Middle-of-Road Beer = Big Bucks = Happy Shareholders. MOR Beer Therefore = Smart Beer

I know that among the beer geeks, this is the standard view: Big Breweries make bland beer. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and disagree (which, yes, I so hate to do. Stan is smarter than me and he'll likely chop up this post and use it to mop his floor. . . .) Big Breweries make profits. They do so in order to make shareholders happy. That's what they do, because their owners went into business to make lots and lots of money.

And the way they could make money was by making beer that appealed to the largest number of people. Which, by definition, is a beer that contains a balance of malt and hops. Not a malt-rich beer.

Not a beer stuffed with as many hops as the brewer could stuff into it using his keeno, whiz-bang, hops-stuffing device. It's a beer that hits the middle road and therefore appeals to the most potential buyers.

Ain't no one, and I mean no. one., gonna get Big Rich making beer only for the roughly 50% of the population that prefers the flavor of hops.

Ain't no one gonna get Big Rich by making beer only for people like me, who prefer the flavor of malt.

The people who will make Big Bucks (and make their shareholders happy) are the ones who hit the sweet spot in the middle. So: it's not bland beer. It's smart beer.

(Because of the book I'm working on. I've been spending a lot of brain power lately thinking about how capitalism works, and why and how big corporations grow -- and thereby attract shareholders, and then grow more by making shareholders happy.)