I have based my entire line of work on the premise of spreading knowledge about beer. I have always maintained the MO that if I educated people so that they could make their own informed and intelligent decisions – teaching to fish vs. giving a fish – they would naturally gravitate towards better products. That’s how we work isn’t it? Isn’t that how we learn to discriminate (in the good sense of the word)? When we become educated, we make better choices and better choices usually result in consumption of better/higher quality products, at least in my experience. It looks as though Sam Adams doubled down on that philosophy as well.

I rarely watch TV and when I do it’s almost always something I’ve DVR’ed, which means I fast forward through the commercials. So it must have been fate that somehow I ended up watching TV on a couple different occasions and on both of those occasions saw a new commercial campaign by Sam Adams. These new commercials have tidbits of educational information about beer, with classroom style animation and a “Know More, Love More…” tagline. For example, one commercial floats a beer bottle graphic between graphics of hops and malts and states (not quoting perfectly) “Too hoppy = too bitter. Too malty = too sweet. Boston Lager = just right! Know more, love more…”, or something like that. The other commercial (that really grabbed my attention) had a graphic of a roasted barley “color wheel” in the bottom left of the screen, with a bottle taking center stage. The bottle changes as the wheel spins and lands on light colored barley when the narrator states, “Pale malt = pale colored beer”. The wheel spins again and lands on a darker malt, “This color malt is what goes into our Oktoberfest beer”. Wheel spins again, darker still, “This roast is what is in our Boston Lager”, and finally one last spin to dark, black malts, “And these black malts are what makes a dark, roasted stout. Did you know that Sam Adams make xyz number of beers? Know more, love more…”

I was stunned when I saw these commercials. Many thoughts ran through my mind. I got excited. I thought about the state of the beer industry and where the average consumer is at with beer knowledge. How far we’ve come. I even questioned my relevance in the market. Do people need this anymore???

After several days thinking about the ramifications of these commercials, I ultimately decided it was the best possible thing that could happen, both for the industry and also for me as an educator. Here’s why. Sam Adams is not a small brewery. They brew several million barrels of beer each year and have been the sole entity lobbying to raise the output ceiling – on multiple occasions in history – and still be considered “craft beer”. (Sam Adams most recently successfully lobbied to get that number to 6 million barrels annually, where it is today.) By stark contrast, there are small “micro breweries”, or even “Nano Breweries” pumping out a humble few hundred to few thousand barrels each year. The effect this has in the marketplace is that some hardcore beer enthusiasts tend to not have Sam Adams in their hearts and minds when thinking about and supporting smaller, craft breweries. And there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s always going to be a contingent of people that only want to support the smallest of companies. That’s fine. But Sam Adams’ size carries some major benefits that they often don’t get a lot of pats on the back for.

Specific to this article, Sam Adams is almost always doing the heavy lifting for the craft beer industry in the advertising arena. Sam Adams has the advertising budget to run national ad campaigns to take the fight to the giant, multi-national behemoths. The micros could never do that. Sam Adams spits out commercial after commercial about what craft beer is and their commitment to craft and being independent. Has it had an effect? Absolutely. Many of the newer commercials coming out from the big boys focus on the ingredients, or the “craft” of brewing, or their legacy. Random coincidence? Not at all. They see what consumers are interested in and where the market has been moving.

So with these new commercials – and who knows, maybe there are others I haven’t seen yet – Sam Adams placed their bets that it was time for the mass public to get some degree of bare-bones knowledge about beer, so that “The more you know…” the more you will make better, more informed decisions, which will more than likely lead you to sample many of the countless other offerings from the Sam Adams brewery.

And me, I couldn’t be happier. It’s almost like validation that what I always thought was the right thing to do just might have been the right thing to do after all… help people drink better beer!

Cheers!

-Jeff