— 5 October 2004
Why Do the English Drink Warm Beer?
Why do the English drink warm beer?
Because they have Lucas refrigerators.
Maybe you need to be a fan of old English motor vehicles to appreciate the joke, but you probably know that Americans, unlike our cousins across the pond, like our beer cold.
Of course, beer starts getting warm as soon as it leaves the ice-box, a problem which has vexed beer drinkers for years. Now, Alcoa and the Pittsburgh Brewing Company have announced an “innovative” new aluminum bottle that they say will keep the beer colder longer.
But, according to an article in Forbes, the aluminum bottle technology they are using has been around since 1991. Furthermore, Pittsburgh Brewing is not the first brewer to use an aluminum bottle. So a very old problem is being solved with a not so new technology. Is this really an innovation?
I finally tried Iron City Beer in the new aluminum bottle over the weekend and think this is a product development coup because:
1. It actually does keep the beer colder, longer
2. The beer seemed to taste better than beer from a glass bottle
3. The bottle is unbreakable
4. The package was superlative, both visually and tactilely
I think that sometimes we convince ourselves that innovation must be about shifting paradigms and forget that paradigm-shifting is really a consequence of serving consumer needs in ways that competitors do not. What makes Iron City Beer innovative is not that the company employed some new (or sort of new) technology but that it designed the new product to provide important consumer benefits and communicated those benefits.
Temperature and taste were obvious areas for a brewer to seek improvement, and unbreakable is a great quality in an alcoholic beverage container, but the most surprising and pleasing part of the Iron City experience is the look and feel of the bottle. It is extremely subjective and difficult to explain, but holding and drinking from the aluminum bottle just felt cool. Literally, the bottle felt cool to both the hand and the mouth. Every sip was like the first.
In a mature category, in which much of the advertising is indistinct and the best known product innovations have been efforts to cut cost or improve efficiency (e.g. the switch from bottles to cans) rather than improve the consumer experience, Iron City Beer has established a new standard for beer-drinking enjoyment. I wish them the best and hope to enjoy many a beer with them.
(And as for who was first to use the aluminum bottle: Iron City Beer is the first that was available to me, which is more important than being first. Maintaining this advantage is a subject for another post.)
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