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MolsonCoors Buys Cobra

    Last month we featured cobra venom-infused alcohol, when a jar was seized by customs inspectors. Turns out there’s also a Cobra beer—but there’s no snake oil with this one. Cobra is a British beer started in 1989 with Karan Bilimora and a partner selling beer out of the boot (that’s trunk in American English) of an old Citroen.
    Fast-forward 20 years and now Lord Karan Bilimora has made a deal to sell 50.1 percent of his company to MolsonCoors. Cobra is sold in 6,000 restaurants in the UK and 50 countries around the world. Cobra has been trying to get established in the UK pub trade, but economic hard times are depressing the premium beer market.
    The Cobra brand will now be jointly owned by MolsonCoors and a Bilimora-owned company. MolsonCoors paid £14 million (about $23 million) in the deal.

    Business is down at a restaurant in Wisconsin—a fact of life felt all the way to China. In a special report, CBS News followed the decline in money from the Twin Oaks Country Inn in Wilmont, Wisc., where Fetzer wines are the house wine, to Fetzer Vineyards in California where sales are down 6 percent, or the equivalent of 2.5 million bottles. For Fetzer, that means fewer bottles, fewer labels, less fruit.
    For Fetzer’s trucking contractor, that’s a 40 percent decline in revenues, and for the trucker’s last full-time mechanic, a loss of $10,000 in overtime pay.
    A Fetzer executive, with a six figure salary, was laid off. His wife, who raises horses, won’t be exhibiting at horse shows. They won’t be paying their horse trainer, who has lost most of her clients. In turn, another person, who sells riding equipment including special patented stirrups, expects a 50 percent drop in business revenues, which will then hit the factory where the stirrups are made—in China.

    If you’ve won the lottery and want to take a dream vacation on the island of Bali, don’t drink the homemade hootch.
    Sixteen people died and 14 more were hospitalized after drinking a homemade alcoholic brew on the Indonesian resort island. The victims had been diagnosed with methanol poisoning.
    Last September, on West Java, another Indonesian island, 12 people died after drinking a concoction that included methylated spirits and insecticide.
    File that in this month’s “I couldn’t make that up” category.

    On July 4, a cargo jet filled with Chicago-style pizza will be landing in the Middle East to give American soldiers a taste of real American pizza.
    This effort started when an Air Force retiree’s 15-year-old son thought it’d be great if they could send pizza to servicemen in Iraq. That resulted with 2,000 pizzas served on July 4, 2008 at Camp Victory in Baghdad and eight forward operating bases.  They did further shipments to VA hospitals on Veteran’s Day and Super Bowl Sunday.
    They’ve now shipped 4,500 pizzas and 6,000 bottles of beer to troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
    For more information, check <www.pizza4patriots.com>.

    The Utah legislature passed legislation earlier this year to reform its liquor rules, but it turns out they didn’t allocate enough licenses.
    The new rules allocated a total of 361 licenses to bars, and 546 beer, wine and liquor licenses to restaurants. After an initial award of licenses to Salt Lake City businesses, however, there are only 12 bar and 15 restaurant licenses left for the rest of the state.
    There will likely be more action in the legislature to increase the numbers of liquor licenses, as well as, possibly, revise a rule that limits the number of licenses to no more than two per block.

    Maybe the question hasn’t kept you awake at nights, but Britain’s Supreme Court of Judicature has answered the question as to just what the heck Pringles are.
    The question involved a tax issue, with $150 million in taxes at stake. In Britain, most foods are exempt from the value-added tax, but potato chips are taxable. Procter & Gamble U.K. argued that Pringles, which are about 40 percent potato flour, but also contain corn, rice and wheat, are not potato chips but are, rather, “savory snacks,” and should be exempt from the VAT.
    In an opinion hailed by the New York Times for its directness, Lord Justice Robin Jacob ruled that a judge can only look at the relevant factors and draw an overall impression, which is that Pringles are potato chips.
    From a Times editorial, “His common-sense approach was a rebuke not only to Procter & Gamble, but to everyone out there who insists that the only way to read laws correctly is to read them strictly…In other words, sometimes you just have to call them as you see them.”

    Three in 10 Americans drink alcoholic beverages weekly, with beer as their top choice, followed by domestic wine and vodka, according to a Wine & Spirits Daily report of a recent Harris poll.
    Of Americans who say they drink several times a year, two-thirds drink beer while 49 percent say they drink domestic wine. Two in five drink vodka, one-third drink rum and 29 percent drink foreign wine. Further down in drink popularity are tequila, champagne and other spirits, such as Canadian or Irish whiskey, bourbon, gin, cordials and Scotch.

    Many Australian wine producers are unhappy because the Bronco Wine Company of California is buying vats of Australian chardonnay wine which they will market in the U.S. at just $3 a bottle with their new Down Under label.
    The Bronco Wine Company is the U.S.’s fourth largest wine producer and best known for its line of cheap California wines marketed under the Charles Shaw label at Trader Joe’s stores, and commonly called “Two Buck Chuck” because it sells for just $2 per bottle.
    Fred Franzia, Bronco’s CEO, says the new label will take direct aim at the popular Australian wine, Yellow Tail.
    As reported by The Australian, Australian wine producers don’t like it, as they feel it damages their efforts to market high quality wines. Paul Henry of the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation said, “Another lowest common denominator brand has the potential to undermine that.”
    An Australian wine broker noted, however, that there is a glut of chardonnay right now, so when Bronco went shopping, there was no shortage of sellers eager to empty tanks to make room for the 2009 harvest, as well as generate cash flow.

    MillerCoors, the U.S. joint venture of MolsonCoors and SABMiller, is taking aim at AB-InBev’s Bud Light and other AB-InBev products.
    According to a Financial Times article, AB-InBev controls about half of the U.S. beer market, and MillerCoors would like to take a bite out of that share, with Miller Lite and Coors Light leading the charge. The light beer market accounts for 40 percent of U.S. beer sales.
    One marketing gimmick will be on Coors Light cans, which have pictures of mountains—mountains that turn blue when the can is chilled. Miller Lite will be returning to an old theme—“Taste’s great”—to try to reverse a recent decline in sales.
    On the other hand, MillerCoors has its own problems, in that, as reported by the Chicago Tribune, they recently had to recall a shipment of Coors Light sent to southeast markets, when they determined that a batch made at their Albany, Georgia plant didn’t pass taste tests.

Source:  The Montana Tavern Times, July 2009, published monthly by Continental Communications, 125 W Granite, Suite 102, Butte, MT 59701.