Bill, I knew I was touching your eyeball with that one and I purposely wrote buy your Ontario Small Brewery Beer at the Beer Store 'when possible'. This, I hoped, left the door wide open for all the shoppers, small pack purchasers, or people that like your store environment better. Or producers who do not choose to sell at The Beer Store. I thought I got to that in #3. You are right, it is easier for us having been in both systems for a while. What I am trying to highlight is the dramatic difference in the cost of service in the 2 systems. If the market was free, then the price for Creemore would be 25-50% higher in the LCBO. But it is not, so we lose the equivalent of $30/hl for every bottle sold at the LCBO instead of The Beer Store (recognizing that the LCBO creates new customers and so it is never a total net loss situation). For most small brewers, that $30 per hl is equivalent to 1 employee or all of the maintenance done in a year. I would love to sell more beer through the LCBO (the stores are great as are the people...I think I mentioned that), but I would go broke if I did.
The $25,000 listing fee at The Beer Store is much less if you market your beer regionally. But even at $25,000, given the difference in service fees...the break even is only 833 hl (or 20,000 12 packs) that is relatively small potatoes for any brewery since a brewery won't survive at less than 1000hl (about the size of a brew pub) and probably can't make any money until they hit 5000 hl or so.
Thanks for the phone call Bill and as I have mentioned before, I think the awareness of these issues is higher now and progress can be made with dialogue in the future.
BTW, Cass am I screwing things up by lumping multiple threads into one post? If so sorry, won't do it again.
Mill Street. Michael, don't be dragging me into this. Re-read my spot on small brewers (including yours truly) generally lacking patience and humility. I visited Mill St last week, met the gentlemen and sampled the beer. The beer was good and my wife liked the size of the bottle. Good luck guys.
Montreal. I failed (or at least the weather and schedule failed). On Monday we re-traced Cass's brewpub tour and all were closed until the evening (when we were no longer in the city). The snow and a near crash on Crescent kept us from doing any shopping, and an emergency meeting of Queebec Small brewers limited our brewery visits to only 1. Luckily we saw Peter's new facility at McAuslan and sampled some very fresh Pale Ale. Yum.
So I have no new PQ beers to try, but we did ski powder all day at Tremblant and had a pint in the brewpuib there.
