Gluten-free beer has a marketing problem

[igliashon]

So yesterday in Oakland/Berkeley there was an event called "Tour de Ferment", which was a bike tour (about 100 riders strong) of 6 local homebrewers. I was fortunate enough to be able to place a case of my homebrew at one of the stops, as they were short on their own beer. I hung out there for a while, and noticed that the people serving were telling patrons "we've got an IPA in this keg, an ESB in this one, oh, and some bottles of gluten-free beer in the cooler". Pretty much everyone I saw visibly grimaced at the mention of gluten-free beer. However, as I made the rounds and introduced myself, I did not introduce myself as a gluten-free brewer but as someone who liked to explore exotic grains. When I told people "oh yeah, I've got a chamomile beer brewed with bananas, wild rice, and sweet potato", their eyes would light up and they'd get excited and want to try it. Many were shocked when I said it was gluten-free and that I brew all my beers without barley.

This was a great learning experience about marketing gluten-free beer. No one without an intolerance wants to drink something that's "missing something", but everyone seems to want to drink something with exotic or unusual ingredients. Seriously, it was like night-and-day between the people who heard it was "gluten-free" and the people who heard it was "brewed with wild rice, banana, and sweet potato" or "quinoa and pine honey" or even a "grapefruit and sorghum IPA". Regular beer drinkers associate the term "gluten-free" with generic crappy beer, which at its best resembles mediocre barley beer; it's gonna be hard work to change that association, but I dream of a day when "gluten-free" is associated with exotic and gourmet ingredients and adventurous new tastes.

 

[JLem]

Seems to me that 'gluten-free' should really be a secondary attribute - like, here's a hoppy saison brewed with quinoa...and oh, by the way, it happens to be gluten free.

And if you think about it, explaining what something is by telling someone what it isn't is not really that helpful. What's a banana? Well, it's pork-free.

 

[frothdaddy]

And if you think about it, explaining what something is by telling someone what it isn't is not really that helpful. What's a banana? Well, it's pork-free.

Agreed. From a marketing perspective, you should start with what the product is, not what it isn't. If you start with what it isn't, it's like you're starting with an apology and justification for it not meeting the customer's expectations.

 

[igliashon]

Totally. I marvelled at the fact that a) the person serving my beer thought telling people it was "gluten-free" was enough information (even though I brought 7 different varieties, from porter to cream ale), and b) that the people being served also thought that that was enough information. I mean, I even included a slick product list with the case of beer, including what each bottle was (they were all hand-labelled by my girlfriend, who is a professional sign maker), what the ingredients were (including hops and herb varieties), and what the ABV was. I guess I should have spent more time before-hand talking up each beer to the people serving....

 

[muench1]

I struggle with this in my family and even in my girlfriend's family where a great many people are on gluten-free diets. I always try to make large family meals fully gluten-free, or as close as possible. If you have 3 pies at a large family gathering, there's no excuse to not just make all 3 gluten free- nobody is ever going to know the difference. Same damn thing with cookies; heck, my family's famous cookie recipe tastes BETTER gluten free than with wheat ingredients, but people act like it's somehow second-rate. Gluten-free pasta is widely available now that's just as good as "normal" and about the same price, but people don't want it.

I think it's a marketing problem with gluten-free products in general. If you say alternative or ancient grains, people are going to be intrigued, because that's something new, interesting or exotic. Gluten-free implies something is missing or has been removed, like fat-free, sugar-free, etc.

 

[jagec]

In some ways it's a problem with the American culture. If we're used to doing things a certain way (like beer), but can't anymore (diet change/health reasons/allergies), we try to replicate an existing product, rather than make something good in its own right.

For example, I went to a well-rated vegetarian restaurant a while back. They had OK food that was chock-full of fake meat...fake pork, fake beef, fake bacon. Thanks, but I'll take the real stuff any day.
However, even as a meat eater, one of my favorite dishes is malai kofta--an amazingly tasty Indian offering that is 100% vegetarian. That's the difference between a cuisine that was built on people eating a certain way for generations, and one that defines "vegetarian" by what ISN'T in it.

 

[igliashon]

In some ways it's a problem with the American culture. If we're used to doing things a certain way (like beer), but can't anymore (diet change/health reasons/allergies), we try to replicate an existing product, rather than make something good in its own right.

I'd say the key difference is that while "vegetarian meats" are vastly different in composition from the real deal, gluten-free foods are actually pretty close. We're just trading one grain for another. Perhaps the only reason that this is so problematic is because we beer geeks are so conservative about what we will and will not accept, taste-wise.

But think about the craft beer revolution that swept this country not even half a century ago; the people brewing IPAs and Porters in the age when only fizzy yellow stuff counted as beer were challenging ideas about what beer was and could be. We gluten-free brewers are doing the same thing today. When you think about the vast diversity of what counts as "beer"--from a thick hoppy Imperial IPA to a dry roasty Irish Stout to a sweet spicy funky Saison to a clean understated lager--why shouldn't we GF brewers be able to carve out some new stylistic niches for ourselves? At some point, every style of beer accepted by the BJCP started out as a questionable departure from the "ideal" of beer. Beer styles are always evolving, and I really think that the GF beer movement will only start to gain legitimacy when we stop playing "me too" and start just brewing the tastiest beers we can with the ingredients available to us.

Me, I'm not trying to replicate the beers I used to like. Even when I brewed non-GF beer, my goal was always to make beer that I'd never tasted before and would never get the opportunity to taste in a commercial beer. That hasn't changed. I'm trying to take old styles in unique new directions, and I think gluten-free grains have a lot to offer. Their only real flaw is in their impracticality (lack of enzymes, difficult to sparge, not available in different roasts, etc.), but there's no reason they can't make tasty beer. And even using extracts and syrups, I think some of my beers are more "drinkable" than a lot of barley-based beers; I'm even starting to acquire a taste for sorghum, such that barley-based beers like Daura and Omission taste "flat" to me. Word on the street is that in Africa, where sorghum beer already dominates, even Guinness adds sorghum to their exports for Africa to fit the tastes of that market.

 

[rlbois1]

...why shouldn't we GF brewers be able to carve out some new stylistic niches for ourselves? At some point, every style of beer accepted by the BJCP started out as a questionable departure from the "ideal" of beer. Beer styles are always evolving, and I really think that the GF beer movement will only start to gain legitimacy when we stop playing "me too" and start just brewing the tastiest beers we can with the ingredients available to us.

Keep talking like this and next thing you know, people will start doing crazy stuff like putting chicken on pizzas; it's just not right. Seriously though, your comments remind me of Dogfish Head and their 'Tweason Ale, made with strawberries and buckwheat honey. While it is gluten free, that's not what defines it.

 

[KevinM]

I'd say that the comparison of meat free "meats" and gluten free beer is spot on. It's that marketing/expectation problem of a subsitution. It's giving a perception that each product is supposed to be exactly like it's counterpart. If you want to get down to it, vegetarian meats are supposedly trading one protein for another.

Both vegetarian meals and sorghum alcoholic beverages can stand up on their own quite well. many vegetarian meals, particularly indian, asian, pan asian, middle eastern, mediterraian are good on their own. They're not meant to be a meat substitute, they're a combination of ingredients that just don't happen to include meat.

Gluten free beers have also given sorghum a bad name based on what we do to it, so that both "gluten free beer" or "sorghum based beer" has that negative reaction/view. And yes, perhaps there is good reason for that in the market. It may eventually chage, however, more than likely it'll eventually get a different name from some marketers who want to give it a different perception. Like you said "Ancient grain fermented beverage"

I bet that if it had an original name (before sorghum had it's own negative view), of sorghum based alcoholic beverage, it'd have a different perception. I'm sure it's still be slightly negative, since some just don't like the flavor, but it'd have the "Oh, this is different."

Look at marketing for the malt based beverages. It's not beer, it's not vodka, yet it lies somewhere between them, most like beer. I think it's main perception problem back in the day was that people would say "it's not a real alcoholic drink" or something to that effect. These days, people will have a mike's hard lemonade and not give it a second thought.