Blog Entries Tagged as beverage

Let the Games Begin: BevStar 2013 Call for Entries

Category: General Blogs  |  Tags: beverage

With the dawn of a new year comes a new chance for your brand to shine. Whether you're playing in the alcohol or non-alcohol space (or both even), you are cordially invited to submit your product to our third-annual BevStar Awards competition. It's our annual celebration of innovation across all of the major beverage categories. And the best part? It's absolutely free to enter, aside from whatever shipping costs you need to incur to get a sample of your product to our judging team.

Since this is about innovation, we ask that your product be new(ish). That means it should have been launched no earlier than Sept. 2011. If it hasn't been launched yet, that's fine. As long as you've got a product, a package and a plan to roll it out before summer 2013, it's eligible. (The product has to exist. Ideation is great, but execution is critical.)

Once again, we'll be awarding gold, silver and bronze awards in the following categories:

• Carbonated Soft Drinks

• Water/Enhanced Water

• Functional Beverages (including sports drinks, but not including energy drinks—those get their own category. We got a ton of energy entries last year.)

• Energy Drinks

• Beer

• Mead, Cider and Sake

• Wine

• Spirits

• Ready-to-Drink Tea & Coffee

We'll also present special achievement awards for marketing innovation, social media initiatives and environmental sustainability.

To enter, please e-mail the following to bevstar@beverageworld.com :

1. Product Name

2. Parent Company Name

3. Contact Info (address, phone & e-mail)

4. High-resolution product image

5. A brief description of the product and why you believe it should win a BevStar award.

6. The names of any packaging, label design, ingredient and branding companies or individuals that helped develop or market your product.

If your product passes the written test, we'll send you instructions on where to ship product samples for the practical test. We ask that you limit the samples to one bottle/can/carton/etc. per product entered.

Keep in mind, tasting is only one component of our selection process. Your product has to offer the whole package, which includes, well, the package and its overall market positioning.

The submission deadline is March 1. Winners will be notified by June 1 and we'll showcase winning products in the July 2013 issue of Beverage World.

If you've got any questions you can e-mail me directly.

We're looking forward to your entries!

’Tis the Season

Category: General Blogs  |  Tags: beverage

Christmas seems to come earlier and earlier each year. Retail windows decorated in snowy wonderlands, Christmas tunes filling department stores and seasonal beverages appearing on restaurant and bar menus.
I always know the official Christmas season has begun when Starbucks switches over from its iconic white cups with green emblem to its red holiday cups; this year the coffee house chose snowmen, carolers and a fox in wintery scenes to welcome the holiday season.

I’m not the only one who looks forward to this changeover. A quick Google search reveals there is a website dedicated to counting down the days until the red cups return and millions of search results return for the words “Starbucks holiday cups.”

But the seasonal return of these fun and festive cups also seemed to come a bit earlier this year. It was early November when I walked into a Starbucks outside of the South Kensington tube station in London craving a Pumpkin Spice Latte only to find a menu of Christmas-themed coffees—Eggnog Latte, Gingerbread Latte, Toffee Nut Latte and Praline Mocha.

“Are you making Pumpkin Spice Lattes still?” I asked with my fingers crossed that they could still make the fall drink.

“No,” the barista replied. “I’m sorry.” So, I opted for the Praline Mocha, new for this Christmas. It’s warm bittersweet chocolate infused with the flavor of hazelnut combined with espresso and steamed milk topped with whipped cream and a drizzle of mocha sauce.

Even though I was disappointed that fall was over and winter had begun—at Starbucks, anyway—I found myself switching gears and getting into the holiday spirit, making a mental Christmas list, getting excited about upcoming holiday parties and enjoying my tall Praline Mocha, no whip.

On the alcohol side, breweries continue their seasonal offerings moving into darker beers, bourbon barrel aged ales, beers with higher alcohol. Anheuser-Busch Winter’s Bourbon Cask Ale, Freemont Brewing’s Bourbon Barrel Abominable and Widmer Brothers Brrr Seasonal Ale are just among a few of the many beers crafted to warm us up during the winter months.

At a recent Bacardi holiday event, the brand showcased how to spice up the holiday season with drinks other than traditional eggnog. Take the Coquito for example. A traditional holiday drink of Puerto Rico, the Coquito is made with half a bottle of Bacardi Superior, one can of evaporated milk, one can of condensed milk, two cans of cream of coconut and two teaspoons of cinnamon. Slowly blend the evaporated milk, condensed milk and the cream and coconut. Then add the cinnamon and slowly add Bacardi Superior until everything is incorporated.

Brand ambassador David Cid took us through a selection of five other cocktails at NY’s Abe & Arthur’s—The Bacardi Cocktail, The Selleck, Airmail, Bacardi Holiday Punch and La Noche. Bacardi Holiday Punch, for instance, consists of 750 ml of Bacardi Superior or Bacardi Gold rum, 2 liters of ginger ale chilled, 8 ounces of orange juice, one ounce of lime juice and one and one-half ounce of lemon juice.

Now that the holidays have officially arrived, take your drink menus to the next level and introduce your guests to some new flavors. Happy holidays.

The Teacher Has Become the Student

Category: General Blogs  |  Tags: beverage

My wife and I just went on what was quite possibly the best brewery tour we'd ever been on (and believe me, we've been on a lot of them). It was at London's Meantime Brewing Company, a 13-year-old craft operation that takes its name from the fact that it's situated in the chronological capital of the world, Greenwich.

When tour leader Alex (a quite dynamic guide) learned we were from the States he couldn't stop gushing about the U.S. craft beer scene and how the U.K. is about 15 years behind the American movement. Wait a minute. BEHIND? A great deal of American craft brewers took a cue from classic styles from Britain (as well as, of course, Belgium, Germany and the Czech Republic) when developing their own products. Beer travelers from the U.S. trek across the pond to drink cask-conditioned Real Ale. And a lot of the U.S. craft brewers offer cask versions of their own products, again a nod to the classic British tradition.

But now there are breweries like Meantime whose offerings are heavily influenced by the styles popularized by American craft brewers—those same styles whose ancestors were European and tweaked and reinvented over time. American pale ale is of course a descendant of English pale ale. The same goes, of course for American IPAs, which evolved from British India Pale Ales, which were more aggressively hopped and had a higher ABV to preserve them for the 18,000-mile pre-canal-era voyage from England to thirsty colonial troops in India.

The walls of Meantime's tasting room were filled with bottles from around the world with a disproportionately large section devoted to U.S. craft brews. Others visiting the brewery were eager to tell us how much they loved beers from the likes Brooklyn Brewery or Stone.

And it's not just the U.K. The brewing boomerang has flown back to Belgium as well, with U.S.-influenced styles like Belgian IPA emerging.

It's hard to believe that not too long ago Europeans considered American beers a total joke. But who's laughing now?

Fighting Words

Category: General Blogs  |  Tags: beverage

It’s time to tone down the language a bit. No, I’m not suggesting everyone’s got to keep their daily discourse airplane-friendly by filtering out expletives. I’ve been known to use a colorful metaphor or three from time to time (just ask anyone who works with me). What I’m proposing is that we take the inter-category smack-talk down a notch.

Last month at the National Beer Wholesalers Association’s 75th annual convention in San Diego, the usual hand-wringing over wine and spirits grabbing more and more of beer’s alcohol market share took place, but it seems like the verbiage being used in such discussions has been amped up quite a bit (and I’ve gone to every one of these conventions in the past decade, so I’ve got a pretty good personal history to draw upon). 

It was one of many topics of conversation on the panel of beer executives including Bill Hackett of Crown Imports, Luiz Edmond of Anheuser-Busch, Tom Long of MillerCoors, Dolf van den Brink of Heineken USA and, from the craft realm, Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head. 

During the course of the panel, I heard terms like “threats” and “adversaries,” being used to describe the wine and spirits categories. Pledges to “kick” wine and spirits’ “rear”—and less euphemistic terms—were hurled around. 

I get it, it’s a very competitive market place and competition is what makes the beverage and any other market great. But what’s being lost in all of the posturing and machismo is that fact that consumers, by and large really don’t care. There are actually very few drinkers of alcohol beverages that only drink from one category. Most are cross drinkers. I myself am a cross drinker. I’ve made no secret of my partisanship toward craft beer, but I do enjoy drinking a good glass of Cabernet, a single malt Scotch or a straight bourbon pretty frequently. I’ve taken personal trips to beer-centric areas like Belgium and Asheville, N.C. But I’ve also spent multiple vacation days in Napa. And I recently figured out how to make a pretty good mint julep (if I do say so myself), which has found a spot on my growing list of go-to drinks. 

The cross-category lines have blurred in distribution as well. Beer distributors increasingly have taken on products beyond their core segment, including wine and spirits. Look at a major wine and spirits distributor like Wirtz, which does some pretty healthy beer volume. 

In my cover story on the craft distilling movement, I talk to Rick Steckler of Click Wholesale, which has made a name for itself distributing beer and wine. With the privatization of spirits sales in the state of Washington, the company saw an opportunity to use its existing distribution infrastructure to excel in the spirits segment as well. 

I hardly think companies like Click or Wirtz are pitting one segment against another with such hostile rhetoric.

The mission of the Beer Institute has been to build “Brand Beer”—as well it should be because that’s within the organization’s purview. However, as an editor of a magazine that serves all drinks categories and as a consumer who drinks a little bit of everything I’m becoming an advocate for something more radical: Brand Beverage.  

Bringing Home the Beverage-Making Experience

Category: General Blogs  |  Tags: beverage

Several months ago, during a visit to the home of one of my brothers here in New York City, he and his wife proudly introduced me to their newest gadget: a SodaStream.

I’m sure most of you reading this are probably familiar with SodaStream, the home soda making device. It has been around for many years—mainly in Europe—and recently made some big inroads into the U.S. market. The company generated a lot of attention when it went public on the Nasdaq in 2010. Betweeen 2007 and 2011, according to a recent article in Forbes, its U.S. sales jumped from $4.4 million to $85 million. 

The device comes in something like seven versions, with the price ranging from $80 and $200.

When I first heard about Soda Stream, my initial reaction could best be described as interested on a personal level, and at the same time, putting on my Beverage World editor hat, a bit wary. What would this mean for the beverage companies I write about all the time? If consumers are able to bottle their own soft drinks at home, well, then, where does that leave the bottlers? Yes, SodaStream only has about 0.7 percent of the CSD market, according to the Forbes article. But there are plenty of examples in history of simple inventions that upended entire industries.

So, what happened during a more recent visit to my brother’s home in October was a bit surprising to me. There, in the corner of their kitchen counter continued to sit the SodaStream. Only this time, when the subject came up in conversation, gone was the unbridled enthusiasm they had regaled my ears with months before. Instead, clearly expressing shopper’s remorse, they both explained to me they had fallen out of love with their soda-making device. My curiosity piqued, I asked my sister-in-law, what happened?

“It just doesn’t make enough,” she told me.

Understanding what she was getting at, I asked: “You mean it’s too much of a hassle for what it does?” That was precisely it, she said.

There’s a reason, I guess, why there’s an entire industry devoted to bottling soft drinks in large factories. And that’s because for most consumers they prefer their soda to remain a pleasurable experience, not work. What my brother and his wife were telling me is that once the novelty of making their own soda at home wore off, the experience—from replacing the CO₂ cartridge, to buying the syrup refills, to making the soda itself and then chugging it down quickly before having to do it all over again—became just another at-home chore. And we have enough of those.

This is not to say that there isn’t a lasting place for some machines that bring home the beverage experience. Heck, Mr. Coffee is proof enough of that. And Starbucks just recently introduced the Verismo, a machine that aims to bring the Starbucks store experience to the home by allowing consumers to brew their own lattes and espressos. 

But time may prove that some drinks are well enough left up to the experts.