The Boston Beer Company's Management Presents At Barclays Back To School Conference (Transcript)

And this is, those of you who have been to the conference in previous years, there is a slide that I keep showing, actually first drew it in 1992. This is kind of my sort of simplified dump down to the level that you get after you have a beer understanding of what’s going on in the US beer industry and this is kind of, you could of think of these lines as 40 year moving average.

But if you go back to the US beer business in 1970, 99% of the beer sold in the United States was regular strength domestic beers from a much larger variety of producers than today that you had Pabst and Stroh and (inaudible) and Olympia and Lone Star and Old Style and Natty Boh etcetera.

But 99% of the beer was regular strength domestic beer. The import category was very small, less than 1% and there were no craft brewers. So that was little over 40 years ago. You fast forward today and that scene has changed dramatically. That 99% is down to 24%. The leading brand in the regular strength domestic beer is Budweiser, which may still be the largest brand in the world. In the U.S., they had their last year of growth for that brand, great brand run by a great company, great marketing, frogs, lizards, [wassup], all kind of cool stuff. Their last year growth despite all of that was 1987. Ronald Reagan was President.

They have had 25 consecutive years of decline and it's because of this dynamic, despite everything they’ve done, the consumer has gone away from what was 99% of the business and the consumers gone in two directions. They’ve gone in one direction to light beer and basically the consumer is pretty rational.

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