These are Dogfish Head's new sausages, made in a collaboration with Coleman Natural Foods. (Click Image To Enlarge)
DOGFISH HEAD HAS TEAMED WITH COLEMAN TO CREATE A LINE OF SAUSAGES WITH A TWIST: THEY’RE SPECIALLY FORMULATED TO PAIR WITH SPECIFIC DOGFISH HEAD BEERS.
I bite into a perfectly cooked bratwurst, but I don’t taste bratwurst. I taste honey and apricots--maybe even the hint of a saison. And as I follow the bit up with a swig of an oak-aged IPA, I can taste as the sweetness of the pork transitions seamlessly to vanilla and then to hops, a continuum of flavor that makes me appreciate both entities anew.
They'll come in four flavors (left to right)--Traditional Bratwurst, Heirloom Italian Brat, Spicy Espresso Brat, and Greek Feta Brat. Each is infused with Dogfish Head beer. (Click Image To Enlarge)
I’m not at a pretentious gastropub paying through the nose for a prix fixe food and beer pairing. I’m on my back porch, grilling up a new line of sausages by Dogfish Head and Coleman Natural Foods (Perdue’s natural food line), sipping on Dogfish Head’s Burton Baton IPA. The bratwurst has a flavor profile designed specifically to be paired with this beer, the result of Coleman’s food scientists teaming up with Dogfish Head brewmasters for months of taste testing and iteration.
But what makes them particularly interesting is that each of these sausages have been designed specifically to pair with certain Dogfish Head beers. (Click Image To Enlarge)
The result is that, starting today, select gourmet stores in the Northeast will carry Dogfish Head–branded sausages, including flavors like Spicy Espresso and Heirloom Italian, each flavored with beer reduction. As a consumer snags a pack of their, say, Greek Feta Chicken Brats (infused with actual Midas Touch beer) and flip over the pack, they’ll see two pairing suggestions: a Dogfish Head Indian Brown Ale or a Burton Baton IPA. Assumably, that customer might go snag a six-pack to match then, too.
So their Spicy Espresso Brats are made with espresso powder, minced habanero and cumin, along with a bit of Chicory Stout. But you then are meant to pair that with a Dogifsh Head India Brown Ale or Sixty-One (an IPA with syrah grape must). (Click Image To Enlarge)
“This is going to be huge,” I think as I reach for another sausage that I follow up with Dogish Head’s Sixty-One, an IPA mixed with syrah grape must. It's rare I've felt so gleefully pretentious in my own home.
In my own taste test, I found the pairings both delicious and fascinating in a really fun, academic way. (Click Image To Enlarge)
The truth is, America's renaissance of craft beer is driving an increasingly crowded market. When Dogfish Head launched in 1995, there were 600 craft breweries in the U.S., and maybe a couple opened every week. Today, there are 2,500 craft breweries around the country (the most since the 1880s), and two more open every day. Yet for all the new breweries, craft beer can only claim 6.5% of the $99 billion US beer market.
Even beers I wouldn't consider myself a fan of--like Midas Touch, which is considered somewhere between wine and mead--was particularly tasty as it bounced off the flavors of the Greek Feta's dairy kick. (Click Image To Enlarge)
Dogfish Head founder and president Sam Calagione admits.
“I don’t think, mathematically, that the current pace is viable for years to come. There’s going to be some inevitable shakeout and economic darwinism. Some of these entries won’t make it.”
Now Calagione is quick to point out that he doesn’t actually view his fellow craft brewers as competition--that designation belongs to wine, spirits, and the “craft” brewers that are actually owned by international corporations. Besides, he explains, beer drinkers of today aren’t like our fathers were. We don’t decide Schlitz is our go-to beer and drink it every day for eternity. We’re promiscuous. We want to have a “whole quiver” of different craft beers in our fridge.
Dogfish Head is also collaborating on a line of pickles... (Click Image To Enlarge)
Even still, Calagione clearly recognizes the value of diversification in an increasingly crowded marketplace, and food is a natural complement of beer. (It’s why Sierra Nevada makes a mustard and Stone has a licensing deal to make hot sauce.) But there hasn’t been a brewery that’s committed to a full lineup of foods, which Dogfish Head saw as a huge, missed opportunity.
Calagione explains.
“Everyone doesn’t eat out at a restaurant every night, and if you’re driving you can’t have too many beers at a restaurant. How do we bring that artisanal-beer dinner concept into the home?”
...and chowder. (Click Image To Enlarge)
Food pairings at the supermarket level are by no means a new idea. Companies like Kraft leverage the collective strength of their 55 or so power brands at the supermarket, mixing Oscar Mayer deli meats and Capri Sun juice drinks in the same Lunchables box.
But we haven’t really seen this approach applied to higher-end goods to re-create the fine-dining restaurant experience. Dogfish Head wanted to create a complete meal of what they’re calling “beer-centric foods.” So they teamed with Brooklyn Brine to make "hop pickles," and Sea Watch to make chowder (both are on sale now). But the pièce de résistance of the lineup would be a main course protein. Pairing beer and sausages was just a natural fit. Coleman and Dogfish Head struck up a deal to collaborate on a release.
With all of these "beer-centric foods" in place, Dogfish Head would like to be able to sell you a whole gastropub-level food and beer pairing to experience at home. And I think they're on to something. But may I be so bold as to make one suggestion? Variety packs. (Click Image To Enlarge)
Coleman's Brand Director Jody Hallman explains.
“It started with, we’ll take one bottle of Raison D'Etre and put it into a small, 40-pound batch of meat, mix, and see how it goes.”
From there, a one-year process of R&D followed, in which Coleman and Dogfish Head went from 15 ideas for sausages to 10 mixed and tested sausages, to 5 flavors that would eventually make the cut.
For the Coleman team, mixing beer into recipes was a new challenge. But on top of that, pairing those tastes with another beer brought in a whole other slew of considerations. Because Dogfish Head didn’t want to simply match the taste of a pilsner in a sausage with the same pilsner you were sipping on; they wanted to enhance the complexity of the experience.
Calagione explains.
“There’s exponentially more flavors when you have one beer in the sausage but have a different beer from our portfolio to pair it with.”
(That might sound silly, but he’s absolutely right. I found my home taste-test to be academically fascinating.)
That involved several iterative taste tests with both teams. Were the sausages good on their own? Were they good with beer? Which beers were they best with? Then the sausages were offered at Dogfish Head’s own brewery--and eventually, food truck--where eager customers actually paid to serve as a test market. (It’s the same model the brewery uses to test new beers before taking them nationwide.)
The approach to one sausage was proving particularly tricky: the Italian. While the flavor was always in the running, formulating an Italian sausage for the mass market palate is actually more difficult than one might expect.
Hallman explains.
“You think Italian is going to be a pretty simplistic flavor profile, but it can be pretty complex because everyone's perception of what it should be differs dramatically,”
The solution proposed by Calagione was to try his Sicilian grandma’s family recipe, who’d actually sold sausages out of a storefront while his grandpa made bootleg wine in the basement (a jug would go to the best sausage customers). The story was too good for Coleman to resist.
Hallman laughs.
“We cut our first samples of that, and me and our lead of R&D were like, OK, we’re going to try this, what if it doesn’t taste good? You get kind of nervous. It could taste great, and that’d be ideal! But the whole time it was like, what if it doesn’t?”
Coleman admits to making some recipe adjustments for commercialization purposes--like saucing a whole hog--but the recipe made it through relatively unfettered. It’s quite spicy for a supermarket product, with a kick of oregano and a strong pepperoni finish.
Hallman confesses.
“You can make the same pork brat for a while, and it kind of feels a little mundane. This project stepped into our culture and really shook it up.”
At this point in my tasting, I’m juggling four sausages and three beers while carefully referencing a neatly printed cheat sheet. A bite here. A swig there. But as sensitively as I try to taste, my palate is now shot. The yeast, hops, pork, and seasonings have blended into a cacophony of flavors my mind has grown too tired (or maybe too fuzzy?) to distinguish.
And I can’t remember the last time I had so much fun eating anything that came in shrinkwrap.
Dogfish Head hasn’t just licensed a line of sausages with their logo on it. They’ve found a way to translate a very particular fine-dining experience into processed food. It’s why, even if any old beer and brat will taste fantastic together, Dogfish Head’s will offer something unique.
That is, until every food and beverage company in existence copies the idea. And if they have any sense, they will.
COMMENTARY: Boy, don't those sausages look good? And, I bet they taste and smell just as good. I think Dogfish Head's strategy of partnering with Coleman to increase sales of their brand sausages, pickles and chowder is a great way to increase sales of both products, and will certainly help coleman sell more BBQ grills, lighter fluid and accessories. This type of marketing strategy is often referred to as a complimentary products strategy.
If you sell gourmet muffins, you have a likely market for gourmet coffee.
That's the concept behind complementary products. They do exactly that - they complement each other. One might enhance the other as the case might be with wine and cheese, or eyeshadow and mascara.
Products might complement each other from a standpoint of necessity. One example is a computer and a monitor; another would be a vacuum cleaner and vacuum bags.
A customer who has already bought from you is more likely to buy from you again. A customer is also more likely to buy a product that complements one they've just bought.
Selling a pair, or a combination, of complementary products is another smart marketing option. It's easier for the customer to buy from only one vendor and make a single purchase. Offering a discount for this bundle of products can further increase your changes of making the sale.
We all know about bundling. It's become an art form for the communications industry. Customers buy their long distance, cell phone, cable, and internet from a company in exchange for paying less than they would for the individual products and services.
It can make sense to give away a complementary service. Printers sometimes offer free layout and design services for large printing jobs. It can also be an incentive for establishing repeat business.
One key to successfully promoting complementary product pairings or packages is to break it down in dollars and cents.
Tell the customer how much they're saving in cold, hard cash. That's usually more effective than expressing it as a percentage discount.
Establish immediacy. Offer your customer a discount on a complementary product if they make the purchase within a certain time period.
Informational products make great choices to give away as complementary items.
If you're a representative for health and beauty products, offer your customers a free booklet full of makeup tips and tricks. Include your contact info, including website URL, throughout the booklet along with coupons. And don't forget coupon codes for online purchases.
You can take advantage of customers' purchases of complementary products even if you don't offer them yourself. Establish an alliance, or multiple ones, with those who do offer them.
If you're a caterer, establish marketing alliances with photographers, florists, and musicians.
If you specialize in pet photography, your market is one that pampers their pets. Logical complementary products and services would include pet grooming, doggie spas, and clothing for pets.
So, who are your customers? And what else do they want to buy that you aren't selling?
Courtesy of an article dated September 12, 2013 appearing in Fast Company Design
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