The substance resembles powdered sugar and could revolutionise the way chemicals are used.

Makes me think of this bubble-tea-inspired gin and tonic drink from Grant Achatz and Craig Schoettler:

Beer Me

Craft brewing has been around for decades, but the movement is just now starting to get hip to the blog scene.  A number of breweries, including Chicago’s Revolution and Colorado’s New Belgium, have their own blogs.  They have great content, but they’re updated so infrequently, it’s difficult to keep track of them.  It’s tough to regularly visit a website if it’s only updated once a week.  Just like Digg’s tech content, beer content is spread pretty thin.

Home Brew Crew

At the same time, there are more and more people making their own beer at home.  They’re passionate about beer and they like learning from and reading about what the big micro breweries are doing.  They’re perfect consumers for beer blog content, but the content is spread so thin it’s difficult to distribute to every reader.  Joe Brewer isn’t going to load 8 beer blogs every day searching for an update, so he’s going to miss out on a lot of content he’d likely be interested in.  He needs a single site.  Or he needs …

My Google Reader Prototype

I subscribed to a bunch of RSS feeds this afternoon to see how it would look if I united all of this content on a Pligg social site.  I liked it — posts from Three Floyds, Dogfish Head, New Belgium — it was a great mix.  But it was missing something.  I needed a more consistent source of content — something that updated daily — to keep the site fresh.  I found it at CraftBeer.com — a great beer site.  Now it looked like it could work.

Como Te Llamas?

Now I just needed a domain, I figured.  But not only did I not want to wait the few days to get that in order (IF I could settle on a name), I wanted to test the concept without spending anything.  So I settled for a subdomain — beer.bartannica.com.  It’s live now after an hour or so of fiddling.  It’s not real pretty, but Google Bot shouldn’t care.  I’ll let you know what happens.  Cheers!

photo credit: mfajardo

photo credit: hotcactuspepper

The Start Of The Microbrewery Revolution

The beer shake-up started around the 70s, when consumers started to revolt against the macrobreweries (Budweiser, Miller, Coors).  These companies produced, and continue to produce, very inoffensive and inexpensive beer. And as the big boys grew, they bought and consolidated their competitors, centralizing production, cutting costs, and providing the catalyst for revolt.  They followed the success of Coke and Pepsi — consolidation and uniformity were their selling points.

For many, there were few or no alternatives.  However, globalization and tourism increased the exposure of alternative beers.  “Why can’t I drink beer like the beer in Belgium?” consumers asked.  Grumblings began.  And technology stepped in to solve the problem — home-brew kits. Consumers, not driven by cost concerns, started to make their own beer.

The Growth Of The Market

Successful home-brewers started to expand.  Their friends liked their beer.  Their friends’ friends liked their beer.  “Could they start to sell this beer?” they wondered, and they gave it a try.  If you look at the big names in microbrewing — including Sprecher, Goose Island, Brooklyn — they all started around the same time.  The incubation of this idea happened across the country.

Fast forward a few decades and I can get Brooklyn Brewery beer in Chicago.  I can buy Colorado’s Fat Tire Amber Ale at the corner store.  And new guys keep entering the market — in Chicago we have Metropolitan Brewery along with Half Acre now challenging the incumbent micro, Goose Island.

The Macros Respond

The growth in this consumer-driven market is where the action is and the big boys want a piece too.  Budweiser released American Ale a few years ago to directly compete with microbrewery ales.  In addition to new products, the macros are reintroducing long-dead names like Schlitz and Stroh.  They’re making every attempt to appear de-centralized and non-homogenized.  They’re flooding the market with brands, because the future is no longer a single beer — it’s a beer for every palate and region.  It’s the wine model, not the cola model.

What Can The Media Industry Learn?

The media industry is going through a similar revolution.  The future was once a single, centralized news source, but that’s no longer the case.  Technology stepped in and unhappy consumers have mucked everything up.  Like a home-brewer making his own stout instead of buying Guinness, anybody with $100 and a free weekend can become a media entity on the internet.  The established companies don’t know how to respond.

One response is restricting content (tablets, apps, fee-based consuption) — and it’s a ridiculous idea as soon as you translate it into the beer equivalent — the Budweiser store experience, the only place you can enjoy the cool, crisp flavor of Bud Light, complete with specially-designed chairs and TVs to enhance the user experience.

Another response is to allow customization — tailor the CNN experience to fit YOU, send us your recipe and we’ll make your beer.  But in a sea of infinite choices, my ideal news and beer flavor already exists (and I probably don’t even know what I like).  The extreme example of this approach is to build a site entirely on the contributions of your readers — the Digg model.  Have something we should read?  Share it with the site’s community.  But social sites like Facebook and Twitter have taken the need for ‘community’ out of the equation.  I don’t need validation from faceless Digg readers; I can get that from my friends on Facebook.

The most promising is to de-centralize, or at least appear to de-centralize, so that you can more directly compete with your challengers — like the release of American Ale.  This seems to be the way to go.  AOL’s Engadget competes with both the NYT tech section and sites like BoyGeniusReport and Gizmodo.  Nobody is directly challenging a big player — there’s no New New York Times — the challengers are going after the weak points.  The Huffington Post is a great example: Your news not liberal enough?  Get it here.  Not conservative enough?  Try Fox.

So that’s my pick on the future — the wine model — a flavor for every palate.