Life’s getting hard out there for cruiserweight breweries.
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but, but, they’re independent craft beeeeerrr durr
Bfd. That’s what they get for screwing up Alpine.
hahah no kidding. Some of my favorite beers were from their old location.
This could be a thing of the future. SO much competition could lead to certain breweries pulling out of markets in a given region. Only the strong survive.
To be bluntly honest, here in St Louis, the Green Flash we would get was always old and oxidized. Their loss to this region is no big deal in my book.
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I would love to know how their sales have done since the made the last recipe change on West Coast IPA? They were killing it up until early 2014 (or was it 15) and then they changed a bunch of recipes, made bigger bottles and at least in Japan (where I live) destroyed their brand. I used to be a massive fanboy of theirs, but now I will still try new beers when they come out, but no longer look to WCIPA as a go to IPA (also much harder to find now). This isn’t a surprise.
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I used to love Green Flash and Alpine. (I still might, if I drank at the source)
As mentioned, by the time their product gets to the shelves of the Midwest (Michigan in my case), I think it is often an inferior product compared to the fresh/local options available.
The initial excitement or “honeymoon” phase seemingly ended quickly with their expansion into Michigan. All the offerings were old when they got here, and only rotted further as they sat. Kind of a bummer.
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It’s worse.
Green Flash Brewing puts Va. Beach brewery up for sale
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I wish they brought more Alpine here.
Should be in Industry News
They left Wyoming quite a while ago and I’m glad after drinking that horrible reformulated WCIPA.
My wife brought up an interesting point: why is it that Mikkeller is expanding and successfully opening up new locations all the time, but these old American stalwarts are expanding too quickly and petering out. Is the difference the quality, the number of new beers produced, as opposed to flagships, or just a different business strategy, with Mikkeller’s focusing more on draft and others focusing more on bottles at supermarkets.
I’ll have to add the I am flummoxed by Mikkeller. Not sure who buys their products in stores due to price and dusty bottles. But I understand that their bars are considered fun and maybe that is where they make their money.
Yep - it does seem that Mikkeller and Brewdog are powering ahead, opening new breweries and bars both abroad and in their domestic markets. Just this weekend you have Mikkeller opening up the NYC brewery/(60 tap brewpub) Mikkeller Brewing NYC Comes to Citi Field - VUE magazine and news of Brewdog “joining up” with a well known group of London public houses https://www.brewdog.com/lowdown/blog/brewdog-and-draft-house With some breweries retreating/shrinking down always seems to create opportunities for others.
Yes, I happened to, perhaps stupidly, attend the Mikkeller NYC opening, and it was a madhouse. I almost never stand in beer lines, modern US hypebeast style, but found myself waiting an hour before I got in and then another thirty minutes before I got beer. In either case, it is a world class beer eatablishment.
Mikkeller vs Green Flash, do you really have to ask? It’s all marketing. Who has the nicer labels? Who has the crazier beers? Who has the “fun” bars, and provocative beer names, and geek chic ownership? No one gives a shit what the beer tastes like, no one gives a shit what it costs, all anyone cares about is slurping their ironically named neon yellow fruit beer while having sweet nothings whispered in their ear by a Danish playboy. Craft beer is fucked and we are responsible. We let this happen. We ignored all of the well brewed classic styles at beer fests in favor of the next flavor barf adjunct nightmare, we bought $20 750s of garbage juice for another tick instead of a $12 6-pack of something actually good, we went to overpriced Mikkeller bars instead of our local watering holes to drink “imported” aceto-bombs and 17% diabetes-inducing smores stouts rather than drinking locally or even regionally. Everyone likes to pretend like they care about drinking local but all anyone really cares about is who has the coolest marketing campaign. Brewers like Green Flash, with their ugly labels and their boring names and their limited portfolio and their lack of celebrity are fucked. Soon there will only be four kinds of breweries left: true locals; micro-monsters that stay on top or ahead of trends (Other Half, Trillium); marketing-first regional breweries with huge investment (Mikkeller, Stillwater); and macros. Everyone else is being squeezed out.
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So the Untappd brewery average score for Mikkeller is 3.78 and for Green Flash 3.79. So I don’t really see that Mikkeller is considered the cream of the crop or very hyped brewery (certainly not in Europe).
If I still had an applause emoji from the old forums to give you,d get one for this. 
I’d say it’s simply the IPA question. A lot of Green Flash’s fame comes from good IPAs. Those don’t hold with national distribution and can’t compete with the increasingly localized IPA factories like Trillium, Tree House, Ocelot, Veil, Aslin, Tired Hands, Other Half etc on the east coast. No matter where you are from Virginia up, you’d be able to get a hold of some of those. In Va. beach where the facility closed down, you can get Commonwealth for example - fresher, hoppier IPAs than Green Flash.
Why Mikkeller is successful is they don’t focus on IPAs. If their massive stouts sit on a shelf for a while, they will probably end up better for it.
The Mikkeller brewery tasting room in San Diego is like 2/3 IPAs, and probably 90% of their 1-off releases are IPAs.
Well, probably just me then. I should have said “i don’t take their IPAs seriously.”
