Brewing a milk stout tonight. Wait, what?
Tonight we’re brewing our very first milk stout. Some of you may be wondering what a milk stout is. Well, according to Wikipedia, the end-all and be-all of brewing knowledge (note sarcasm):
Milk stout (also called sweet stout or cream stout) is a stout containing lactose, a sugar derived from milk. Because lactose is unfermentable by Saccharomyces cerevisiae, it adds sweetness, body, and calories to the finished beer.
Come by Jeff’s tonight to partake in a little MNB history in the making. Milk stouts are truly unique beers. If Joel can get it working, we are also planning on building another fire. So that should definitely make MNB better than whatever you were planning to do tonight.
Thanks to Jeanine for sending in the photo!
MNB makes for some sorely disappointed Googlers
I try to keep my eye on where our millions and millions of visitors come from each day. Yesterday we got a fair amount of Google traffic (read “a few clicks”) from the phrase “Craft Beer Marketing Strategy.” Interested, I went to investigate. Here’s what I found (click for larger view):
The good news? We’re the number one hit (today and yesterday, at least). But I feel bad for all those Google folk clicking on our link hoping to find some silver bullet marketing plan for a craft brewery. Sure, we talked about our marketing plan briefly in our last post, but all we really said was that we HAVE one. I have no doubt that we’ll drop off in the rankings as time wears on and we throw up some new posts.
And let’s be honest, we’re not talking about 100′s of people searching for this term every day.
The bigger picture: Where MNB is as a business
We started brewing in September 2006. It was almost 2 years ago that we thought there might be more to this. We had the passion, the vision, the business skills. And so we developed and set forth a 3 year launch plan. During the past 2 years we’ve stuck surprisingly close to our schedule. These were our goals:
- Year 1: Learn to brew really good beer
- Year 2: Learn to brew really good beer consistently, and develop 2-3 launch beers
- Year 3: Develop business plan, raise money, launch
So developmentally, where are we now? Somewhere between Years 2 and 3. We know which beers we want to launch with. Eye Patch Ale will be our go-to brew, a maltier IPA that most people can’t get enough of. Drafty Kilt Scotch Ale will also get a lot of love. This is a more unique beer, especially for the Georgia market. Dark, smokey, sweet. We’ve found that many people who don’t usually like dark beers love the Drafty Kilt. However, we’re still doing minor tweaks to both of these recipes. Part of this is driven by our Year 3 plans, discussed below.
Technically we didn’t set out to start our business plan until perhaps a couple weeks ago, but truthfully we’ve been working on it since the spring. This has forced us to think through some very hard issues and make trade-offs. We’ve worked a lot on the brand and our marketing strategy. Let’s face it, no matter how good your beer is, good marketing makes it better. We know we want to start by contract brewing (renting another brewery’s excess capacity, which reduces financial risk and with it, margins). We’ve talked to numerous brewers and made some friends in the industry, which has helped us to rethink a few of our recipes to make them more commercially viable (see prior paragraph).
All in all, we’re in a great place. We’re right about where we thought we’d be. It helps that there are 3 of us, so we can divvy up the work. It also helps that we brew every week. Look for more specific updates on our beers later on. As soon as Jeff writes them.
It was cold so we built a fire
Last night’s brewing went really well. But I didn’t have to tell you that. You could have surmised as much from the professionalism with which we carry ourselves in all things that we do. We brewed up another batch of our Drafty Kilt Scotch Ale, and hit our target gravity on the nose. You know what else? Joel actually pulled his own weight last night (many thanks to Abigail for sending in the pic).
See above for about half of our white bucket collection. The other half is on loan to the Bucket Museum of Indiana. Joel built a fire on Jeff’s back porch. We expected the worst, but the house didn’t burn down, and it was nice and toasty back there. I asked Colin and the gang to “pose,” and I think they thought that meant “look like morons”:
Mission accomplished. Notice how all the pictures look really crappy. Turns out iPhones don’t excel at image capturing. Also notice all of the dark beer in glasses. We ran out of Eye Patch Ale about halfway through the evening, so we were left with our experimental bourbon barrel stout. I think people enjoyed it. If nothing else it was a great night for a stout.
Thanks to everyone who made it out. Hopefully we’ll see you soon!
Oh yeah? Well the Drafty Kilt store called and they’re running out of YOU!
Taken, of course, from the classic George Costanza line about the jerk store. But in this case cleverly twisted to fit our purposes, brewing beer. We’ve been getting lots of whiny requests *cough Colin cough* for more Drafty Kilt Scotch Ale. And indeed it is time to brew another batch.
Join us tonight at Jeff’s to brew. And help us drink the Eye Patch Ale and possibly some yummy stout. Want to receive text message alerts about brewing every Monday?
Declining beer sales in emerging countries
West send along this article from the WSJ (that’s short for Wall Street Journal for those of you who aren’t as smart as West) this morning. Many large brewers have been investing in emerging markets in recent years as sales in North America and Western Europe have softened.
However, in tough economic times, beer is often one of the first things to go in emerging countries. It is still viewed as a luxury item, and can be replaced by cheaper (and more “effective”) local liquors. All of the big brewers have seen sales and volume declines, including InBev (beer volume in Russia dropped 11% in the 3rd quarter). This softening has also hit South Africa and Latin America.
Sales in Peru are still strong. SABMiller reported a 10% increase in Peru beer sales over the first half of the year. But this seems to be an exception in an otherwise tough beer market.
What does all of this mean for Monday Night Brewery? Probably not a lot, at least in the short-term. But if these economic slowdowns in beer continue, it could fuel even more consolidation in the beer industry, concentrating more of the distribution and marketing power in the hands of the bland. We need to be scrappy.
Collecting bids from 6-pack carrier manufacturers…
…is annoying and time-consuming.