But a good distributor is more than a trucking company. It’s a partner who helps the client brewery move beer by setting up displays, organizing special events like beer dinners and tap takeovers, removing cobwebby, past-its-peak beer from store shelves, and educating retailers on what makes a beer worth buying.
When New Belgium Brewing Co. in Fort Collins, CO, decided to move into the Mid-Atlantic region, it interviewed 40 different distributors before cobbling together a network of 17 wholesalers to serve its new Maryland, Virginia and Washington, DC, markets. Montgomery County in Maryland presented a major roadblock to complete coverage. This is probably the only locality in the nation where the county government is the sole licensed wholesaler of alcoholic beverages. With a monopoly comes an attendant lack of service. Montgomery offered to warehouse and deliver beer, but wouldn’t agree to any other services, and wouldn’t even promise to keep packaged beer refrigerated at all times. According to New Belgium’s Mid-Atlantic regional director Neil Reeve, the brewery struck a deal with a neighboring distributor (Premium in Frederick, MD) to store extra beer at the proper temperature and truck it to the Montgomery County warehouses on an as-needed basis. Premium also agreed to keep an eye on the beer once it reached the marketplace. Adding another tier, in effect, to the existing three will make it more expensive to deliver beer, but New Belgium refuses to compromise on freshness issues.
A distributor also works with a brewery’s sales reps to allocate liquid. How do you allot limited seasonals and one-off beers? “A lot of arm-wrestling goes on,” says Joe Whitney, Sierra Nevada’s director of sales and marketing. “All the sales managers make an argument as to why their market deserves the lion’s share.” As a rule of thumb, if Sierra Nevada sells 10 percent of its year-around brands in a certain area, that area will get 10 percent of a special release like Hoptimum (an imperial IPA spiced with experimental hop varieties) or the brewery’s Ovila series of abbey-style beers. Sierra Nevada will occasionally make exceptions. For instance, San Francisco got a disproportionate share of Fritz and Ken’s Ale, an imperial stout that former Anchor Brewing owner Fritz Maytag collaborated on.
Occasionally, a distributor will place beer in a venue that a brewery rep might have overlooked. Brad Phillips, Mid-Atlantic rep for Sierra Nevada, recalls getting flak from some retailers who felt shortchanged when beers like Hoptimum started popping up in a 7-11 in Arlington, VA. But that 7-11 is situated in an affluent, rapidly growing area and is able to move higher-end brands.
