Our friends in the general media are busy celebrating the agreement between MillerCoors and Pabst Brewing Co. under which MillerCoors will continue brewing Pabst products. For now.
Take for instance this story, which appeared in the Austin (Texas) Statesman: “Long Live Longnecks,” the headline proclaims. “A little bit of Texas got a new lease on life on Wednesday in a courtroom in Milwaukee,” it begins.
We’re as happy as anyone that MillerCoors will continue to brew Pabst products. But we don’t think that solves the problem. Not by a country mile.
To be sure, we haven’t seen the agreement. But we seriously doubt that MillerCoors has agreed to keep brewing Pabst products into perpetuity.
If Pabst was our company, we’d swear a serious oath that this near-death experience will never happen again. We’d take the smallest brand, build a craft brewery for that. The next smallest, and build a craft brewery for that, etc.
Pabst has beers with historical roots in Milwaukee, Texas, the Pacific Northwest, Detroit, Brooklyn, Baltimore, etc. If Pabst was our company, we’d put a brewery in each of those areas, complete with taproom, local marketing, etc., so that by the time the MillerCoors-Pabst contract expired, Pabst would be brewing its own beers across the country.
And with a network of breweries across the country, Pabst would from that standpoint be on equal terms with MillerCoors and Anheuser-Busch…and be able to play up not only the local angle (“Brewed in Texas by Texans”) but also the freshness thing (“fresh because it’s brewed near you”).