Rosemarie Fike explains why craft brewers almost always push tours of their premises and souvenir glasses, mugs, coasters, and T-shirts:
This summer I’ve been enjoying a lot of microbrewery tours — even though the main attraction isn’t the “tour” I pay for, but the free beer that comes with it. In fact, the breweries must know that’s why people come. So why don’t they just drop this tour façade and sell us the beer?
Regardless of which brewery you visit, you pay a mere $10 for a pint glass with the brewery’s logo on it. As a thank you for purchasing the pint glass, they then grant three tickets you can redeem for free “samples” — which are actually full-sized beers.
There are also usually food vendors and live music. This atmosphere combined with the inexpensive libations draw sizeable crowds to these “tours” — where only a handful of patrons actually tour the facility.
But why do the breweries insist upon selling us the pint glasses, when most of us only really want what goes inside?
In conversation with the brewery owners, I learned that the breweries in my town aren’t legally allowed to sell beer directly to consumers in the way a bar can. But there’s nothing in the law preventing them from giving their product away.
In response to those incentives, they sell customers a pint glass (or charge them for the “tour”) and rent some of their property out to food vendors to subsidize the cost of getting their product into the hands of eager consumers without technically charging them for it.
It’s far from an ideal situation for these businesses, but it allows them to introduce new people to their product and to earn some revenue in the process — even if it’s less revenue than they could earn if they were allowed to just sell people the beer. It’s a clever arrangement and a perfect example of evasive entrepreneurship.
