Only the strong survive in beer natural selection

If beer has a good buzz, retailers take notice.

And if you’re a brewer in the hyper-competitive craft beer market, you’d better hope they do so. Otherwise your product might not end up on display. There is, after all, only so much space to go around in grocery and liquor stores.

That’s probably an obvious point. Yet it’s one that’s flown largely under the radar. More craft beer availability is great for us enthusiasts. But there are only so many shelves for all those bottles and cans.

“It becomes an issue,” City Wide Liquors vice president Errol Rousseve says. “We have the same shelf space we’ve always had. We’re trying to make room. There’s just a lot more product now that we’re trying to fit into our displays.”

Honestly, this is an issue I hadn’t thought much about until a summertime visit to Transient Artisan Ales. As I chatted with owner and head brewer Chris Betts, we came to the subject of craft brewery proliferation and the recent closure of Berrien Springs-based Cultivate Brewing Co.

My question to Betts was simple: Do you think there are too many breweries and some will fall by the wayside?

His answer, paraphrased, was more nuanced than I expected. He said the area still has room for growth from a brewpub perspective. But where breweries might get into trouble is in distribution, where a growing supply of craft beer competes for limited shelf space.

Betts said he’d rather bottle and can his product and then sell it from the taproom, driving business to his space and bringing people into downtown Bridgman.

He’s not alone in that regard. South Bend Brew Werks has never bottled or canned. That might change, but it’ll only be for people to walk out with a six pack.

“It won’t be for distribution,” head brewer and co-operator Steve Lowe says. “I’ve already made that decision. We’re too small of a place … I want people to come into our establishment.”

Others, of course, use distribution as a means for growth.

Round Barn, the well-known winemakers in southwest Michigan, got into the beer business in 2007. Its beer is now available at stores in the area. Matt Moersch, whose family owns Round Barn, says they found the landscape competitive as they looked to distribute regionally, especially when it came to the bigger retailers.

“It’s definitely a premium for sure,” Moersch says. “That’s been a challenge for a regional brand to break into larger, A-level, Meijer-type (stores). They’re actually reacting now and carving out areas, making it a little easier on us to get our product in front of people.”

Bare Hands Brewery started in 2011 with a small Granger taproom. Its beer is now widely available at stores locally, oftentimes on prominent display. Marketing and events coordinator Eric Foust says Bare Hands has expanded into Indianapolis and is pushing toward Bloomington and then Columbus, Ind.

As of now, Bare Hands handles its own distribution. Foust actually envisions a holding pattern on that front next year when the brewery opens its new location in downtown South Bend despite the increased production capacity it’ll bring.

“Serving our local community is the first and top priority,” he says. “Opening the South Bend taproom, we might actually see a potential reduction in the amount of distribution we’ll be able to do because we’ll probably have an influx of sales that go out of our facility. That’s really what we want to focus on.”

Upstarts such as Bare Hands can put a strain on retailers. It’s not just liquor stores such as City Wide and Belmont Beverage. Grocers feel it, too.

Martin’s Super Markets dedicates extensive space to craft beer. Todd Szucs, manager at the store on Sanford School Road in Elkhart, near Simonton Lake, is constantly evaluating his stock.

Szucs has been at nine different Martin’s stores over the last 23 years and says the competition for shelf space has never been greater. One of the first things Szucs did after moving to this location in February was to double the amount of room for beer. And it’s still tight.

Forums such as Ratebeer.com and social media help guide Szucs toward decisions on what to add. Sales data helps guide what to subtract. Rousseve says City Wide staffers will taste test, plus monitor sites such as BeerAdvocate.com for ideas on new options.

Only the strong survive in this case of beer natural selection.

“It’s pretty volatile,” Szucs says. “From month to month, it really changes. Definitely, we stay in tune with our slow movers on the shelf and do a lot of scan data to see who doesn’t deserve the shelf space, so to speak, to weed out some of the slow movers. Then we’ll try some new things that are hot and up-and-coming that we don’t carry.”