Boosted by an earlier-than-expected seasonal transition and the return of the on-premise channel, sales of Leinenkugel’s Summer Shandy have increased 13% year-to-date, according to the Molson Coors Beverage Company blog.
“As we continued to excel with distribution and sales and the off-premise, we were able to quickly transition into Leinenkugel’s Summer Shandy,” Dick Leinenkugel, president and chief beer merchant of Jacob Leinenkugel Brewing Company, told Brewbound. “Our breweries and supply chain stepped up very quickly to get Summer Shandy out there.”
Summer Shandy started 2021 with nearly doubled dollar sales. Year-to-date through January 24, dollar sales of the citrusy offering increased +98.3% compared to the same period last year, according to market research firm IRI.
Leinenkugel explained that the increase in sales was partly due to an earlier than normal launch because of “pretty solid distribution gains that we had on both Snowdrift Vanilla Porter, which was our primary seasonal, and then we introduced the new seasonal last year Toasted Bock, which primarily was in our Great Lakes marketing area.” Both of those beers sold out quicker than expected, he added.
“Ideally, you’d like to make the clean break out of your winter seasonal sometime during the month of February and get into the spring/summertime at that point,” Leinenkugel continued.
Historically, the company introduces an early batch of Summer Shandy in late January in Arizona to serve during the PGA’s Phoenix Open and also distributes in some warmer-climate markets before the seasonal beer’s wider launch. However, the earlier-than-anticipated sell-through of Snowdrift Vanilla Porter meant that Summer Shandy popped up in colder climates in January as well.
“I hate to see it in January in Wisconsin when there’s still snow on the ground, and we haven’t experienced our first 50-below weather,” Leinenkugel said. “Beer drinkers like it, they don’t care, so when they see it, they pick it up, and we hear from them saying, ‘Hey, Summer Shandys’ back out.’
“Summer becomes a state of mind,” he continued. “I think it’s great that we’re able to transition quickly.”
Drinkers seemed pleased with the early rollout, as off-premise dollar sales of Summer Shandy remained elevated as the calendar cycled past the March 2020 stockup period:
- +70.9% YTD through February 21;
- +29% YTD through March 21;
- +17.8% YTD through April 18.
Off-premise dollar sales of Summer Shandy have taken a dip as the on-premise has fully reopened nationwide, declining -24.3% for the four weeks ending May 16 and dipping -1.3% year-to-date, according to IRI. However, those numbers don’t provide a full picture. When on-premise sales are factored in, sales of Summer Shandy are up +13% year-to-date through mid-June, according to the company’s extended IRI data.
“As bars and restaurants continue to reopen throughout the summer, there’s a great opportunity for Summer Shandy,” beer merchant John Leinenkugel said in Molson Coors’ blog post focused on the effect of the on-premise’s return on the brand’s sales. “When you have a brand the size of Leinenkugel’s Summer Shandy and the opportunity that it represents, and it’s still growing after 15 years and people still get excited about this brand, you know you’re onto something.”
Summer Shandy has mostly outlasted its shandy siblings in the Leinenkugel portfolio. Two years ago, the company reviewed its seasonal offerings and decided to discontinue Grapefruit Shandy as a standalone SKU (currently available in Brewology Pack 1, sold March to August). Last year, it stopped production of Cranberry Ginger Shandy and replaced it with Toasted Bock, which will replace Snowdrift Vanilla Porter as Leinenkugel’s primary winter seasonal offering from November through February after a 2020 Midwest launch that was “extremely well received,” Dick Leinenkugel said. This fall, a collaboration beer brewed with Germany’s Hofbräu München will replace Harvest Patch Shandy.
Leinenkugel posited that Summer Shandy’s flavor is what gives it staying power.
“When we created Leinenkugel’s Summer Shandy back in 2007, we just hit on a flavor profile of beer mixed with lemonade — natural lemonade flavor that was absolutely perfect,” he said. “To me, it’s a beer style or flavor that could work year round, and I think the proof of that was this year when it was released a little bit early, earlier than we’d want it, but it’s been selling extremely well.”
In addition to most of its shandies, Leinenkugel also discontinued its Spritzen brand family, a line of 93-calorie, 4.2% ABV hard seltzer challengers that launched in March 2020, just as pandemic-driven safer-at-home orders were taking hold across the country.
The 154-year-old, Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin-based brewery is driving innovation with new package formats and two new offerings, Session Helles (3.4% ABV, available February-September), and the brewery’s first nationally available IPA, Lemon Haze IPA (4.9% ABV, available year-round). When the new brands are merchandised with Summer Shandy at off-premise retailers, Summer Shandy gets a 40% lift in sales velocity, according to the Molson Coors blog.
The company is also increasingly turning to cans as a preferred package option.
“The portability and ease, the ability to increase packout on the shelf, those are all things that work well for our distributors and our retail customers and consumers,” Leinenkugel said.
Last February, Leinenkugel added capacity for 6-pack cans, in which Summer Shandy, Session Helles and Lemon Haze IPA are offered.
“The reality is that it gets you more packout on the shelf as well so you don’t have as many out-of-stocks,” Leinenkugel said. “So we’ve been happy to add both 6-pack bottles and 6-pack cans in many of our major chain customers. That is an additional SKU and we’ve seen velocities increased because of that.”
Leinenkugel Launches New Award for Brewing Students
Last week, the company introduced the Jake Leinenkugel Diversity in Brewing Award, which will support minority students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who are pursuing degrees in brewing or fermentation sciences.
“The craft beer industry needs more diverse voices, and an integral step in making that happen is providing better opportunities to enter the field,” Leinenkugel said in the press release. “Hopefully this financial support at a world class university will ultimately help create a more inclusive atmosphere in the craft brewing world.”
Molson Coors has donated $50,000 to endow the award as part of its Tenth & Blake Brewing Education Scholarship Fund, which partners breweries in the company’s craft division with nearby universities to foster a new generation of beer industry employees among students in the Black, Latino, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander and LGBTQ+ communities.
In addition to the Leinenkugel/UW-Madison alignment, the company simultaneously announced a similar partnership between Revolver Brewing and Texas A&M University. Other partnerships between universities and Tenth & Blake breweries include:
- Terrapin Beer Company and Middle Tennessee State University;
- Hop Valley Brewing Company and Oregon State University;
- AC Golden Brewing Company and Colorado State University.
Each award comes with the potential for its recipient to pursue a paid internship at its related brewery. The program was pioneered at Terrapin, where president Dustin Watts was inspired to start it last summer after nationwide protests against racial injustice.
“Diversity is extremely important in the workplace,” Watts said in a press release announcing the scholarships. “In craft beer, we’ve always joked that if you go to a craft beer conference, you see a lot of beards and tattoos on white people. We hope to change that by making education and a career path more viable for underrepresented students.”