In 2002, Michelob Ultra hit shelves nationwide for the very first time. Its remarkable success since then has been one of the most important stories to both the brand’s owner, Anheuser-Busch InBev (née Anheuser-Busch), and to the American brewing industry writ large. A detail that often gets omitted from that story is that early on, A-B tested Michelob Ultra in smaller-than-normal cans. It didn’t go well.
“People would say, ‘Less calories, less carbs… less beer?’” Kimberly A. Clements, the co-founder and managing partner of industry consultancy Pints LLC recalled, recounting in a recent episode of VinePair’s Taplines her role in Michelob Ultra’s early aughts rollout as a third-generation A-B distributor in Arizona. “Testing showed that they wanted a 12-ounce can, or they wanted a larger package.”
The American beer aisle is virtually unrecognizable compared to the one Michelob Ultra entered 22 years ago, but the general wisdom still applies. Packaging is a powerful value signal to drinkers. The reason 19.2-ounce cans have performed so well in a tough market is the same reason BuzzBallz opted to introduce Biggies rather than Smallies: When it comes to single-serve beverage-alcohol packaging, bigger tends to be better.
This may be why I find New Belgium Brewery’s upcoming Mini Rippers gambit so refreshing.
Have you heard of these yet? No? All right, first of all: Forget everything you know about Voodoo Ranger, NBB’s game-changing brand family of flavor-forward, high-potency India pale ales. Er… some of what you know. In September 2024, the industry blog MyBeerBuzz published labels that the Fort Collins-based firm had filed with the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) for an upcoming product release. At first glance, they just looked like standard-issue wraps for Voodoo Ranger Juice Force and Tropic Force IPAs, but a vertical stripe down the middle indicates they’re intended not for stovepipes or even standard 12-ounce cans but 7.5-ounce cans. Thus: Mini Rippers.
As a former college kid whose heaviest years of pregaming coincided with the boom era of 5-Hour Energy’s ubiquitous 1.93-ounce nips, I grasped the use case of NBB’s upcoming release — slated to hit stores in March 2025 — right off the rip. (Ahem.) These are for moments when you might otherwise toss back a shot before heading out the door to a bar or party. It’s not an “occasion” where beer has traditionally excelled, on account of its low alcohol-by-volume and infinitely higher carbonation level compared to liquor. But 7.5 ounces is a gulp and a half to jabronis in their drinking prime, and Voodoo Ranger has earned its bones (ahem x2) by pushing the ABV ceiling upward; both Mini Ripper SKUs clock in at 9.5 percent. Could it be the skeleton key (ahem x3) to unlock an opportunity that has always eluded brewers?
Of course NBB thinks so. “The idea there is to really tell people what this is — this is a whole new occasion,” chief executive Shaun Belongie said at Beer Marketer’s Insights’ seminar last month, per a report from the event by Brewbound’s Zoe Licata. “Imagine you’ve just called the Uber, waiting, you got five minutes: Mini Ripper. You really want a cold beer, [and] you want it cold the whole time: Mini Ripper.”
(A spokesperson for NBB declined to make an executive available for an interview for this column, citing travel schedules.)
There’s some irony that the same brand that’s more or less synonymous with craft beer’s push into big honkin’ stovepipes is now pitching a “less is more” extension. But Mini Rippers are less contradictory to their large-format Voodoo Ranger brethren than they might appear. For one thing, Brewbound reports that Belongie et al. are aiming the former at the grocery channel, while the latter is a creature of America’s convenience stores. For another, NBB has already cracked the code on fruity flavors; both Forces Juice and Tropic are top-30 craft brands in scan data for off-premise sales at multi-outlet grocery, mass retail, and convenience stores tracked by market research firm Circana through Nov. 3 because people drink those beers. (Not me personally, but like… people.) Launching the Mini Ripper sub-brand with those two proven liquids gives the brewer an opportunity to put something old in front of drinkers, retailers, and distributors that looks new, which is both good business on merit, and necessary, given NBB has started to see some diminishing returns and even intra-brand cannibalism when introducing Voodoo Ranger flavors.
As Tesla demonstrated with its CyberBeer gimmick last year, any dipshit can create a unique one-off beer vessel. Imagining atypical packaging isn’t a major challenge; it’s fitting it, at scale through the logistics pipeline that exists between brewer and drinker. For example, F.X. Matt’s iconic beerball is remembered for its oh-so-’80s novelty, and rightly so, but it only ever made the splash that it did because it fit on distributors’ trucks and retailers’ coolers. Forty years later, Mini Rippers will strike a similar balance between fashion and function, albeit on the other end of the volume spectrum.
Marketing materials published by Beer Crunchers’ Doug Veliky (who moondaylights as Revolution Brewing’s chief strategy officer, by the by) indicates NBB plans to sell Mini Rippers in standard-enough stackable 8-packs, priced “$1-2 below 6pk.” Per his back-of-the-napkin math assuming a $10.99 sixer of 12-ounce Voodoo Ranger, “these small serving cans will cost about 10 percent more per ounce than their existing 6-packs, but when they get the more aggressive $8.99 price, they’re 2 percent cheaper per ounce.” Those numbers look good, but for Mini Rippers to succeed, NBB will have to hammer that math, because as much work as Voodoo Ranger has done to tell craft beer’s “bang for buck” story, it’s still not how most drinkers think of the segment. At the Beer Marketer’s Insights conference, Belongie said he hoped Mini Rippers could “disrupt that value equation in grocery,” presenting customers with a new calculus to give craft beer — or at least NBB’s craft beer — a competitive edge.
Veliky also pointed out that the size offers NBB a small “moat” because few other craft brewers can run 7.5-ounce cans, and the smaller, more plentiful single-serve cans offer opportunities for drinkers to spread out the same amount of beer across more drinkers. In a moment where the rest of the craft brewing industry has mostly caught on to Voodoo Ranger’s magic, and high-ABV flavored malt beverages are competing aggressively for its placements, Mini Rippers are another way for NBB to expand, or at least hold onto, its hard-won shelf space. Any of these things would be big wins for a small package; if the brand manages to achieve them all, it’ll have a hit product on its hands all over again.
As Clements’ early-aughts experience demonstrates, this is a big “if.” For all the recent talk of moderation and sober-curiosity, Americans have not demonstrated much historical interest in dialing down the per-serving amounts of their packaged beers. If Mini Rippers are to be a genuinely transformative product for the category on the register of Michelob Ultra or even Voodoo Ranger itself, they’ll have to disprove the conventional wisdom about how the American drinking public understands volume and value. It’s a tall order for a short can — but I think NBB has as good a shot (ahem x4!) at it as anybody.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
The past month has delivered a seemingly endless barrage of bad news about the sale of our once-proud democracy to the highest bidders. But lo! The system hasn’t completely failed yet! On Tuesday, Kroger’s troubled, two-years-running bid to buy its rival Albertsons for $24.6 billion received not one but two blows from the American judiciary, with a judge in Oregon advancing the Federal Trade Commission’s case against the deal, and another in Washington ruling it violated that state’s antitrust laws outright. Is that… could it be… good news? For now, for supermarket customers and workers, plus the small brewers and distributors who stood to get hosed in a more consolidated grocery market, I’d say so.
📈 Ups…
Funkytown Brewery is launching a seed round to solicit investments to fund its first brick-and-mortar location in Chicago… Congrats to Allagash Brewing Co., Athletic Brewing Co., and Guinness for making Fast Company’s annual Brands That Matter list this year… , Allagash Brewing Co.’s upcoming re-entry into Colorado will make its distribution footprint bigger than its pre-pullback reach 15 years ago…
📉 …and downs
Contract-brewing giant City Brewery is reportedly eyeing bankruptcy even as it tries to negotiate a $50 million loan to stay afloat… “A painful period of rationalization” is how Brewers Association vice president of strategy and membership Bart Watson described 2024…
The article With Voodoo Ranger ‘Mini Rippers,’ New Belgium Takes a New Shot at an Old Idea appeared first on VinePair.