Winter Beers ae Back Again
It’s
the first of November, and that means two things.
One, you sold your last bottle of Oktoberfest yesterday;
hope you didn’t overstock, and
two, it’s now winter beer season, and all the breweries are
going to be selling you theirs.
But before you buy into the turbo-charged, spice-burning
action, ask yourself . . .
Why Again?
. . . do
people want winter beers; why do brewers brew them; why are
they spiced,
why are they big; and why are you buying them . . .
“The
market is a lot like our brewers,” offered Andy Pherson,
President of Long Trail Brewing in Bridgewater Corners,
Vermont. “They like change.” It could be as simple as that –
if you sell to the craft brew consumer, you know that’s
true. These guys have already changed from what most other
beer drinkers prefer, and it’s almost as if that change has
gotten into their psyche; they change a lot, brand loyalty
thrown to the winds.
You just did real well on
Oktoberfest (it’s the biggest-selling seasonal beer overall,
so it’s at least likely that you did), but now they’re
looking for something new. Winter beers are just that
something. It doesn’t matter if they’ve seen this “new”
thing before, after all, they saw all those Oktoberfest
beers before. It’s new now, new like the changing
season.
Jim Koch, the Sam Adams
man, takes that changing season philosophy and goes deep
with it. “I believe that the styles of beer have a
fundamental relationship to the turning of the seasons,” he
said. “When you live in New England, the changing of the
seasons is something very dramatic, almost thunderous.
You’ll have that first day when you say, ‘Okay, it’s really
winter now.’ It may be in the end of October, it may not be
’til December, but it happens. It affects your mind, it
affects your attitude and it affects your beer.”
Okay, a bit more heart and
soul, but still valid. People may look at the calendar to
buy Oktoberfest, but they look out the window and walk out
the door to know when it’s winter beer time, and when that
day happens . . . Al Marzi at Harpoon knows. “We’ve got
hardcore fans of the Harpoon Winter Warmer,” he said,
“people who always call: ‘When’s it coming out?!'” For some
people, there’s a real pragmatic reason for the desire for
winter beers that has to do with the way the season drives
something else. “A lot of it is that people who buy beer in
our segment do a lot of food and beer pairing,” explained
Ben Anhalt, the brewer at Paper City in Mt. Holyoke. “In the
colder months people aren’t eating salad. “They’re eating
meatloaf, and spaghetti and meatballs. There’s a culinary
edge to it. You need something bigger to match those
foods.”
That’s why Anhalt rolls out
Paper City’s big Winter Palace Wee Heavy, a hefty beer that
can take on a meatloaf without wheezing.
And just in case that meat
loaf is tougher than it looks, he’s brewing an additional
special winter beer this year for a tag team match, his
Denogginator doublebock.
Ask Anhalt why he brews the
Denogginator, though, and you’ll get the answer that strikes
closest to home on all these winter brews. “I brewed it just
for fun,” he said. Go back far enough – and that’s going to
be going back a couple centuries – and you’ll find that
seasonal beers were almost all brewed for all these reasons.
English winter warmers were an accompaniment to wild boar
and Christmas pudding.
Doublebocks were brewed
strong and sweet to sustain fasting monks through Lent.
Spiced winter beers were just something different, something
special, something . . . just for fun.
That’s where Harpoon’s
Winter Warmer falls in, a spiced winter beer that was done
just because. Harpoon head brewer Al Marzi recalled how it
got started. “It was (brewery co-founder) Rich Doyle’s
idea,” he said. “He was looking at winter beers in Europe,
primarily in England. That’s why they opened Harpoon: they’d
traveled in Europe, had those fresh local beers, and wanted
to start that in Boston. They went back to those roots to
decide what beers to make.” Marzi wasn’t at the brewery yet
when the Winter Warmer was first brewed, but that’s not all
that surprising. As best as they can determine, the Winter
Warmer is the third oldest regularly-brewed winter seasonal
beer in America, coming in behind Anchor’s Our Special Ale
and Coor Winterfest. “It was our first seasonal, and I think
it was in 1989,” Marzi said. “It has been our best-selling
seasonal for years. The Summer Ale finally passed it this
year, mainly on the basis of a longer season.”
I asked Marzi if the beer
is the same every year. “Hey,” he said, “If it ain’t broke,
don’t fix it! We’ve always liked it the way it is. But it’s
funny. No matter that we don’t change it at all, people
always ask, every year: ‘What did you do to it?’ or ‘It’s
different!’ and you’ll hear them telling each other, ‘1996
was the best year.’ It’s all the same! We haven’t felt a
need to change it. We’ve got the 1OO Barrel Series to keep
the brewers happy.”
Even a brewery that’s just
starting up will have a winter beer. Todd Marcus is busy as
a one-armed paperhanger out on the Cape,
running his new one-man
operation, Cape Cod Brewing. He’s only got two beers
available as I write this, his Channel Marker Red and
Shark’s Tooth IPA, but he’ll be ready for the cold winds off
the ocean.
“I’ll put out some specials
to satisfy the fickle tastes of the craft brew drinker,” he
said. “They always want something new. I’ve got a couple
options. It might be a spiced version of the red, with
allspice, cinnamon, clove, and ginger. But if I have the
tank space, I’ll do something halfway between a Scotch Ale
and a barleywine, a beer I’ve made before, called Old Man
Winter. Somewhere between 8 and 9%, certainly way less than
cloying, with just enough roasted malt to give it a hint of
smoke.”
Anhalt isn’t just rolling
out the big, malty, solid Winter Palace or the mighty
Denogginator. “Winter Lager is one of our Brewer’s Offering
beers,” he said. “The former head brewer had this recipe
with seven different grains: rye, a little wheat, kind of a
hodgepodge. It’s a fun little multigrain lager that doesn’t
fit in any styles or categories. We mostly make it to keep
our lager yeast happy over the winter.” All three beers are
available in draft and bottles.
Jim Koch is playing Santa
Claus this year with a little bit of something for everyone
in his big beer sack. “We have some beers from the past this
year,” he said. “Old Fezziwig and the Cranberry Lambic will
be available in the mixed winter packs. We’re also working
on a new beer that will be in the mixed packs, which has the
name Holiday Porter at this point.
It is a very big, higher
alcohol porter, a big Imperial porter. It’s not the (old)
Honey Porter, there’s no honey in it.”
If you want a full six-pack
or case of winter specialty, Boston Beer offers the Samuel
Adams Winter Lager. “Winter Lager is the primary winter
beer,” Koch confirmed. “The Winter Lager will be the same
recipe as in the past. It’s a big, spiced beer – a big malty
dark lager with holiday spices in it. It has fresh ginger
pulp, cinnamon from southeast Asia, and curaEao orange zest.
Even the base beer is an unusual style: it doesn’t really
fit the schwarzbier or dunkel category, it’s bigger than
that.”
Long Trail does a winter
variety pack too, though you won’t find multiple winter
specialities in there.
“Hibernator is the winter
beer, since 1995,” said Andy Pherson. “It’s a Scotch Ale. We
haven’t changed it . . . except the hop variety, and hops
aren’t that big a deal in a Scotch Ale anyway. It’s about
6%.”
You can expect to see more
support for the Hibernator this year, and Pherson had an
interesting story on why that is. “We have to flaunt that
label more, and we’re going to do that this year,” he said.
“We didn’t do more before this year because we didn’t own
the name. Golden Pacific Brewing came up with the same name,
and registered it first, by a few weeks! I went out to
Golden Pacific and fessed up. I showed it to the president,
I told him we were already in production. He was great about
it, and we wound up doing a license with them. Then just as
the agreement expired, Gambrinus bought up Golden Pacific.
Well, we just signed a license agreement with them. It’s an
outright sale, and we own the name now, so we’ll be able to
put some solid support behind it.”
Another Vermont brewer who
is looking for your interest in winter beers is Otter Creek
and Wolaver’s, in Middlebury. They had a winter beer for
years, one called A Winter’s Ale, but they dropped that last
year and brewed up a new beer called Alpine Ale. Sales and
marketing guy Max Oswald described it as “A great beer, with
big malt flavor and a solid hop finish. It’s engaging, the
kind of beer you want to keep going with. It’s 5.8% ABV.
We’re selling to ski areas, so we don’t really want to knock
someone over.”
Oswald explained why the
change in line-up. “We’d seen some stagnation in seasonal
sales,” he said. “We’d had a static line of seasonals.
Winter beers get compressed into November and December, and
your winter beer’s not really performing in the winter
January and February. Steve Parkes (of Wolaver’s) came in
with a bunch of ideas from California. So we shook it up
with some new beers. It worked out well, the market really
responded. It de-seasonalized it to a ‘special release’,
working towards eliminating the November/December ‘winter
beer’ season and positioning the beer towards skiing – the
whole ski season. We’re not stuck, handicapped, hamstrung by
‘winter’ anymore.”
That’s certainly something
to aim for. I asked Al Marzi what he thought was the best
way to sell winter beers after New Year’s Day. “Make sure
you sell them by December 31,” he replied, and he wasn’t
laughing. It’s a rare winter beer that continues to sell
well after New Year’s Day. “After New Year’s Day,” Marzi
confided, “the light-switch goes off, the case sales fall
off. It’s really strongest leading up to the holidays. Even
though January is the heart of winter, people just aren’t
thinking that. I don’t know why they won’t sell in the
winter.”
Don’t take that personally.
It’s probably not the winter beer’s fault. Brian Anhalt got
realistic about it. “In any kind of service or hospitality
business,” he reminded people, “January is a horrible month.
People don’t go out or buy six-packs: they’re overextended
financially, they’re still on their New Year’s resolutions.
January’s a dog of a month, probably a 25% drop in brewing.
But once that’s over, February comes and things are back on
course – but winter beers are forgotten. So play your
inventory really close. You should be getting your volume
discounts in December and overstock, then just live off that
fat in January.”
There is a contrarian view:
no surprise, it’s Jim Koch. “Winter Lager does fine after
New Year’s Day,” he said. “It continues to do well into
winter. Then, depending on where you are in the country . .
. sometimes around the end of February in Massachusetts,
even though it’s still winter and the weather sucks,
people’s minds sort of lean forward. They begin thinking
about spring. That’s only for about two months or six weeks,
because come April, we’re thinking summer.” Must have
something to do with baseball.
Don’t let all this talk of
‘dead by January’ scare you off, though. Winter beers are
definitely hot sellers, and sales have been on the rise over
the past five years. “We’ve seen growth in our seasonal
program every year since we started doing it in 1987,” said
Koch. Andy Pherson’s real happy with Hibernator sales. “It
showed 2O% growth in all markets last year,” he said. “It’s
a very steady grower.”
“Winter Warmer’s been up,”
Al Marzi said, “and if it holds with the other seasonals
this year, it will continue to be up. It’s been a really
good year, across the board.” “We’re looking at about 2O%
growth overall,” said Paper City’s Anhalt. “We took a large
jump in our spring and summer seasonals, and maybe the trend
line will jump even higher, because we usually sell more
Oktoberfest and Winter Palace than the other seasonals. We
could have a gangbuster fall.”
Okay, say you’ve got your
stock in, and it’s not January 1 yet. What’s the best way to
sell it? Max Oswald at Otter Creek leans on the lure of a
special release, kind of the news aspect of it. “There’s a
strong market for special release beers,” he said. “Let
people know that’s what it is. A lot of people are always
looking for something different, something to look forward
to, a beer that’s only out for a while. They’re drinking the
category: quality and variety. The retailer can play into
that. We do POS all around that special release. Retailers
have been stung in the past; when seasonals shut off, they
shut off hard. But we’ve adjusted, and those sales will come
back. It’s also a great way to introduce people to their
stores: a lot of big stores don’t handle that kind of
variety.”
Jim Koch says pile ’em high
and watch ’em buy. “Put up a 5 to 25-case stack, depending
on your store size,” he said. “Winter beer is an impulse
purchase, and it’s very high incremental profit. It tends to
be an additional six-pack, 12-pack, or case on top of what
they intended to buy. That’s about as profitable as it gets:
it doesn’t replace what they were planning to get, and it’s
a pretty good ring. It brings a lot of money to the bottom
line. ‘Samuel Adams Seasonals are the golden cases that all
fall to the bottom line’. That description actually came
from a retailer. It’s a high-profit, impulse item, so
display them prominently. They don’t detract from your base
business and will add pure profit dollars to each customer
visit.”
All good points, and
thoughtful strategy. But Brian Anhalt had a real simple
suggestion that plays hard on the “sell it by New Year’s
Day” wisdom. “Make a pretty display,” he said, “and put a
Christmas tree on it.”
