Companies as large as AB typically have trouble seeing beyond their own operation, and understanding what’s happening in a market as diverse as craft beer. When the lead-time on a new brand is 18-24 months, there’s little advantage in being a fast, or first-mover with new flavors and recipes — in fact, there’s a lot of risk in being too early. AB has introduced brands previously that barely trickled out of St. Louis, not because they weren’t thoughtful, progressive beers, but because the market wasn’t ready at a scale necessary for AB to put resources behind it. Goose Island, on the other hand, represents a new conduit to the market for AB’s research and development managers.



“You can’t always be first,” admits Jane Killebrew, AB’s director of brewing, quality, and innovation, “but you don’t want to be last.” Killebrew seems to have a new spark in her eye as well, after years of creating brands for AB. Her most recent success was Straw-ber-rita and Lime-a-rita — she loves it when a product nails its intended market. “It’s aways a blend of insights, brewing, and marketing,” she explains. “No one cared about the Ritas when they were in big bottles and called “mixology." But in 8-ounce cans they were unique, cute, sold in convenience stores and branded with Bud Light — it was huge.” These days, even some small craft producers are trying to make their own “Rita clones” on the back of the Radler craze that took over the Midwest the past couple years.

Often, innovation in the beer world starts top-down. Marketing identifies an opportunity to sell a product in a new way, or to new audiences, or to simply keep up with trends, and the brewing side has to create a beer that meets that need, like it did with Michelob Ultra, targeting the health-conscious 45+ crowd that simply didn’t drink much beer anymore. But working with brands like Goose Island, a lot of the conversation is reversed. You have a beer like 312, and you have to figure out how to adjust the larger system to accommodate the beer instead. “We did 20 trials of 312,” claims Killebrew. The trials involved constant tasting and debate with Brett Porter and the Goose team as AB tried to match the flavors and aromas in their Baldwinsville, New York brewery. “It’s usually way easier to invent a new brand than to try and copy an existing brand,” says Killebrew.