Amid declining sales for most of its flagship IPAs and following a spate of public controversies and lawsuits, San Diego’s Stone Brewing hopes to introduce a new, “more welcoming” version of the brewery with a portfolio built around a “Baja-inspired lager,” Buenaveza Salt & Lime Lager. It’s a sharp departure from the overtly aggressive attitude—and boldly flavored IPAs—that defined the brewery for 25 years, and made it an icon among hops-loving drinkers.
Maria Stipp, Stone’s new CEO—and formerly CEO of Lagunitas Brewing Company—said in a February interview with Brewbound that Buenaveza is part of the goal of “resetting the tone and manner of the brand,” calling the Lager the brewery’s “number-one priority.” The Lager launched last August and is something of a necessity. While still one of the most-stocked beers on shelves across the country, Stone IPA has been in decline for three years in chain retail stores tracked by market research company IRI. In IRI’s most recent 52-week sales period ending April 18, Stone IPA dollar sales declined -14% while craft beer as a category was +11.6%
The change from focusing on West Coast IPA to Lager is part of what Stipp envisions as an inviting, less “off-putting” brand image. The new attitude is meant to support sales of more approachable beer styles like Buenaveza, its spinoff Buenavida Hard Seltzers, Dayfall Belgian White, and Features & Benefits low-calorie IPA. (Stone declined to make anyone from the company available for an interview with Good Beer Hunting, and also declined to answer questions via email.)
Stone’s turnaround hinges on reintroducing the brewery to drinkers while pushing a less-IPA-focused portfolio. It’s a tall order for a brewery that, for 25 years, has derided the very styles it’s now chosen as top priorities.
Whether from Buenaveza, Buenavida, or another new product, Stone needs a shot in the arm. Stone IPA is no longer the workhorse it once was: That brand made up roughly 22% of the brewery’s chain retail sales in 2020, down from 26.5% the year prior. Of its year-round IPAs, only Delicious IPA and Fear.Movie.Lions Double IPA posted positive growth in chain retail in 2020, increasing dollar sales +25% and +54%, respectively.
While COVID forced most U.S. drinkers to buy beer off-premise at grocery or big-box stores—giving a boost to many national and regional breweries—Stone struggled. It had the retail placements and infrastructure to succeed in chain retail, but didn’t capitalize on the opportunity the way its peer breweries did.
Over the past year, Stone’s California cohort generally outpaced it. Stone’s total chain retail sales grew just shy of 5% in the 52-week period ending April 18. In the same period, Firestone Walker Brewing Company grew 23%; Russian River Brewing grew 42%; and Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. grew 15%. Nationally, those brands—as well as small, local breweries—threaten the dominance Stone has long had in the IPA space and beyond.
In the Brewbound interview, Stipp references consumer research Stone conducted that showed the two words drinkers most associated with the brewery were “quality” and “IPA.” With Buenaveza, the brewery hopes to retain the former while pivoting from the latter.
As of April 18, Buenaveza Lager had sold $741,997 in chain retail stores, roughly the same dollar amount as Bell’s Brewery’s Amber Ale, Four Corners Brewing Company’s El Chingon IPA, Highland Brewing Company’s Gaelic Ale, and New Belgium Brewing Company’s Mountain Time Premium Lager. Stone enjoys national distribution, though, while those comparable beers are either focused regionally or even more locally than that. Buenaveza’s success may hinge on whether retailers and drinkers are paying Stone enough attention to register this new direction.
“While someone like myself that’s more deeply steeped in the scene for a long time sees [Buenaveza] and gets a little bit of that cognitive dissonance, I think most people are just happy to have a tasty, light, approachable beer available to them,” says Ian Cheesman, a writer for San Diego Beer News. He says a broader stylistic focus on easier-drinking beers will “expand the tent” of Stone drinkers. “If you don’t let your perceptions of a brand or the personality that brand expresses get in the way of that, it’s ultimately a really good thing.”
But not letting one’s perceptions of a brand affect one’s decision whether or not to buy its beer is nearly impossible. Given how saturated beer shelves are, drinkers’ attitudes toward a brewery are motivating factors in choosing that brand over another. And until this year, Stone’s attitude was one of near indifference to whether it was popular or not. (“This is an aggressive beer. You probably won’t like it,” read Arrogant Bastard Ale’s label.)
Gene Fielden, beer buyer at the North Park location of San Diego bottle shop Bottlecraft, says he wasn’t aware that Buenaveza was such a priority for Stone, nor that it was part of a broader effort toward more approachable styles. In fact, when first contacted for this article, he admitted to not having tried Buenaveza; a can was still in his fridge from weeks prior.
A representative from Stone Distributing, the company’s wholesale division that self-distributes its beers in the area, had given Fielden samples of Buenaveza as well as the brewery’s new Witbier, Dayfall, and had introduced them almost apologetically: “He said, ‘I know this is a little different from what we’ve done before.’”
Once Fielden tried Buenaveza on April 28, though, he liked it, and says he anticipates placing an order for it ahead of an expected heat wave in the area. Fielden says he thought the beer was well made, and it would be the only lime-flavored Lager in his store.
“I had been given a can a while back and it was sort of languishing in the fridge. I’m glad you spurred me to say, ‘We should actually give this a try,’” he tells GBH.
Because of their wide availability in stores like Costco and CVS, Stone’s flagship beers aren’t something Bottlecraft North Park normally carries; it can’t compete on the prices those stores offer. And as consumers’ IPA palates shifted toward more aromatic, less bitter hop profiles in recent years, Stone seemed to be “forced to follow the market rather than lead it,” Fielden says. As a result, he hadn’t been keeping close tabs on every new Stone release, because his customers weren’t demanding them. “I fear, for many of them, it’s just not on their radar.”
This is the uphill battle for Stone: How to introduce a new and dramatically different image to a customer base that may have already moved on.
The extent of the turnaround Stipp is proposing is huge. She tells Brewbound that one of her early decisions upon joining the company was to lower Stone’s pricing in its home market where it self-distributes its beer and can alter prices quickly. This was intended to make Stone beers, especially flagship Stone IPA, more competitive with other craft beers, and to allow retailers to advertise Stone alongside other breweries’ products in ads and sales circulars. (For his part, Fielden says he was not aware of the recent change in pricing.)
Those pricing changes to make core products like Stone IPA and Stone Delicious IPA more competitive have shown promise: In California grocery, convenience, and other chain stores, both performed more strongly than the rest of Stone's portfolio, holding steady from the final quarter of 2020 into the first of 2021.
Pricing is one strategy. But the turnaround also requires an embrace of beer styles—and an attitude—that Stone had openly mocked since its earliest days. A 2014 Inc. article titled “How to Market Like an Arrogant Bastard” lists four tenets of Stone’s philosophy at the time:
Attitude is everything.
Pick a fight.
Don’t fit in.
Ally with other outcasts.
While Stipp tries to shed this combative persona, Stone is a massive ship to steer. In the midst of the Buenaveza push, Stone’s social media is still promoting IPAs with 9.4% ABV, 100+ IBUs, and a “ruinous nature.” Even in announcing the new Buenavida seltzer line, brewery co-founder Greg Koch strikes his trademark curmudgeonly pose. One of the most provocative figures in beer, Koch is bombastic (he earned and embraced the title of “Beer Jesus”) and at times confrontational. True to form, he reacted somewhat ambivalently to Stone’s new hard seltzer line.
“My intermittent interactions with the world of hard seltzers had left me… and I’m working hard to be kind here… nonplussed,” he said in a press release. “The category as a whole confused me, and I struggled to see why we would want to play in a space that seemed to overtly espouse a philosophy of mediocrity.” Eventually, though, Koch admits he came around: “I’m fine with it even though I know that I’m likely to get merciless sh*t over us releasing a hard seltzer… and perhaps deservedly so with all the fun I’ve poked at the category.”
Koch appears to still be processing what it means for his brewery to sell the types of beverages it once railed against. Even as it tries to chart its future, Stone is still constrained by its past. To not acknowledge its previously combative attitude would create what Cheesman earlier described as “cognitive dissonance,” but it’s perhaps also counterproductive to keep harping on that messaging as the brewery tries to change course.
The tension is also true of Buenaveza Salt & Lime Lager. In an announcement about Buenaveza’s launch, the brewery writes: “There’s a slight tartness and balanced light bitterness (‘balanced’ and ‘light’ by Stone standards, that is—don’t let this genre defiance distract you).” Koch famously derided mass-market Lagers as a “fizzy yellow facsimile of beer,” before doing a 180 and releasing Who You Callin’ Wussie Pilsner in 2016. The brewery no longer brews that beer or another Lager, Tropic of Thunder, released in 2019.
“They do have a heritage that indicates an opposition to these things. I think the only thing they can reasonably do is lean into it sort of unabashedly,” Cheesman says. “It might even go some ways to say, ‘Perhaps we were a bit too brash in our earlier characterizations, or even [acknowledge that] they felt this is what the beer culture needed then, and this is what it needs now.”
Stone has spent most of its history defining itself in opposition to beer made by the country’s largest breweries. Now, those lighter-drinking styles and a more approachable attitude are key to the brewery’s survival. Drinkers have long known what Stone isn’t. Will they take the time to find out what it could be?
Words by Kate Bernot