"Takeovers" - a considered view

You sound as if you couldn’t even be bothered to work out who Zywiec is owned by. Clue - it’s Heineken - kinda relevant to the recent Beavertown takeover. And we got loads of ticks from international and local craft breweries at their festival (heck, I even got some Carlsberg-family beers). If there’s a meaningful craft beer community then, as they promote craft beer, Heineken must be part of it.

LIfe certainly becomes more complex each day.

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Hey man, I couldn’t even figure out if Zywiec had a festival. Additionally, the owner of Zywiec at this point is least important since Zywiec is an old brewery as opposed to one that represents the difficult to define “craft” moniker. I think you are missing the bigger point, you put down someone’s post without providing counter evidence that can be clearly understood by someone on this site.

Macros attempting to infiltrate the craft community is more indicative that there is indeed a community. Communities evolve and not ever brewer is necessarily part of the community. Things do become sticky when business is a part of the community.

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I would rather think that the ‘beer community’ is more profit oriented than the music community. If there are communities of cheese mongers, or small batch whisky producers, they would be more comparable.

image

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Thought this was a very corporate beer festival map at first hah.

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Where is the info graphic of all the other breweries that are not owned by corporations or investment companies?

Aside from the Duvel Moortgat, I rarely support any of the other breweries and don’t consider them part of the community.

I’m not sure I’m sold on the article writer’s premise, but there might be some truth to it at a micro-level (as some people already discussed above).

Strictly speaking about the “community” though, there’s plenty of people in my area who only care about a handful of breweries, and they are outright hostile to most of the craft breweries in the area. If they aren’t pumping out trade-bait or hazebombs, they are “garbage” and “may as well shut down.” I’m not exagerating, these are exact words I’ve seen people say. The toxic hostility from the most vocal of them is what gets me more than anything else.

The great thing about most of the people I’ve met through RateBeer is that they aren’t like the typical online reviewer (a la Yelp), where they believe that a critique isn’t good without being nasty. Bad beer gets bad reviews, and average beer gets reviewed average without the reviewer being a prick.

Of course on the flip side, I imagine that most people buying craft beer are people picking up a random 6-pack of craft beer at a grocery store, don’t give who owns the brewery a single thought. The “community” is so vast that it is really meaningless in the sense that the “community” as a whole won’t turn on a single brewery that “sells out.”

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There are so many of those that … the mind boggles as to the effort involved.

Here’s an updated chart

Source:
https://www.themadfermentationist.com/2018/07/craft-beer-connections-brewery.html

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Wow, I never knew Trappist owned so many breweries - they seem to have cornered that part of the market quite well.

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I already updated the majority of them…However, if you can find the +108 Others for ABInbev, +14 Carslberg and +32/+9 MolsonCoors/MillerCoors, it would be great :stuck_out_tongue:

Authentic Trappist Product is really a company owning all the Trappists or simply a Marketing Trademark that must be paid and can only be obtained under specific conditions?

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“The best known Trappist products are the Trappist® beers. Thirteen abbeys which are members of the International Trappist Association brew and sell their own beer. The breweries are all equipped with high-quality brewing installations which guarantee the quality of Trappist® beer.”

https://www.trappist.be/en/products/beers/

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Yeah but belonging to an Association doesn’t mean that this Association owns them…it just mean they pay the rights to put the Trappist label on their beers…

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Not correct. At a stretch the “owner” of Trappist beers is the Catholic church. A better way to express it is that each monastery is its own owner.

" Trappist beers are a special category of beers. They carry the label of “Authentic Trappist Beer”. This means that the beer is brewed within the walls of a Trappist monastery under the control and responsibility of the community of monks, whose revenue is devoted to social service.

International Trappist Association
The “Authentic Trappist Product" logo is granted by the International Trappist Association. It guarantees consumers the Trappist origin of the products according to well-established principles:

  1. Belgian Trappist beers are manufactured on-site or in close proximity to the monastery.
  2. The monastic community is engaged in management and all aspects of the means necessary for their operation. This must clearly reflect both the unquestionably subordinate relationship with the beneficiary monastery and the relationship with the culture of the enterprise itself in the plan of monastic life.
  3. The income provides for the major portion of the necessities of the community and for social services.

The International Trappist Association brings together the monasteries of the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance (“Trappists”) who commercialize their products."

Again, they just earn and/or pay the rights to use the Trappist Beer mention, each brewery isn’t owned by them.
Just for example, Koningshoeven lost the right to use the Trappist mention for some time…


As a result of this agreement, a dispute arose with the *[International Trappist Association], the body that governs the labelling of goods as Trappist. They claimed that this new method of operation was against the regulations that permitted the beer to display the Authentic Trappist Product logo. Whilst the beer continued to be brewed within the abbey walls, the arrangement with Bavaria was felt to be too commercialised. As a result, the brewery withdrew their use of the logo on 1 December 1999. However, the brewery continued to label the beer as Trappistenbier .
After a lengthy study by all parties, and a review of the agreement between the abbey and brewery, the beers were granted the right to display the logo again as of September 9, 2005. As part of this settlement, the monks have taken a more active control of the brewery day-to-day operations, working several hours each day.

Check the similarities here:

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Bingo!

Even though Trappist breweries have to adhere to rules to use the label, they still have the right to decide and do otherwise, losing their membership. Much the same as the several craft beer associations.

Quote: “Considered in this perspective, the brewery provides us with a parable for our monastic life, with the Lord as virtuoso brewmaster.”

They said he is the Brewmaster, not the Owner… :stuck_out_tongue: