Beer Wars

Beer Wars is a documentary on the beer industry that looks at the small craft brewer and their hurtles against the big macros breweries. A big focus is the three tier distribution system for alcohol.  The three tier system was put in place after prohibition to protect the consumer from the evil alcohol producers. Now it is mostly controlled by Budweiser and MillerCoors so small craft brewers have a hard time getting their product to the market regardless of demand. 

The movie was created by Anat Baron who helped put out Mike’s Hard Lemonade.  She claimed to be in the beer industry which makes her craft beer audience cringe.  It was an interesting look at the industry from the point of view of the small brewer.  Sam from Dogfish Head and Greg from Stone were featured.  I found the huge size of the beer lobby which represents the distributers and the big two beer companies interesting.  There is more money in beer lobbying than guns and cigarettes combined. 

The cool thing about the movie was the live satellite feeds before and after. Before the movie there was a live feed of Anat who gave a brief introduction. Then we watched the movie. And afterwards she had a live feed of Ben Stein moderating a small panel of industry folks who were in the movie. The panel included Greg and Sam, a guy from the Brewers Association, a former partner of Jim Koch’s who created a caffeinated beer, a guy from BeerAdvocate.com, and some other industry “expert”. Ben asked questions and tried to get a discussion going. An interesting moment was when they showed an outtake from the movie where the BeerAdvocate guy said the caffeinated beer was crap. After the clip they went back to the panel with both the BeerAdvocate guy and the woman who created the caffeinated beer sharing an awkward moment live in front of a large audience.

It was an interesting view in to the industry. It would be good for someone not familiar with the craft beer movement or the three tier distribution system. The size of the macro beer lobby is what I learned the most about. The coolest part of the movie was the live aspect. They should do that for all documentaries and other movie events.