Draftmark home draft system launches exclusively in St. Louis on Tuesday
The brewery will make the units available for sale starting today — Draftmark’s base costs about $50 and beer refills (about eleven 12-ounce pours) are $14 each — at a select number of Schnucks, Dierbergs and Shop ‘n Save stores as well as certain liquor stores around St. Louis. More local retailers will receive the product in February […]
This is the device that I speculated about back in October. Here’s what appears to be the patent.
Breweries: A-B InBev, Anheuser-Busch
I don’t see this penetrating the craft industry too much since it looks like it’s gonna require a special container to dispense it. That’s probably the idea, actually.
Its a special container made buy InBev-A/B so its not like another brewery could just buy the containers anyway. I think it is a better idea then the one use Home Draft system especially with the ability to have different beers (ie Bass, Bud Heavy, Shock Top). I’m not about to buy the thing (not in St. Louis anyway) but it is a bit more convenient then a full home keg set-up.
I like the end quote in the article: “It’s much cheaper to come up with some sort of packaging innovation than to develop a new brand of beer,” he said. “As major breweries try to explore each and every option to make a profit, we can expect to see a steady line of new types of packaging.” They’re not really breweries, they’re packagers.
The DraftMark system is not draft beer. The beer it pasteurized via “flash pasteurization”. Basically the beer is put through a heated tube. You may as well buy bottled beer, because it is the same thing. Notice that at a lot of the retail outlets, the refills are not in coolers. Good indication it is pasteurized.
The 128 ounce refills cost $14.00 each. That is equivalent to paying $31.50 for a case of beer (24 beers, 12 ounces each), and that does not include the $50 system. So you are paying for over priced pasteurized marketing hype beer.