CRAFT by Under My Host® Issue No. 16 Made in America: Part I | Page 21

You just have to hop on the road of logos and lifestyle blogs and try to keep ahead
of the *cough* aesthetic *cough*.
But speaking of roads, where is this road leading for beer? We have Bud,
Lite(Miller), Bud Light, Coors, Old Milwaukee, Pabst, Schlitz, ad infinitum. If I
put these beers in front of you in a blind taste test, I guarantee that you wouldn’t
be able to tell whose beer is whose. People get passionate and sometimes down-
right worked up over their brand of beer.
Think back to choosing your brand of macro lager, maybe it was a cheap pitch-
er special of Old Milwaukee at your first neighborhood bar. Maybe it was the
baseball game you and your dad went to where you experienced your first Coors
poured down your back. It can happen a thousand different ways, but it always
ends up the same way--with the decal of Calvin peeing on a Miller Lite logo on
the back window of your Chevy Silverado, and Bud Light truck nuts hanging from
the hitch.
This progression is what I know, and for your information, Against the Grain
(AtG) branded truck nuts are basically what our whole business is based on. We
want every truck nut sold to be AtG truck nuts; then I will have you in the palm of
my hand. (Eww.)
However, my whole vision of a worldwide AtG truck nut empire shriveled up last
fall when I wondered the streets of Tokyo and found out that sometimes, even
in beer, brands don’t matter. Moving past the wheels of drying fish, near the
railway station and into small, tightly packed bars. We would look at the drink
menus, which luckily, were also in English. For beer, the menu would only list
“Draft” or “Bottle.”
After several instances of the same listing at bars and restaurants around the
city, it dawned on me that yellow, fizzy lager in a glass is just known as “draft”
in Japan, although by inspection of the empty kegs on the street, there were
several producers and beer names. Obviously, no one cares where the beer came
from or who made it. Not one shit was given about what spring water the beer
was made from, what wood it was aged with, whether it was less filling or tasted
great, or what it had to do with horses, dogs, frogs, bears, mice, or Bob Uecker. I
know this is not the case with other Japanese products, but macro-lager beer in
Japan is immune from branding.
So, what is the answer? How do you build a brand in Japan when we take for
granted that there is even a foundation to build upon? What is the way to over-
come the cultural differences in beer, to capitalize on variety, to attach more
than physical attributes to our products?
I have a complimentary pair of AtG truck nuts for whoever can give me the an-
swer.
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