Just how effective is the pull-out method? Not very, apparently. This last week, waves were rippling in the craft beer community when it became public knowledge that AB InBev bought a minority stake in RateBeer.com. The collective raising-of-the-eyebrows commenced with many indie beer people wondering what area of craft beer will AB InBev not buy into or buy out?
Why does this sale of shares matter? RateBeer is one if the biggest beer rating and review sharing sites out there along with BeerAdvocate.com. Thousands of people use it every day to rate, discuss and categorize their favorite beers with the underlying assumption that it’s a user-driven database with no special interests. With AB InBev hopping into business with RateBeer (through their investment arm, ZX Ventures, whose Instagram account features Goose Island almost exclusively when it features a beer brand), this assumption of non-bias is put into question. The situation becomes even murkier when you take into account that the partnership actually was official back in October but Ratebeer and ZX Ventures decided to keep it under wraps because “the two sides wanted to get ‘points on the board’ to prove the value of the partnership without the ‘disruption’ of making it public.” According to Good Beer Hunting, which broke the story.
Craft brewers and fans across social media were not happy with this belated news. Dogfish Head Brewing posted their intention to formally request their information be taken down from Ratebeer’s database and other breweries like Mother Earth, Karl Strauss, Harpoon, Six Point Brewery and Noble Ale Works followed. We also sent an email to show our solidarity with the rest of the indie beer community as well as the desire to not have AB InBev profit from any part of our business. So does asking to pull out brewery info matter? Nope. The response that we got from site admin and owner, Joe Tucker, was the same one that everyone who requested received.
That means there will be no pulling out of RateBeer (much like you can’t have Yelp reviews taken down about your business). Noble Ale Works took a different route and posted this picture where they changed all of their info in RateBeer to pure ridiculousness in protest of the investment, along with this caption:
“Current Status: Changing all of our info on RateBeer to nonsense and all of our beer descriptions to Rick Astley lyrics.
#YouKnowTheRulesAndSoDoI“
This made the people over at RateBeer very unhappy and they responded to Noble Ale Works’ Brand Manager, Vito Trautz, with this message:
All the drama has people wondering, what’s the point? Can AB InBev even influence the data if they wanted to? The answer is, not likely, due to complex algorithms used by RateBeer and the nature of user-driven content. But that doesn’t mean their intentions are pure. In fact, Urbain Coutteau, one of the owners of the Belgium-based brewery, De Struise Brouwers, brought up a different idea. He urged breweries and reviewers to keep using RateBeer because he believes that their intentions might be to kill-off RateBeer:
So what’s a brewery to do? Educate. The RateBeer drama is over and done with for the moment. What needs to be done, is for breweries to continue to educate craft beer consumers on the difference between true craft beer (indie beer) and faux craft breweries owned by AB InBev and other Big Beer and let them make their own decisions as to how they want to spend their money and who they want their dollars to benefit. In the spirit of shining a light on just how entrenched AB InBev is in the craft beer community, here is a list of all the beer businesses that we know they are involved in.
AB InBev Owns:
Craft Breweries
Goose Island Brewery
Golden Road
Elysian Brewing Co.
Devil’s Backbone Brewing Co.
Karbach Brewing Co.
Four Peaks
10 Barrel Brewing
Breckenridge Brewery
Wicked Weed
Blue Point Brewing
Home Brew Suppliers
Northern Brewer (they push Goose Island, Elysian and Golden Road brew kits)
Midwest Supplies
Beer Websites
RateBeer.com (minority investment)
Beerneccessities.com (beer blog)
October (beer blog)
Distributors/Wholesalers
Unknown
This last category of distributors is the most concerning. When researching to find out how many wholesalers AB InBev owns, I came up short. You can find wholesalers on their website and a ton of these lead back to the AB InBev website. It’s unclear if that means they own the distributors or the distributors are just aligned with them. For instance, Western Beverage distributes all over Oregon, and when you go to their website, you are redirected to AB InBev’s official wholesaler site. I haven’t had the time to slog through all of the distributors on the map to see how many of their websites redirect back to AB InBev and I’m unclear on what that redirect means. Why is it so hard to find out how many wholesalers AB InBev owns? We will keep you updated, and if you have anything to add to this list, please comment and I will get it added.