Tapping the West by Scott Messenger
Author:Scott Messenger
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781771513210
Publisher: Touchwood Editions
Local Motion
The post-2013 brewing scene has been animated by many things, such as the energy and drive of younger entrepreneurs like those at Dandy and Bent Stick. But another thing these brewers are demonstrating and using to their advantage is a love of all things local. In a way, this phenomenon, particularly among such a considerable swath of beer consumers, is nearly miraculous. That’s because of another act of disruptive deregulation that happened more than a quarter-century ago.
Beer lovers of a certain age in Alberta, and those of wine and spirits, likely remember 1993 as a very good year. That September, the Government of Alberta, led by the late Premier Ralph Klein, announced that it was exiting the liquor retailing business. The motivation was money. The government would save $67 million a year if it divested itself of its 208 stores, which employed 1,500 people. They could find jobs in the privately run shops that would take over, Steve West, minister responsible for the Alberta Liquor Control Board at the time, assured Albertans. Some of those employees would even be given the option to buy the shops. Six months later, the province’s last government-run liquor store shut its doors forever.
Today, those government stores have been replaced with roughly fifteen hundred privately owned stores. More important to note, though, is the difference in what those stores now contain. Before privatization, 2,200 products were available to Alberta consumers. There are now more than 26,000.
For Alberta brewers today, that statistic is good and bad. To the bad, their products compete with the best that retailers can get their hands on, from all over the world. A locally made pilsner, for instance, takes on the famous and delicious Czech lager, Pilsner Urquell, which dates to 1842. Beer critic Michael Jackson considered it one of the world’s best representatives of the style.
Privatization also introduced another complicating factor for the newly established Alberta brewer: sheer quantity. If a brewer, for example, made its debut with a single beer packaged for retail sale, that beer becomes but a drop in a sea of the stuff. Currently, there are approximately five thousand beer products available to Albertans. Should that new brewer not have sufficient marketing power to give that beer a voice, which is likely the case, it sits on liquor store shelves waiting for the consumer to grow tired of predictably excellent European lagers or, for that matter, cheaper but familiar ones. No store stocks every beer product, of course, but that single Alberta-made beer nevertheless stands a one-in-dozens chance of being picked. Those odds would have been much more in a local brewer’s favour before September 1993 (though there weren’t many local brewers).
Seeing the good side of privatization requires only a slight shift of the prism to shed a different light on the nature of the consumer. The rapid ramping up of selection that accompanied privatization had an educational effect, in that it enabled the rise of the beer geek. In that way, it prepared the
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