Tree House Brewing Cape Cod (Boston, New Bedford: real estate market, renting, condo)

[lrfox]

Originally Posted by Beachcomber4

As always I appreciate your perspective. On a positive? note LOL I know I will have many more visitors with Tree House in town. It's a guarentee the kids will come home for the holidays. I've also considered what it could mean if I ever wanted to rent out my house. We purposely bought in a beach neighborhood thinking of ROI but this will make it even more attractive to a certain demographic and for longer than just the summer season.

Oh yeah, it'll be a huge draw. I wish my parents had bought over there.

Originally Posted by Beachcomber4

The thing people love about craft breweries is the uniqueness. They are becoming ubiquitous and markets saturated. Which is often the kiss of death.

It's true that the pressure is higher now to leave a mark on people. However, I think that "uniqueness" is A thing that people love, not necessarily THE thing. I'd make the case that the #1 thing people look for is simply quality. They want good beer above all else. The rest is just sort of extra. It may help (or the lack of it may keep breweries from tapping their full potential), but it's all secondary to the quality of the product.

A few examples:

• Hill Farmstead in Vermont is among the most highly regarded breweries in the country because they have great beer. They don't have flashy labels, a big marketing component, clever/funny beer names, or beers made out of bizarre or gimmicky ingredients (i.e. beers made with lobster, garlic, pickles, jalapenos, etc. - all things New England brewers have [in]famously used in their beers). Nor are they in the heart of a tourist destination or in a big city (they're in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont - an hour from Jay Peak and over an hour NW of Littleton, NH - the two closest "destinations"). They have almost zero distribution (kegs to a handful of restaurants in VT). They just produce consistent, high quality beer. And it works - people make the pilgrimage regularly.
• On the other hand, Chicago's Goose Island has been with InBev for going on 10 years now and their Bourbon Country Stouts are still among the best and most highly sought after beers in the country. They sell out in most places within a day or two of going on sale. While some of Goose Island's year-rounders have dipped in quality (they had dipped prior to the InBec acquisition - expanding production is no small feat with or without a corporate owner), the specialty stuff is still extremely highly regarded in spite of the corporate parent company and wider distribution.

People like good beer, period. It's really no different for beer than it is for wine, spirits, or food. Ben & Jerry's is still highly sought after and widely regarded even though it's owned by Unilever. People are still paying top dollar for Lagavulin, Oban, Johnnie Walker Blue, etc. even though they're owned by Diageo. If they maintain the quality, the demand remains. If the quality noticeably declines, they lose the business. There's still plenty of room for quality beer in the market, but there's enough quality out there now that it's hard to succeed if you're only average (even with other "unique" traits) . Tree House is neither corporate nor average, and they design spaces that people really enjoy spending time in. They'll excel on the Cape.

[timberline742]

Lets just hope they picked a good street. The traffic will be nuts. The fact that they have a place now where you can only (legally) turn one direction when leaving (unless they have changed that in the last year, haven't been with pandemic) is absolutely bonkers to me.

[lrfox]

Originally Posted by timberline742

Lets just hope they picked a good street. The traffic will be nuts. The fact that they have a place now where you can only (legally) turn one direction when leaving (unless they have changed that in the last year, haven't been with pandemic) is absolutely bonkers to me.

Agreed. I admittedly haven't been during the pandemic either. I believe they still have a 1 case minimum and I just can't justify buying a case of beer. I don't drink enough to warrant that and I don't have any interested in the whole buy/sell/trade thing that people do. Especially during the pandemic. In my fridge, I have a few beers from Trillium, Vitamin Sea, and Channel Marker who have mostly sustained me through COVID so far. We've also had a few from ME and VT brewers (Bissell, Goodfire, Foam, Hill Farmstead, Ten Bends) when we've gone up North. But I have a hard time buying a 4-pack of a single beer. The one case limit is just too much for me, but apparently it's working just fine for them.

[timberline742]

Originally Posted by lrfox

Agreed. I admittedly haven't been during the pandemic either. I believe they still have a 1 case minimum and I just can't justify buying a case of beer. I don't drink enough to warrant that and I don't have any interested in the whole buy/sell/trade thing that people do. Especially during the pandemic. In my fridge, I have a few beers from Trillium, Vitamin Sea, and Channel Marker who have mostly sustained me through COVID so far. We've also had a few from ME and VT brewers (Bissell, Goodfire, Foam, Hill Farmstead, Ten Bends) when we've gone up North. But I have a hard time buying a 4-pack of a single beer. The one case limit is just too much for me, but apparently it's working just fine for them.

Same with me. No use for a full case. Only time I even want a 4 pack is when Long Live (wisely) does mixed four packs with stouts and IIPAs. But even then, rarely. I get the barrel aged stuff to cellar, and have been doing layaway on sours at Foam. But otherwise, no socializing = almost no beer drinking.

[BostonMike7]

I kinda agree about the 1 case thing. I wish they would break it up to at least a 4-pack like Trillium does for their pickup, with no minimum limit.

[lrfox]

Originally Posted by timberline742

Same with me. No use for a full case. Only time I even want a 4 pack is when Long Live (wisely) does mixed four packs with stouts and IIPAs. But even then, rarely. I get the barrel aged stuff to cellar, and have been doing layaway on sours at Foam. But otherwise, no socializing = almost no beer drinking.

While we're not quite at "almost no beer drinking," we're at drastically reduced quantities. No alcohol during the week, and 1 or possibly 2 on Friday/Saturday night. If I bought a case, it'd last me 1/2 year minimum. Mixed 4 packs are great, and I love that in VT, almost all of the stores let you buy single cans - that's been great for us (especially since VT stores get great distribution from VT breweries). Tree House's "buy by the can" model was one of my favorite things about going there. I could buy 6 beers and they'd all be different.

But if you put me in a house near Tree House-By-The-Sea during the summer, it'd be a different story...

[FCMA]

A couple quick inaccuracies to correct in this thread. Tree House started in Brimfield, not Monson. They moved to Monson due to a zoning dispute with a NIMBY neighbor I believe, the miserable kind who got mad that his 5-ac or so zoning safe space was lightly intruded upon and this was even before TH had become massively popular (which happened in Monson). They are also opening a Deerfield location - someone falsely called Deerfield the Berkshires. While Berkshire Brewing Company is around the corner in town, that outfit has been capitalizing on name recognition since 1994 - BBC does not come from the Berkshires but the Connecticut River valley floor. The cultural Berks start another 30 miles west in the hills of Windsor and Savoy. If referring to the geologic Berks, I suppose they do start at the W edge of Deerfield over by Pekarski’s Sausage. TH Deerfield will be around the corner from Yankee Candle and a 2-min detour off I-91, the CT/NYC tourist artery in to VT. They will be bursting at the seams. As somewhat of a local, I plan to only go on like Tuesdays. The Cape location sounds nice! Those TH owners are now made of serious money and can expand to their heart’s content, on their own terms. Maybe the miserable Brimfield nematode was on to something to get them off his lawn.

And yes, Tree House beers are among the few that live up to their hype. It was a surprise the first time I ever tasted it.

[timberline742]

That Brimfield spot was only open for a blip. It was founded there, but not much more than that. Minor footnote. But yeah.

They also have purchased a farm in CT. 100 acres or so.


I do have fond memories of the little shed in Monson with the peanut shells on the floor and the guitars on the wall. Those were some long waits. I really do wish I sat on one of those Lucid bottles, probably worth a fortune now.



One of my best friendships is somewhat directly attributable to accidentally stumbling onto this place.

[FCMA]

Brimfield was a neat spot and site of the namesake tree house, so while very short lived at least marginally more than a footnote. They still cite it on their website About page. But yeah. Back then, they were so small that on my first visit, back when you could go near another person, co-owner Dean memorably greeted us out of the blue with a hug (!?!) and the bad news that Julius (he termed it “god’s gift to the world”) was sold out. It has been wild seeing them get so huge.

[GeoffD]

Originally Posted by timberline742

Only the kiss of death if you are middling or bad.



So some businesses sold out. And? Small businesses routinely sell out to big. Not news.


If its a fad, it is a "fad" that has been around since before my grandfather's time. Some of the breweries I went to when I lived in Wisconsin have been around since before prohibition (they paused, wink wink, for that.) 30+ years ago when I lived in VT there were craft breweries.



If that is a "fad", it is one heck of a "fad".

My grandfather’s time was the end of prohibition. He was chief engineer at the Dawson Brewery in New Bedford. The guy wearing a coverall in the company photos where the rest of the leadership was wearing suits. In 1935, 75% of the market was draft beer and there were 600-something breweries. In terms of the history of beer, the huge brewery oligopoly of canned and bottled beer has been a pretty small blip on the timeline.