Thursday, November 12, 2009

Indulgence Or Innovation?

Beer festivals aside (it's difficult making a living off "festival beers"), non mainstream styled beers are a difficult sell. Should we blame the publicans for this? No, they have to buy what their regulars will drink. I have customers worried about a "Best Bitter" being too bitter, or a 4.4% being too strong. What should I do?

We need to sell the beer. The beer has to sell. So that we can make some more.

Perhaps it's just too easy to throw a huge pile of hops and malt into the big bucket, give it a couple of weeks, then sell a few 9s of novelty beer via Boggart. Perhaps this is a recipe for a "minimum viable product". Or it's not, and it's just homebrew writ large. Or self-indulgent toss. Or the beer equivalent of Dōjinshi, fan-fiction, whatever. Heck, I don't know.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

You have to make what you can sell. It's easier for me to sell something that is a little more unusual. I'm the brewer here and the brewpub beers are allowed to be more unusual.

I'm not gloating, in fact I wish you could sell more interesting beers, I'd like more interesting beers to be available in more pubs and that won't happen without more people wanting to drink them. Ho hum.

StringersBeer said...

Yes, it's one of those circular things, isn't it?

I must look at bottling more seriously. But not just bottling the regular (boring) beers.

StringersBeer said...

Of course I say "boring" in an humourous kind of a way - I mean restrained, well-balanced, beauties ideal for volume quaffing, in a pub setting.