in finding your consumers? What kind of feedback have you gotten from the TTB? What kind of statements are you going to be making in your marketing? What portion of fitness enthusiasts are regular drinkers? How significant is the negative stigma against alcohol consumption in the fitness community?

One of the biggest lessons we've learned in the craft beer industry over the past ten or fifteen years is that novelty beers do not survive. If you're going to be marketing mostly in the craft segment, your main selling point has to be that your beer is good, not that it's good for you. I cannot stress that enough. The novelty-over-quality mistake is a big part of why products like Moonshot fail.

And not to put too fine of a point on it, but have you been to a lot of craft beer events? Fitness enthusiasts aren't exactly our core consumers. Sure, there's a niche there, but we've found that most craft drinkers would rather drink less of a really good beer that's higher in calories and carbs than more of a not-so-good beer that's lower in calories and carbs. Most beers don't even have nutritional information because the TTB doesn't even require it, and you want to make your beer's nutritional information its main selling point. And looking at whatever niche is there, how sure are you that it isn't already being filled, or well on its way to being filled, by companies that have a head start on you?

If you're going to be marketing mostly in the macro segment, then you're taking on a whole separate set of problems I don't envy.

I don't mean to be discouraging. But if you don't already have really good answers for yourself to all of these questions, you'd better get them very soon.

an IPA needs to have body to balance the hoppyness and therefore you need a low attenuation

Interestingly, this is exactly the opposite of the prevailing sentiment regarding brewing IPA among American craft brewers. Here, top brewers generally mash their IPAs very low (~64/65ºC), minimize the use of crystal malts, and often add a simple sugar like dextrose in order to get really high attenuation and a really crisp, clean beer. Attenuation is commonly 80+%. These beers generally emphasize hop aroma and flavor, and keep perceived bitterness relatively low, so malt sweetness just gets in the way.

It saddens me that the craft beer industry has already gotten to the point of discouraging innovative (and sometimes downright weird) new products.

It hasn't.

But, with respect, I would go back to the Moonshot example. Moonshot was launched by Rhonda Kallman, a really great, intelligent, passionate woman I've known almost twenty years. On paper, it had every chance to succeed; Kallman was literally the second employee Boston Beer Company ever had, and was a senior executive in the company before she left to do her own thing. But Moonshot failed -- badly -- because it was never able to stand on the strength of its own quality. It was a mediocre beer that tried to get people to buy it because it had caffeine added, and, like, that's cool I guess?

Let's be honest: Beer with added caffeine isn't innovative. It's gimmicky. And I'm not even saying that there's no room for gimmicky beer in the craft industry; God knows there are plenty of gimmicky craft beers. I'm saying that a gimmick cannot be a beer's main selling point. If I market a beer that's brewed with the power of crow's eggs, it might get a bunch of people to buy it once -- but if they ever buy it again, it's going to be because it's good beer, not because of the crowtein.

If you're confident in your beer's quality, which it sounds like you are, then hopefully you won't have this problem.

My goal is to create a completely new segment of beer.

Again, for your sake I hope I'm wrong, but I just can't see this happening. The beer market has gotten really, really, really tough in the past ten or fifteen years. Craft beer as a segment keeps growing year over year, but the market as a whole is constantly losing ground to wine and spirits. That means that as tough as it is to establish a new brand in the craft segment, it's a loooot harder for a new brand to steal market share from the macros on their own turf.

Don't think it can happen? That was the thought for craft beer as a whole 15 years ago.

It really wasn't. Fifteen years ago craft beer was already well-established. There were already over 1,500 craft breweries in the country -- up from a post-Prohibition low of just 89 in 1978 breweries total, and up from just about 300 in 1990. The early 2000s were actually when the industry really started to go mainstream, as places like Stone and Dogfish were blowing up.

It was said about craft beer more like thirty years ago, when places like the relaunched Anchor, and Sierra Nevada, and Boston Beer Company were just gearing up. They carved their niche directly out of the macros' sales, and they were able to do it because there was a large, unserved market for diverse, flavorful beers (particularly ales, of which there were very few on the mass market at the time).

You probably said Not Your Father's Root Beer was a novelty, as well, but I'd really like to be in their shoes right now.

No, I said that Not Your Father's Root Beer was alcopop, which is already a well-established niche market. Mike's? Smirnoff Ice? Bacardi Breezer? It wasn't really anything new, so there wasn't really any novelty to it. And critically, they got backing from Pabst early on; that's why their stuff is flooding markets right now.

I think you and I would both be happy taking a little more market share from AB & MillerCoors, so cheers to that!

I would, but one final proviso: The macros are kind of like starving animals right now. Okay, that's a bit dramatic -- they're still making billions of dollars every year -- but they are losing a lot of their traditional business, and they know it. As that happens, they're increasingly looking to expand into nontraditional segments. This is something we're seeing more and more of in the craft industry; AB-Inbev is buying up craft breweries left and right, even as they make fun of craft beer in advertising Budweiser.

My point is that if you really do manage to grow a significant segment around your beer and it looks to be productive and sustainable, it won't be long until the macros decide they want to own it. A "fitness beer" marketed to twenty-somethings, exactly the demographic they're losing the most? If someone else does the hard work of drumming up the demand, that sounds like the kind of thing that would be right up their alley.

Carlsberg does a lot of beers besides their standard lager, some of which are pretty interesting. Carls Porter is a solid Baltic porter, if you ever get the chance to try it. It's also worth noting that Carlsberg Laboratory is one of the oldest and most important institutions in brewing science; no shame in being associated with that.

You make a good point, but beers like PtE aren't the rule, they're the exception (or were for a good point).

I agree, it has become much more common. Pretty much all of the top new places -- Trillium, Tree House, Alpine, MBC, TG, etc. -- are brewing dry, hop-forward (D)IPAs with little malt sweetness. I just meant that that shift started at least fifteen years ago; Pliny quickly became the de facto standard for the style, and it's been spreading ever since.

I don't know if it's really equipment.

Oh, I'm including process, water treatments, yeast and so on when I refer to a brewery's system. I think one of the distinct changes we've seen in craft brewing over roughly the past decade or so has been a growing appreciation for the chemistry involved in the process, from start to finish. That's one respect in which we've actually become more like the big brewers, and for the better. So much of what we understood to be best practices fifteen or twenty years ago was just wrong, and it made a big difference both in quality and consistency.