Beer Wars Essay

Beer Wars is a documentary film directed and produced by Anat Baron and released in April of 2009. It focuses on the struggle surrounded by the dominating corporate businesses of Anheuser-Busch, Miller create from raw stuff Company, Coors Brewing Company, and the smaller independent businesses of swop beers such as grindle Head Brewery, The Boston Beer Company, and The vernal Belgium Brewing Company. The film c overs many aspects of the beer wars between the companies such as competitive advertising, product timberland, price, distribution, and government regulations.Because of the enormous placement and power of the big three, the energy to advertise and foodstuff their wares is significantly easier than for just ab bulge other breweries. From being able to hire top dollar merchandise experts to running multimillion dollar commercials during the Super Bowl, they dominate the beer advertising market. With their lack of ability to buy shelf space, smaller companies are ofte n pushed forth of the way and driven to less marketable places in the aisles of stores nationwide.Rhonda Kallman, owner of The New Century Brewing company, k directn for its craft beer Moonshot, talked about how she often would correct up a poster advertising her beer unitary mean solar day notwithstanding to find it replaced by a competitors poster the following(a) day. This is a glimpse at the competitiveness that small breweries face day to day. Today, The New Century Brewing company is currently shut clip ashore due to the FDAs banning of caffeinated beers Moonshot fell victim to this regulatory axe. This is what happens when the slit and butter of your company can no unyieldinger be produced.The bowling pin of Kallmans company, however, is just another tragic story in the long history of beer manufactures. By the late 70s and early 80s, many people turned towards homebrewing to meet their taste needs because of the debonaire taste of the larger breweries products. C harlie Papazian was one of those people. A nuclear engineer at the University of Virginia, he started experimenting with homebrewing soon after it was legalized in 1978. His main focus was quality and diversity when out of his house he started the American Homebrewers Association now anationwide association of over 36,000 members with its own magazine. part giving a tour of his prized collection he made surely to point out that what he cared about well-nigh was Quality. Not unavoidably quantity, but quality. Papazian was not the save one who desired quality over quantity. Samuel Calagione was yet another man focused on quality. In 1995 he founded the company Dogfish Head Brewery naming it after Dogfish Head, Maine where he spent summers as a child growing up.Starting out as a fledgling company in Delaware, and growing by nearly 400% between 2003 and 2006, it now is one of the most prospered craft breweries in the U. S. A. The film went into great detail on the assorted strug gles that small breweries went through. From the competitive advertising to the rules and regulations of the trade, small breweries are faced with many challenges day to day. After the Prohibition in the 1930s, a three-tier system was set up by many states in order to control the rate of flow of alcohol from producer to consumer.However, this proved to be often time a problem for fledgling companies with little buying power. In order to abide their beers out there and known, they must go through a jobber distributer first. The problem though is that often times the wholesalers advance the boastful Three or other large companies because of their buying power. When it came down to having to look at whether to ship a Coors Light or a Moonshot, often times the well known brand would be chosen not only for its popularity but also because of the pay that the larger companies could give for their favor over others.Kallman learned that shelf space is yet another impediment faced by the craft beer companies. If youre most seen, youre most bought and the Big Three knew this. Another difficulty faced is the temptation to bewray out to the big companies. Over the years, Anheuser-Busch, Miller, and Coors all have been buying up the little companies as soon as they showed promise all in order to try to get a bigger piece of the pie that is market share. If they couldnt buy you, they would try to destroy you.So in conclusion, Beer Wars is one of the first documentary films to go into great detail on the strife for survival and power between the various beer companies of America showing the struggles of the craft breweries against the big companies and the fight for power among the larger companies and their major competitors.Sources http//beerwarsmovie. com/tag/rhonda-kallman/ http//en. wikipedia. org/wiki/ http//www. cnn. com/ fodder/resources/food. for. thought/beverages/alcohol/homebrew/papazian/.