The craft brewing industry’s indisputable heavyweight champion for the past half-decade is looking a little wobbly on its feet lately. Nobody panic, but Voodoo Ranger’s magic might just be wearing off.
What?! No! Wasn’t it just a year and a half ago that we were marveling together in these very pages about the seeming invincibility of New Belgium Brewery’s hazy, haymaking, high-powered brand family? Were we not hailing its groundbreaking success in the convenience store channel less than nine months back? We were, dear reader, we were. But time marches ever forward, and even the Voodoo Ranger himself must march with it — or be left behind.
As we’ve discussed, the present circumstances are fairly bleak for the industry at large. The latest batch of data from the Brewers Association, ably delivered by chief economist and vice president of strategy Bart Watson and company during the trade group’s mid-year update last week, isn’t categorically negative, but it’s close. “More Craft Beer Drinkers are Drinking Less Craft Beer,” as Brewbound’s Jess Infante (who is not related to Hop Take’s Dave Infante, by the way), summed it up last week.
That’s good news if you make, distribute, or sell any of the stuff craft beer drinkers are also drinking, like imports (hello, Modelo), hard cider (could be its year, many are saying), or canned cocktails (the High Noon-ification of the American pool party continues apace). It isn’t really good news for craft brewers and their supply chain partners, though. Selling more craft beer to more people is an unqualified win. This is… ah, not that.
By definition, segment-wide scoring never tells the full story of an individual brewery. Some craft breweries are doing well right now! Also by definition, the BA hasn’t considered NBB a “craft brewer” since it was acquired by the Japanese conglomerate Kirin via the latter’s Lion Little World Beverages subsidiary in 2019. (Ditto Bell’s Brewery, which the Japanese group scooped up in 2021.) But to millions of drinkers across the country, the firm is synonymous with craft beer. Your mileage may vary. More importantly, though, to hundreds of regionally and nationally distributed craft breweries across the country, the success of NBB’s “rangerous” sub-brand has been a beacon for sales growth shining out from increasingly darkening skies for the segment.
Voodoo Ranger may not have been the first craft brand to put high-alcohol-by-volume hazy India pale ale varietals into 19.2-ounce “stovepipe” packaging and start taking the single-serve c-store customer seriously, but it was without doubt the one that first cracked that code at scale, and others followed suit. From Goose Island Brewing Co.’s Tropical Beer Hug (a 9.9 percent ABV imperial IPA sold in stovepipes with a bear wearing sunglasses), to Big Juicy Ballard from Seattle’s Redhook Brewery (9.5 percent IIPA; sold in stovepipes; mustachioed fisticuffs-type guy with sunglasses), to Sheep Mullet, a stovepiped 9 percent double IPA by Richmond, Va.’s Hardywood Park Craft Brewery that bears a hirsute ewe wearing — you guessed it — sunglasses, America’s cold boxes are full of evidence that firms of all sizes and ownership structures have noticed Voodoo Ranger’s success.
How could they not? For a long time, “success” was the most notable thing about Voodoo Ranger. After remixing its “Ranger” collection in 2018 with the “Voodoo” prefix and its ubiquitous, sunglasses-wearing skeleton mascot, the brand took off like a rocket ship. “We were an ‘also ran’ in IPA at that point, which is wild to think about now,” senior brand manager David Knospe told VinePair in 2022. Later that year, Knospe would accept Brewbound’s award for Innovation of the Year on Voodoo Ranger’s behalf, observing there was a time when “craft or IPA just didn’t fit in the c-store environment, and that’s changed a lot.”
2022 was also the year Voodoo Ranger seemed to fully uncouple itself from the segment’s growth curve, racking up 30 percent year-over-year sales in off-premise growth while total craft sales declined around 8 percent, according to analysis by Good Beer Hunting’s Kate Bernot. The brand’s 9.5 percent Juice Force IIPA was flying, and its 9.5 percent Fruit Force “fruit punch” IIPA was about to touch down. Midway through 2023, the brand family was still going gangbusters, boasting five of Circana’s 30 best-growing brands in the off-premise in September 2023; by the end of last year, only Blue Moon was selling more in dollars than Voodoo Ranger Hazy IPA or Juice Force in the entire segment. Molson Coors’ controversial craft brand was sliding, as it had been for the past few years, so closing out 2023, it wasn’t inconceivable to imagine a member of NBB’s pioneering, semi-standalone brand family would claim the No. 1 spot in the off-premise within a couple years.
It still might. In fact, given the American drinking public’s lukewarm response to Blue Moon’s own rebrand, and the broader trend favoring both the c-store channel and higher-ABV beers, it’s downright likely. Roughly halfway through 2024, both Juice Force and Voodoo Ranger Hazy IIPA are still growing, and Blue Moon’s once-massive base is still slowly shrinking. But the beer-marketing alchemy that NBB tapped into for its meteoric rise over the past five years is showing some signs of fading throughout the bony brand family.
Successive four-week sales snapshots from Circana in June and July of this year indicate the skeleton’s key isn’t quite the panacea it once was (or at least, once seemed to be). Four Voodoo Ranger beers in the top 30 posted double-digit dollar sales losses between 14 and 23.5 percent in the four-week period through mid-July: Fruit Force, Juicy Haze, IPA, and Hoppy Pack. They’re all down year-to-date, too. Fruit Force, Brewbound’s Zoe Licata noted, trailed only Leinenkugel’s Shandy Seasonal in losses year-over-year — and that’s after just one year on the market. Ouch.
None of this spells voo-doom for NBB’s tremendously successful skeletal juice-bomber squadron as a “platform,” to use the marketing jargon. There are plenty of real winners under the Voodoo Ranger banner that are outpacing the segment, at least as far as sales are concerned. (Your humble Hop Take editor is no great fan of big, honkin’ IPAs; there’s no accounting for taste.) I’d expect that to hold, especially as misleading tales about economic woe drive customers to seek out more bang for their beer buck and more single-serve stuff for flexibility. But scan data show some genuinely softening sales in the Voodoo Ranger Cinematic Universe. Why?
The answers, I think, reveal this extraordinary juggernaut as an exception that’s proved some beer marketing rules, rather than rewritten them. Voodoo Ranger pioneered the c-store for craft beer; many breweries have since followed them there. None come close to NBB’s sales in the channel, but they’re taking some dollars and placements that might have otherwise gone to Voodoo Ranger. (This is likely happening within the family, too. Roughly 18 months after the launch of Juice Force, Juicy Haze’s once-promising growth had turned into substantial declines. It makes sense: Who would buy the latter when the former, with higher ABV and a more intense name, is right next to it?) The brand family spread the stovepipe gospel far and wide; its competitors have heard the good word. That’s a major differentiator gone in a fridge now filled with 19.2-ounce cans that are emblazoned with technicolor ‘toons packing serious punches that taste like punches. Meanwhile, spirits-based canned cocktails are making inroads into the c-store and other retail channels that were once beer’s walled gardens in many states, doing with new legislation what BeatBox, BuzzBallz, and Fireball did with close readings of existing legislation a few years ago.
In the Darwinian bloodbath that is this nation’s beer aisle, the fittest Voodoo Ranger offerings aren’t just surviving — they’re still thriving. The stragglers are falling prey to in-brand cannibalism, stiffer competition, and line overextensions. Those aren’t this brand’s problems in particular, they’re just beer-industry problems in general. The real magic of Voodoo Ranger was staving them off for so long.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
The idea of a “Keurig for beer” has animated brewing-industry entrepreneurs for at least a couple decades, because beer is expensive to make and ship, its routes to market are convoluted, and excise taxes eat margins. It would be a much more attractive business if you could simply ship a customer the ingredients for a beer in ink-cartridge form, then have them make it on their countertop, right? Right! The latest entrant to this search for the Holy Hoppy Grail is OneTap, a so-called “beer printer” from Belgian startup Bar.on that’s earned some early praise for its high-quality outputs. Don’t panic yet, brewers — this thing is still a prototype, and even if it makes it into production, there’s no guarantee drinkers would adopt it. Remember PicoBrew? Or slightly different, and way worse, Juicero?
📈 Ups…
The silver lining from a rough mid-year update from the Brewers Association is that more people are drinking craft beer (albeit less of it)… Beer is having a generally tough go in the on-premise, but CGA found non-alcoholic brew sales up almost 34 percent on the year through mid-May 2024… Anchor Union is sharing stories from longtime fans of the San Francisco brewery who are calling on its new billionaire owner to rehire its old workers…
📉 …and downs
Total beverage-alcohol sales in the NielsenIQ-tracked off-premise were down 2.4 percent in June 2024, with total beer down 2.2 percent… Beer inflation is still outpacing the other categories “at home” in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index for June… Hulk Hogan introduced Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention, further underscoring the platitudinous bullshit behind his corny “Real American Beer”…
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