Beer is not beer
As the summer drew nearer, my heart stirred.
After suffering from the epidemic and carrying 996, every social animal that is suffering from social beatings has been sullen for a whole year and urgently needs to find a gap to release.
The best antidote is a big glass of cold beer.
Why? Because the sense of taste has a memory.
Unlike the happiness of sweetness and the excitement of spicy taste, the distinctive bitter taste unique to beer can give people a strong stimulus, recalling the cool summer nights associated with hot pot, barbecue, and party.
Although there is no red wine delicacy, no white wine thickness, no cola sweetness, but calling friends to drink cup after cup, only beer can do it, which is definitely the key to a lively and happy night.
If you don't drink a little, you can't coincide with the fragments in your memory, and you always feel that something is missing. Between the cups and cups, one after two, three cups and four or two down the belly, bragging more feeling, the table "ten six" casually split.
Some people say that children will dislike the bitter taste of beer and fear the moral constraints of alcohol, and middle-aged and elderly people often throw themselves into the arms of spirits, but the young people who are flourishing have a special love for beer.
From the moment you think beer is better than coke, you grow up.
However, when it comes to several major domestic beer brands, most of the drinkers sneer at it - for Chinese men, the happiness brought by beer can be described as greatly reduced: the beer in the middle of summer is getting weaker and weaker.
Are our Chinese beer really inferior?
01 Classical and Industrial
If China's beer culture is to truly integrate into the world, it must first understand the history of world beer.
In ancient times, the ancestors made beer, and the raw material at hand was barley grown in the field, without hops. Because there is no advanced temperature control means, fermentation produces high temperatures, and finally brews barrels of turbid and multi-bubble beer, emitting a rich aroma, drinking with the taste of the land and the aroma of malt.
This classical technique is called al, and the brew is called craft beer. It is also the earliest beer of mankind, dating back to 8000 BC. The Sumerians, the inventors of bread, believed that eating bread and drinking beer were signs of entering civilization.
To this day, the European table still follows the Sumerian eating habit of bread and beer.
If malt is the mortal body of beer, hops are the soul of beer.
Later, beer brewing technology was introduced to Europe, and the most prominent role of beer culture after malt, hops, was determined by the Germans as a stabilizer.
By the Middle Ages, the brewing of beer had shifted from the family to monasteries and country workshops and had become an important part of monastic life. As more and more people come to the monastery to ask for beer, drinking wine is like eating a magic elixir. The monastery's beer simply could not meet the demand, which was launched to pay for it.
This is where beer commercialization began.
During the Industrial Revolution, tens of millions of workers always had a drink after a day of toiling. At this time, both flavor and texture are secondary factors, and the key is price and cost.
In order to increase production, the Germans chose to turn piping hot beer cold. Again, using these ingredients, beer is brewed in an icy cellar. Get rid of the manual mode of small workshops, you can brew dozens of tons of wine at a time, filling the mouths of millions of hungry and thirsty drunkards.
People call it lager beer.
It was from this time that some profit-seeking capitalists replaced barley with cheaper rice and corn, reduced costs, and successfully squeezed out traditional breweries, and lager beer began to become popular.
People who can taste it disdainfully call it "industrial beer".
At the end of the story, everyone knows that Lager beer came to the top and now accounts for more than 90% of global beer production, and the Budweiser, Heineken, Carlsberg, etc. that we now know are all lager brands that have risen after this. And ale beer, that is, craft beer, plus a variety of other kinds of beer, add up to less than 10%.
Chains of contempt were thus formed, and craft beers as artisanal, mellow, classical, expensive, niche, stood at the top of the pyramid, looking down on industrial beer.
Even beer has an aesthetic standard, but this standard is not accepted by everyone.
Those who can drink wine believe that since the four major pieces of beer are malt, hops, yeast and water, the taste of malt and hops is naturally as strong as possible, and the flavor of natural fermentation, the more complex and more variable, the better.
But for more friends who do not drink well, craft beer is too high, too bitter, too strong, these are common complaints, just like the current art, can not appreciate.
Aesthetics is one thing, life is another.
If it were not for industrial civilization and the emergence of industrial beer, how many people would have access to beer in the barren years? Not to mention throwing a few bucks and drinking a lot.
Anything new, from bud to maturity, is tortuous, and the beer industry certainly can't be left alone.
02 Short spring
Chinese and wine are almost longer than the history of Chinese civilization, beer in the modern sense only entered the Chinese life in the 19th century, compared with rice wine and liquor, it is obviously a "latecomer".
100 years ago, China's beer, only the exclusive use of "foreigners", more than 40 years, China's food consumption world and "foreigners" are also completely separated, on the one hand, Chinese hate the world powers, simply unwilling to accept beer this kind of product, on the other hand, the number of beer brewed by foreigners is very small, insufficient self-sufficiency, it is impossible to enter the mass market consumption.
In 1949, the annual output of beer in the country was only more than 7,000 tons, which was less than the annual output of a small brewery. The beer culture in the mainland should have been formed after the founding of New China, and the development of beer culture is also 40 years after the reform and opening up.
In the era of poetry, in the land of Wuhua Tianbao, the diversified environment made people in different places form a distinctive "sense of wine", which brought strong vitality to China's beer industry and made all parts of China have proud beer brands.
With the spring breeze of reform and opening up, the state implemented the "Beer Special Project" in 1985. With 2.6 billion yuan raised by local governments, 800 million yuan from The China Construction Bank, and 20 million U.S. dollars used by the state to purchase advanced assembly lines, China officially knocked on the door of "domestic" beer.
In the national appraisal held in the 1980s, there were not a few award-winning beers - Shanghai Beer, Jiafeng Beer, Tsingtao Beer, Five Star Beer, West Lake Beer, Beijing Beer, and Snowflake Beer.
Suddenly, the establishment of breweries swept the country, and in just a few years, the number of local beer brands reached 813, and the grand situation of "one city, one beer" was spectacular. Once upon a time, the beer produced in some local breweries left too many youthful memories on the way the older generation grew up.
Whether it is the joy of earning the first pot of gold in life or the confusion and disappointment after repeatedly hitting the wall in the face of reality, or the excitement of the title of the gold list or the loss of the famous Sun Shan, or the excitement of the first love and the pain of the lost love, it often pours the feelings into a cup of bubbled beer, and those delicious hometown beers are often the best release agent for people to burn life.
Unfortunately, the spring of domestic beer is not long.
Washed out by the tide of the market economy, these beer brands that once had a market, except for a few large distilleries that became leaders, most of them were defeated in the face of foreign bombardment - Sichuan's Blue Sword, Hunan's Baisha, Wuhan's Xingyingge, Zhejiang's Zhonghua, have come to an end. Only a wrinkled yellowing wine label remains, telling today's people about yesterday's feelings and the glory of the past.
In order to survive, Chinese beer companies have chosen to rely on diluted profitable production models, relying on low-degree despoteurs in exchange for sales of market models, and have "transformed" beer beyond recognition.
Because for a long time, the mainland has not clearly stipulated the amount of hops and malt content before it can be called beer. Therefore, in order to reduce costs and adapt to the Chinese concept of beer consumption, the brewery owners successfully improved the recipe, replacing malt with rice starch, and even the hops were reluctant to put in, and there was syrup in it. So now the beer is as light as water, without a little bitterness.
The Ha Qing Yan Xue that we are familiar with is all like this.
The effect is obvious. However, when everyone learns this technology, in order to maintain competitiveness, manufacturers are getting more and more involved. Gradually, without knowing who started the head, he simply did not put hops and malt at all, and the wine became weaker and cheaper.
And gradually synonymous with good quality and low price, even after more than ten years of baptism, it has always hovered in the single digits of the price fluctuation, never really caused people to worry about "beer freedom".
Low profit margins have always been the biggest knot in domestic beer producers.
Today, the domestic mass-produced industrial beer can no longer taste the aroma of any hops, and all that remains is the so-called "cool" feeling, which is also the selling point of all brands competing for publicity.
This one said my wine was "refreshing", and the other said my wine was "light", which was really wordless, and simply summarized it as "super refreshing". I'm worried that in time, when all the Chinese words related to "shuang" are exhausted, will there be a beer named "Zheng Shuang"?
In the end, is it cool, can't you taste it?
Many people call Chinese industrial mass-produced lagers "beer" because they are so dull, like soda that is inflated and not sour or sweet.
Remember when I was a child, I went to help my father buy wine in the summer? What a proud thing. The tall beer bottles were all carefully held in their arms, for fear of falling if they were not careful. Look at the bowl of foam, and then secretly take a sip, the indescribable taste!
Nowadays, whether at home or abroad, no one sells wine that can match that texture. Just like the summer nights taken away by time, the beauty only stays in the memory, and it is difficult to reproduce.
03 Ambiguous attempts
While the drunkards are still reveling in hindsight, the manufacturers have begun to complain bitterly.
Since the second half of last year, several major manufacturers in the head have opened a new round of beer price increases. With successive price increase announcements, the original low-key beer industry has returned to the public eye.
The frequent increase in raw material costs makes price increases seem like a helpless choice. Coupled with the declining sales of domestic beer in recent years, as well as the continuous improvement of the quality of life of the people, the price increase can be seen as an ambiguous attempt by brewers.
The beginning of the high-end beer can be traced back to 2018. At that time, the emergence of Yuanqi Forest, Xicha and Naixue inspired high-end beer products.
Strong demands for profits have driven major wineries to spare no effort to transform high-end strategies.
The performance response is very obvious. Thanks to price increases, The ton revenue of China Resources Beer, Tsingtao Beer and Chongqing Beer in the first half of 2018 increased by 13%, 5.9% and 4.7% respectively.
More typically, in 2020, Chongqing Beer and Carlsberg restructured, completely subverting the brand's consistent tone: its double-digit products became mainstream. This high-end transformation has also brought a gross profit margin of up to 68% for Chongqing Beer. Moreover, since the first round of price increases in the domestic beer market at the end of 2017, Chongqing Beer has increased its gross profit margin on sales for three consecutive years.
High-end has a natural fit for alleviating the profit difficulties of manufacturers, especially for domestic beers that have occupied the market at low prices at the beginning of their establishment.
However, there are joys and worries, and the price increase has brought about the improvement of capabilities for major manufacturers, but the quality behind it has still not improved. And this will be the biggest shackle for domestic beer to get rid of "low price and low quality".
Subjectively speaking, I can accept the price increase of beer, but I can't stand the same mediocre quality.
In fact, high-end or low-end, to seize the market, to compete for high-end users, there is nothing wrong with it, the key is that the product quality must pass.
Domestic industrial light beer, wine is too small, to drink a lot to achieve the state of pleasure in our memory. Both the taste and the cost have reached the bottom line.
Therefore, in addition to the price of more high-end, manufacturers began to try to make the product more high-end. What is high-end beer? Nothing more than a lager and a re-exploration of classicist ales. That is to say, we now often call craft beer.
As early as 2016-2017, the market was born with "high-end players" such as hops, monkey craft beer, zebra craft beer, boxing cat and so on. Last year, billions of yuan of funds also entered the craft beer circle, and chain taverns such as Cat Yuanwai and Helens, as well as craft brewing brands such as Taishan Yuanjiang, Xin zero Beer, and Xuanbo Beer, have successively obtained financing.
It seems to be blossoming everywhere, craft beer is not making money? Look at the gross profit margin of Chongqing Beer rising year by year.
The reason why the gross profit margin of craft beer is so high, on the one hand, is because its unit price is much higher than that of mainstream industrial beer, in general, a bottle of 500 ml of craft beer, the actual raw material cost is 2-3 yuan, the price is about 10 yuan; on the other hand, for many small workshops, only a few people can operate, the labor cost is not high.
Moreover, the data shows that the penetration rate of craft beer in China in 2020 is only 2.2%, compared with the penetration rate of 12.3% in the United States, there is still a lot of room for improvement. The craft beer market size is predicted to reach $12.5 billion by 2025, accounting for 11% of the overall beer market size.
In other words, there is a lot of room for development.
But to this day, there is still not a leading company in the industry, and it is still generally in the barbaric era of no brand and no category.
In the past five years, more than 4,000 companies have squeezed into the track, and last year alone, more than 300 fell in unison.
In the craft beer industry, the influx of people is endless, and the dead are endless.
Why?
04 Beer is not beer
The first reason is capacity.
Currently, most craft breweries produce between a few hundred tons and a thousand tons, dwarfing even local breweries, let alone beer giants.
After all, from the perspective of the entire market pattern, craft beer is not the mainstream, and it is difficult to appear in the field of snowflakes, Qingdao, such as large-scale, standardized and specialized factories.
What's more, the so-called craft beer (Craft Beer), which means craft beer in English, is essentially niche and unique. And that's what makes craft beer so fascinating.
For example, the American Brewers Association has a set of industry common standards for craft brewing:
1. Annual production of not more than 6 million barrels (about 70.2 tons);
2. The proportion of shares of non-craft brewers or company institutions cannot exceed 25% (escorting the living space of craft beer);
3. Most beer flavors must be obtained from traditional or innovative raw materials and fermentation processes.
This means that craft beer cannot be a big brand. Because once it is bigger, the product is all over the street, which will contradict the definition of craft brewing.
Compared with those standards in the United States, the domestic craft beer industry has been slightly "arbitrary". Of course, the brands in it do not think so, and the entrants certainly want to be bigger and stronger, rather than being limited to "small and beautiful".
On the one hand, "craft beer" is just in a state of infancy, there is no unified standard in the industry, and consumers have not formed a consensus at the conceptual level. On the other hand, as the oldest enemy of the "craft beer trend", capital and large factories are ready to enter the game.
This is not good news for the drinkers.
At present, the first impression of Chinese consumers on craft beer is "expensive".
According to the statistics of world beer consumption in 2020, China alone accounts for more than 20% of the world's share, and is really "the country that can drink beer the most".
However, as an imported product, it is naturally not a deep culture.
Different from the liquor culture flowing in the bones, in the eyes of Chinese, beer has always played the role of "quenching thirst", "white drinking after drinking some beer through" such a tool person role, just a low degree, gas, cheap wine, always in the "box", "hit" and other group measurement units appear.
For ordinary people, beer has long played a role as a food companion, and "craft beer" is essentially a food that needs to be enjoyed separately, which is contrary to the eating habits of Chinese.
After all, the year when beer entered China was the period when Lager beer ruled the world. Whether it is a refreshing taste or a price that meets the low consumption level of the year, lager beer has undoubtedly become the only choice for Chinese beer.
Three generations later, this habit is hard to change.
Although as a new generation of drinkers gradually occupies the C position of the table, the rise of craft beers with rich tastes and many flavors is inevitable. In any case, it is still impossible to completely replace the industrial lager.
In the United States, craft beer has also taken 10% of the market share for three decades. So in the future within reach, buying a dozen and getting half a dozen, rounding is about equal to no money, and the beer culture of bottle caps can also be drawn will still be the mainstream.
After all, I think very few people get a daily ration of wine, which is a tree house of a hundred pieces and a jar.
In other words, industrial beer is for blowing bottles, and craft brewing is for you to drink cup by cup.
Different positioning, different drinking scenes.
Some people think: beer, don't do anything high-end. Since it is a fast moving consumer, keeping your duty is king.
Unlike in Western culture, beer carries feelings and symbolism completely differently.
For example, in European and American movies, we often see this kind of picture, the first thing the male protagonist does when he returns home is to take a small bottle of beer from the refrigerator for a sip and then do something else. For them, beer has long been a necessity of life.
But for us, it's hard to associate "drinking" with beer.
This difference can also be seen in the music.
Open the NetEase cloud, search for "beer", except for a very small number of non-mainstream decadence, these two words do not appear in any Chinese lyrics. But if you search for "beer", hundreds of beer-based music comes flooding in, and the frequency can almost compete with the "Puxi" in hip-hop lyrics.
You see, Chinese have this attitude towards beer.
After all, just walking up from the rice field, washing the mud at the feet and changing into trousers, turning around and pointing and scolding, there is really no need. As everyone knows, the muddy water is flowing down the shiny pants legs, soaking the white socks.
This article originated from Grand Gateway