Ballast Point’s New “Clear Hazy IPA”: Marketing So Stupid, It Sounds like Satire

It’s been a while at this point since the last time we checked in on the still mind-boggling story of Ballast Point, the San Diego, CA craft beer icon that first sold to Constellation Brands for a record $1 billion back in 2016, at the height of the craft beer boom. In retrospect, this remains by far the most massively overinflated of all overvalued brewery sales of this era, taking place at precisely the moment when the “fruited IPA” wave came to a crest, bringing Ballast Point and Grapefruit Sculpin IPA in particular to their highest point. That year, in 2016, they sold a company record of 431,000 barrels of beer and Constellation was no doubt projecting that the brand would become the next Boston Beer Co.

Fast forward to 2019, and Ballast Point had already become a shell of its former self. Its total production across half a dozen Ballast Point breweries and taprooms around the U.S. had been slashed by more than half, to around 200,000 barrels. Volume growth of the overall craft beer segment had slowed, while the overall number of small brewing operations continued to balloon regardless. Meanwhile, hazy IPA was stealing the thunder of the drier, West Coast IPAs that had long been Ballast Point’s claim to fame, and the new hazy category was propelling other industry stalwarts that adopted it early (such as Sierra Nevada) to new heights. A combination of factors had led Ballast Point to become exactly the sort of big regional brewery that suffered in this era: Overextended, disconnected from the zeitgeist, and abandoned by the same sort of “buy small and local” ethos that decades earlier had fueled its own growth.

Given all that, it wasn’t terribly surprising to see the Ballast Point brand sold again in 2019, for a much lower, never reported figure. What shocked the beer industry at the time was the fact that almost no one had even heard of the brewing entity acquiring Ballast Point, a household name. We had all grown used to buyouts involving AB InBev and Molson Coors swallowing up small fry brewers in the decade prior—the idea of Ballast Point being acquired by a tiny, Chicago-area brewery (600 barrels, in 2019!) called Kings & Convicts Brewing Co. made no sense. It was an out-of-nowhere story that grabbed headlines well outside of traditional beer publications.

Even now, this brewery is still a largely unknown commodity to most beer geeks.

And of course, this was all by design. The truth of the matter was of course that Ballast Point wasn’t truly “acquired by Kings & Convicts,” but that it had been snapped up by the well-heeled investors behind Kings & Convicts, which to that point seems to have been more of a hobbyist brewery for its original founders. Acquiring Ballast Point, along with all its brands, breweries and access to the market, was the company’s method of suddenly becoming a national player overnight. As the Chicago Tribune reported at the time, all of this was possible thanks to the investment of wine industry magnate Richard Mahoney, the chairman of the board of The Wine Group, which owns such ubiquitous supermarket wine brands as Cupcake, flipflop and Benziger. The optics of a “little brewery” buying up a big one just made for an irresistible storytelling hook that they naturally exploited.

And if we’re being honest, that story breaking at the end of 2019 was pretty much the last we’d heard about Ballast Point until now. The next year was one of lost time and contraction for the industry, fueled by the obvious on-premise challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many brands went into hunker-down mode, focusing on package store or grocery sales if they had access to those markets, and to-go sales from the brewery if they didn’t. Innovation didn’t get a lot of play during the height of the pandemic, which sort of makes sense.

Now, though, Ballast Point has suddenly reentered the craft beer conversation online, and they’ve done it with a product rollout that is so ludicrous I literally couldn’t help myself from taking the time to pick it apart. Friends, peers, beer lovers everywhere, I ask you to wrap your head around the following line of ad copy: “Clear hazy IPA.” This is Ballast Point’s big new push to capture the public interest; the ultimate craft beer oxymoron. It’s such an absurdity that I find myself asking over and over whether this is actually industry parody of some kind. Did April Fool’s Day arrive a month early? Is this beer accompanied by a “translucent opaque stout” as well?

The beer in question is called Big Gus, and it’s one half of a dyad of new releases dubbed the “Brothers Gus.” Wee Gus is a light, hop-forward, pilsner-esque lager with the ready made selling point of being less than 100 calories for a 12 oz serving. That’s a pretty familiar concept at this point, as seemingly every national brewery has been attempting to get hoppy, sub-100 calorie beers into the market for the last two years, but it’s the description of Big Gus that really boggles the mind here. It’s a pretty standard IPA, save for the fact that Ballast Point is trying to market it as a “clear hazy IPA.” In the process, they’re more or less trying to position the idea of “returning to how IPA was brewed for decades before the last five years” as a novel idea that they just invented. The sheer gall they’re displaying in trying to get the consumer to accept that this is a breakthrough in beer development can’t help but make me stifle a laugh—it does not imply that Ballast Point thinks highly of their customer.

You don’t have to take it from me, though. Here’s an explanation of “clear hazy IPA” development in the brewery’s own words:

Big ideas are typically born after a few beers, so the team sat down and came up with a fun challenge. “What if we made a clear hazy IPA?” As the rest of the industry was deep in the haze craze, the Ballast Point brewers bucked the trend by developing two beers that are clearly different from anything on the market. Ballast Point is well-known for brewing hop-forward beers—the Brothers Gus are no exception—but they are crystal clear by design.

“We always wanted to make a beer that looks different than it tastes,” said Aaron Justus, Ballast Point’s director of research and development. “That’s sort of the creative play with Big and Wee Gus. We sat around as a R&D team and thought ‘how can we make these beers as clear as possible? What kind of scientific processes can we do to ensure that clarity and how can we make them hoppy?’ They also had to be beers that we like to drink.”