Draft Beer Needs a Boost. Big Brewers Should Follow This Blueprint.

Draft beer is not selling particularly well these days. What is capital-B Big Beer doing about it? Fighting over tap handles. Backing legislation in Congress to offer tax breaks on draft systems. Complaining about Zoomers.

These tepid efforts have not restored draft beer’s sales. Shocking, I know. I thought for sure that availing qualified hospitality vendors of the awesome, economy-stimulating power of the federal tax code’s Section 179D loophole deduction would be enough to reverse draft’s decade-long decline, if only the CHEERS Act had made it out of the House of Representatives last year. Alas. The industry is throwing its considerable lobbying power behind that bill again this year, which is fine, I guess. But I have another idea, one that plays to the industry’s marketing might, boosts one of the category’s most inimitable advantages against wine and spirits, and offers the draft channel a path back into the American zeitgeist. Doesn’t that sound good, brewing industry? Of course it does. Here it is:

Do a “Got Milk?” campaign for draft beer.

You can do this. You should do this. Frankly, you kinda have to do this, unless you want to walk into a bar in 10 years to see your hard-won tap handles gathering dust while your next generation of customers is “zebra-striping” their High Noons with tallboys of Liquid Death. Or worse: gone entirely, because no bar owner is going to keep a draft system around if that room could be better used slinging vodka seltzers. This horrifying vision of the on-premise experience is lurking just over the horizon, slowly coalescing into reality.

It’s partly the pandemic’s fault, but it’s also partly your fault, brewers. Sure, people are drinking less draft beer due to a constellation of factors, some of which are beyond your control. But you do control the ability to flood the American drinking public with advertising that pitches a well-poured pint — not just yours, but any well-poured pint — as the pinnacle of affordable luxury, an aspirational brand unto itself. Yet you haven’t done it.

Now is the time. And the “it” is a “Got Milk?” campaign for draft beer.

This should be self-explanatory. I’m sure most Hop Take readers get it. But the brewing industry apparently does not, otherwise it would have done it already. After all, the blueprint is freely available. It’s “Got Milk?” The campaign, launched in 1993, ran for two decades and repositioned the dairy business’s flagship fluid to better compete with hotshot, high-budget competitors from the then-booming soft drinks and health food sectors. It turned a commodity into a celebrity. And it used celebrities to do it, from Taylor Swift, to Whoopi Goldberg, to Stone Cold Steve Austin.

“There was something so perfectly hip about it,” Edward Wasserman, the dean of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, told Fast Company in 2018, for the magazine’s 25-year retrospective on what it declared an “unmatched” success of the California Milk Processor Board’s now-iconic campaign. (Wasserman retired in 2020.) “They start with a product with no personality, which, if anything, was forced upon generations of children, which very few adults drank or would admit to drinking, whose health benefits are questionable, whose environmental impact is dubious, and they turned it into something that had a kind of panache.”

This is a crucial point, for two reasons. While “Got Milk?” succeeded in boosting milk’s cultural cachet, it — fairly notoriously — failed to improve its actual sales. The U.S. dairy business has struggled for decades as Americans switch to alternative “milks.” This is a pitfall that brewers must avoid in any draft-oriented promotion. The goal is to sell more beer on tap, after all, not just to make it look cool. But the beer industry isn’t handicapped the way its cow-yanking counterparts were when first cooking up “Got Milk?” A cold glass of milk is one of the blandest, goofiest things you can drink as an adult. That’s weirdo sh*t, full stop.

But a cold glass of beer? Normal. Better than normal: aspirational. Colorful in the glass; dynamic with an effervescent head. Emphatically not weirdo sh*t. “Got Milk?” was brilliant because the dairy industry — the f*cking dairy industry — was able to harness the power of marketing to convince the American drinking public that milk — f*cking milk — was glamorous. That was a very deep hole to climb out of! And “Got Milk?” did it. With such a built-in advantage, don’t you think a beer-industry analogue boosting draft beer, which people already like, might be able to generate sales in addition to goodwill? As long as you keep your taplines clean, I do.

For the record, I am not encouraging the brewing industry to rip off the exact creative conceit of “Got Milk?” one-for-one and call it a day. If in six months I see a highway billboard with, say, Travis Kelce holding a beer next to copy that reads “Got Pints?” I am going to drive off the road. Do not do this. “Got Milk?” was created for a media landscape and consumer that no longer exists. It made health claims, which beer advertising cannot, per the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau. Its straightforward use of celebrities — and especially its use of establishment politicians like Bob Dole and Bill Clinton — wouldn’t play in our current information ecosystem. And so on, and so forth.

Instead of a rote imitation of “Got Milk?” as a creative concept, the brewing industry must channel its strategic genius. Namely, it must work collaboratively to reestablish draft beer as something unique, more special, worth seeking out. As a brand of its own. Basically, the outstanding work Diageo has done for Guinness Draught, but for draft. All of it.

This presents a bit of a prisoner’s dilemma for the beer industry. A “pilsner’s dilemma,” if you will. (You don’t have to.) The major firms with the budgets and savvy to stand up a national marketing campaign all compete with each other. No matter the noise macrobrewing executives make about saving draft beer, when it comes time to cut checks, it’s every C-suite for itself. Anheuser-Busch InBev, Molson Coors, Constellation Brands, etc. all want to sell more draft beer, sure, but it’s more expedient for each to invest on growing their own share of draft at the others’ expense than it is to invest in growing draft’s overall share of total alcohol — or at least, reversing its decline.

The dairy industry had a big structural advantage in overcoming this common-goods problem on “Got Milk?” in the form of federally mandatory checkoff programs, into which dairy farmers pay and from which the funding for that campaign came. (And others since. MilkPEP, or the Milk Processors Education Program, was responsible for putting the California Milk Processor Board’s 1993 stroke of marketing genius in front of a national audience, and still operates to this day.)

Beer has no such program. Maybe it should, given how often its leaders insist “beer is agriculture,” but it doesn’t. This makes mutually beneficial coordination a challenge! And the trade doesn’t have a good track record on uniting around category-level, consumer-facing messaging campaigns. Not in recent history (see: “corngate”), and not in history-history (see: the United States Brewers Association getting absolutely pantsed by teetotallers in the court of public opinion in the early 20th century). Still, if all the beverage-alcohol industry’s biggest trade groups managed to set aside all their internecine squabbles long enough to agree on a line of counterattack against a potentially unfavorable revision of federal dietary guidelines, surely the biggest players in the beer industry can be cajoled to do likewise to defend the draft channel from an undignified end. Right?

One has to hope. One being me — I love draft beer. But others have to hope, too, and they’re more integral in actually making draft beer’s “Got Milk?” moment a reality. Craft brewers that overindex on draft beer; wholesalers that make better margins on kegs; bar owners who have built businesses around the delights of draft (and also make better margins on kegs). These cohorts have skin in the game, too; their respective trade groups ought to contribute to this effort, too. The country’s biggest brewers that stand to benefit the most must push forward regardless. Draft beer is the category’s biggest differentiator, most premium offering, and oldest legacy. It is the soul of social drinking. As goes the channel, so goes beer’s exclusive status in the on-premise. And from there… well, it’s High Noons all the way down. Do a “Got Milk?” campaign for draft beer, brewers. Preferably before it’s too late.

🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now

By now you likely know that people of all backgrounds and immigration statuses, and especially Hispanic folks, are being targeted by masked federal shock troops as part of President Donald Trump’s domestic reign of terror. Beer executives certainly know. After all, Hispanic drinkers are a key demographic! That they’re staying home en masse for fear of being disappeared by secret police and deported to foreign concentration camps without even a whiff of due process is, y’know, not good for sales! Yet industry leaders are struggling to find the words to condemn this grotesque authoritarian spectacle on even the most self-interested grounds. Earlier this month, Constellation Brands’ Bill Newlands allowed that “the immigration question” is “sort of ‘anti’ our business.” Just last week, Boston Beer Co. co-founder Jim Koch was quoted in The Wall Street Journal responding to a question of how the firm’s Twisted Tea brand might offset lost business from petrified customers with “I suspect there’s not a good answer.” Which, ironically, is itself not a good answer, either.

📈 Ups…

Teamsters striking Breakthru Beverage Group in Florida have extended their picket line to the wholesaler’s locations in six other states in an ambitious bid to land a fair first contract… Congrats to Moor’s Brewing of Chicago on winning Boston Beer Co.’s “Brewing the American Dream” competition… Benchmark Beverage Co. and Blake’s Beverage Co. formed a commercial partnership, with the former taking a stake in the latter… Total hop acreage is down 31 percent since 2021, bringing the glut-threatened market within reach of equilibrium…

📉 …and downs

BrewDog abruptly closed its Cincinnati taproom… Mike’s Hard Lemonade will phase out most of its glass-bottled SKUs, a staple of the millennial high-school house party… Numerator found that 90 percent of Americans are worried about tariffs and may adjust their shopping… Reuters is reporting that the revised Dietary Guidelines for Americans now simply won’t include a specific recommendation on alcohol intake…

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