On April 16, 2009, Fathom Events premiered Beer Wars, a documentary looking at the beer industry. The event was shown on 440 movie screens across the country, and featured a live panel discussion afterwards.
Written and directed by Anat Baron, Beer Wars looks at the issues dealt with by independent brewers. The movie looked largely at two entrepreneurs - Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery and Rhonda Kallman of New Century Brewing Co. Over the course of the movie, Baron brought out a number of facts about the beer industry that surprised all but the biggest "beer geeks" in the audience, and helped highlight some of the problems facing small brewers.
Beer Facts and Figures
- 80% of the beer made in the United States is controlled by two companies, neither of which are based in the United States (one in Belgium and one in South Africa).
- The top American owned brewer is Boston Beer Company, maker of Sam Adams.
- Beer is one of the most regulated industries in America, with over 37,000 beer laws.
- The U.S. is the only country in the world with a three-tier system for alcohol distribution (brewer, distributor, and retailer).
- It is illegal for brewers to sell beer online, or directly to consumers.
Rhonda Kallman and New Century Brewing Co.
Kallman is not a brewer, but she's not an industry novice - she co-founded Boston Beer Company with Jim Koch in 1984. By the time she left in 1999, she was Executive Vice President of Sales and Brand Development. Her new company introduced Moonshot, a caffeinated beer, in 2004.
The movie looks at her efforts to capitalize her struggling company, as well as the work involved to get her beer on shelves and in bars. It's obvious Kallman is facing an uphill battle, and is putting in a lot of plain old-fashioned legwork that seems to be taking toll on a personal level. In one emotional scene, viewers watched as Kallman comforted her crying daughter while she begged for her mother to stay home. It was a blatantly manipulative bit of video, but it worked.
Sam Calagione and Dogfish Head Craft Brewery
Calagione and Dogfish Head would qualify as a craft beer success story. Since 1995, they've grown phenomenally, now producing some 75,000 barrels of beer a year. That's a lot of beer, but as the movie points out, it's only .0002% of the U.S. market share. Compare that to Boston Beer's 1.2 million barrels per year, or Anheuser-Busch's 157 million barrels.
Calagione made clear the devotion to the art of brewing that independent brewers bring to the table. When asked how craft brewers can compete, he responded, "Our weapon has always been what's inside the bottle."
The Discussion Afterwords
The live panel discussion after the movie took the Beer Wars LIVE event beyond just a movie premiere. Moderated by Ben Stein, it featured many people seen in the movie: Greg Koch of Stone Brewing Company, Charlie Papazian of the Brewers Association, Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, Todd Alstrom of BeerAdvocate, author and historian Maureen Ogle, and of course, Baron.
Stein was a bit of a disappointment, and seemed to be more interested in getting Koch or Calagione to admit that secretly, they'd like to be a big mega-brewer. Along with Papazian, however, they repeatedly came back to what they see as the biggest difference between craft brewers and the large corporate brewers - the passion for making good beer. Calagione probably put it best when he said, "The big companies are businesses first and brewers second."
Clearly on the side of the small brewers, Beer Wars was a funny and thought-provoking look at the advantages enjoyed by the mega-brewers in the U.S. beer market.
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