Back in May, the Wall Street Journal ran an article about Grimbergen Abbey in Belgium. Like many European abbeys, Grimbergen, located in Brussels’ northern outskirts, has a long and storied history of brewing beer. It is not an unbroken history, however. The abbey’s first beer was brewed by Grimbergen’s Norbentine monks in 1128. Periods of unrest meant that brewing ceased three times during the abbey’s history, with the most recent occurring during the French Revolution (1789-1799). After the Revolution, brewing never returned to the abbey. and, in the middle of the twentieth century, the monks licensed the brand to a local Belgian brewery, Brouwerij Maes . In 2008, such was Grimbergen’s success, the brand name was purchased by the Danish brewing giant Carlsberg. And it was Carlsberg who made the decision that Grimbergen should once again be brewed at the abbey. With Carlsberg money, a new 10,000 square foot state-of-the art brewery has been constructed to bring brewing back to Grimbergen.

As I read the Wall Street Journal article, one sentence stood out and hit me squarely in the eye – “The resurrection has furnished its sponsor, Carlsberg, with its own kind of holy grail: unique and authentic brews.” In particular, it was the adjective authentic that struck me as an interesting choice. Earlier this year, I published a book chapter which I titled “Craft Beer Tourism: The Search for Authenticity, Diversity, and Great Beer“. In researching material for that chapter I read quite a bit about the concepts of authentic/authenticity.

To better understand the meaning of any word, a good place to start is a dictionary. Perusing online dictionaries reveals the following definitions of authentic – “not false or imitation“, “being what it is claimed to be“, and “not false or copied“.

But what about consumers? How do they perceive and define authenticity? In a paper published in the journal Organization Science in 2014, Balazs Kovacs, Glenn Carroll, and David Lehman, explored how the ownership structure of restaurants impacted consumer views of authenticity. Interestingly, the first step in their study was to survey consumers and identify both synonyms and antonyms that consumers associated with the adjective authentic. Consumer-identified synonyms for authentic included genuine, real, and legitimate, while antonyms included false, phony, and scam.

For a growing number of consumers, authenticity appears to be increasingly valued. Indeed, according to B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore, in their 2007 book Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want, “in industry after industry, in customer after customer, authenticity has overtaken quality as the prevailing purchasing criterion.” When it comes to authenticity it seems that ownership of the company producing the product or providing the service matters. Analyzing the language used by restaurant patrons in 1.2 million reviews of over 18,000 restaurants on the Yelp platform in three cities – Los Angeles, New York, and Dallas – Balazs and his colleagues found that consumers perceived independent, family-owned restaurants as being more authentic than chain, non-family-owned restaurants. In other words, when it comes to authenticity, ownership matters.

The relationship between ownership and authenticity has been something of a thorny issue for several decades within the world of brewing. Those of you who are craft beer enthusiasts have probably sampled one of the wonderful beers brewed by Trappist monks in one of their fourteen abbeys in Europe and the United States. Trappist beers are considered among the best in the world. For example, Westvleteren 12 XII, a Belgian Quad brewed at the Sint-Sixtus Abbey in Westvleteren in Belgium was recently rated the third best beer in the world by reviewers at RateBeer.com. Such has been the popularity and high quality of Trappist beers over the decades, other breweries started to brand and market some of their beers as “Abbey Ales”. One example of such an “Abbey Ale” is Leffe, which is brewed by the global behemoth AB InBev. While once brewed by monks at the Abbey of Leffe, today the beer is brewed at the Stella Artois Brewery in Leuven, Belgium. Mass produced “Abbey” Ales attempted to cash in on the popularity of Trappist beers. They did so by utilizing images that suggested a monastic connection, such as an image of an abbey or a monk drinking beer.

As noted by Michael Beverland and his colleagues in a 2008 paper published in the Journal of Advertising, the breweries who marketed these beers “successfully positioned their products as Trappist-styled products through subtle marketing and use of imagery, color cues, and font styles to suggest authenticity.”

Not surprisingly, the Trappists felt threatened by the growing number of “Abbey Ales” that seemed to be causing confusion among beer drinkers. As a result, they took steps to mitigate the confusion. In 1998, to protect the authenticity of their product, the Trappists established the International Trappist Association (ITA) and trademarked “Trappist”. According to the ITA website, the Association was established to “inform consumers of the origin and authenticity of Trappist products with no ambiguity.” In addition, the intent of the Association is to protect ” the fundamental values associated with every Trappist product” and to ensure that “the Trappist name is not used improperly” and “does not mislead anyone”. Only beers made within the walls of a member abbey may carry the “Authentic Trappist Product” label.

In some respects, the “Authentic Trappist Product” label is similar to the “Independent Craft” seal” that was launched by the Brewers Association in 2017. This label can only be used by authentic craft breweries. The creation of the Independent Craft seal was driven by similar developments that had necessitated the creation of the Authentic Trappist Product label. As a result of the emergence of “crafty” beers (think Blue Moon) and the purchase of craft breweries by mega-breweries (think AB InBev’s purchase of Goose Island Beer Co.), there was increasing confusion in the marketplace as to which beers were brewed by an authentic craft brewery and which were made by a brewery owned by AB InBev, Heineken, etc. Between, 2011 and 2017, AB InBev purchased ten craft breweries in the United States, including Goose Island Beer Co. in Chicago, Il (purchased 2011), Four Peaks Brewing Co. of Tempe, AZ (2015), and Wicked Weed Brewing of Asheville, NC (2017). Other former craft breweries purchased by large multinational brewing companies include Lagunitas Brewing Company of Petaluma, CA which was purchased by Heineken in 2015 and Atwater Brewery of Detroit, MI which was purchased by Molson Coors in 2020.

Multinational giants such as AB InBev purchase craft breweries because it is the most straightforward route to gain a foothold in the lucrative craft beer market. They are, in effect trying, to purchase the authenticity that is associated with craft breweries. This was made quite apparent by Andy Goeler who worked for AB InBev and was assigned to Goose Island after its acquisition. According to Mr. Goeler, “we bought Goose Island for what Goose Island was: authentic, very credible”.

Why do companies value being able to promote their products as authentic. According to Kovacs and his colleagues in the aforementioned article “many modern organization go to great lengths to project an image of authenticity, believing that it will create value” for them. In other words, authenticity, or the appearance of authenticity, sells. With respect to beer, a 2018 study by Jarret Hart in the Journal of Wine Economics found that consumers were willing to pay between $0.72 and $1.04 more for a pint of beer produced by an independently-owned craft brewery than one produced by a “craft brewery” that was owned by corporate breweries such as AB InBev.

Ownership, and transparency regarding ownership, matters. Unfortunately, large multinational brewers are not always transparent when it comes to ownership. This is why labels such as “Authentic Trappist Product” and “Independent Craft” are necessary. They help consumers distinguish the authentic from the inauthentic. As stated by Michael Beverland and his colleagues in the aforementioned 2008 study, “identifying a product as authentic” helps “consumers gain control over their consumption decisions”.

Further Reading:

Beverland, Michael B., Adam Lindgreen, and Michiel W. Vink. 2008. Projecting authenticity through advertising: Consumer judgments of advertisers’ claims. Journal of Advertising, Volume 37, Issue 1, pp. 5–15.

Hart, Jarret. 2018. Drink beer for science: An experiment on consumer preferences for local craft beer. Journal of Wine Economics, Colume13, Issue 4, pp. 429–441.

Kovacs, Balazs, Glenn R. Carroll, and David W. Lehman. 2014. Authenticity and Consumer Value Ratings: Empirical Tests from the Restaurant Domain. Organization Science, Volume 25, Issue 2, pp. 458-478.