Vardaman Virtual Forestry Company
FRIDAY REPORT OF 10/06/06
The Most Direct, Frequent Link to Knowledge Workers in the Eastern Forest Economy
“THE LONGNECK TAIL
A Revolution in American Beer
By Jay R. Brooks”
Our quotes are from an article in REASON
“In 1980, good American beer was on the brink of extinction. Our most popular brands – Bud, Miller, Coors - were the laughingstocks of the world. Our brewing heritage had been all but stamped out, with hundreds of formerly thriving regional breweries gone…
“Then a backlash began. Over the past 25 years the microbrewery revolution has created a beer culture that is the envy of the world. More styles of suds are now brewed in America than in any other place. Along with the light-tasting lagers that still dominate the market, the new offerings include porters, stouts, barley wines, bocks, hefeweizens, pale ales, bitters, and Belgian-style farmhouse ales. American beers consistently win the highest proportion of awards in international competitions. Local and regional beer has re-emerged: There are more than 1,400 breweries in the United States, up from only a few dozen at the start of the 1980s. By any measure, this is an amazing achievement.
“Even more amazing: The vast majority of Americans are scarcely aware of this. All those wonderful craft beers account for a mere 3.5 percent of total U.S. beer sales. They are able to thrive nonetheless, thanks in part to a phenomenon WIRED editor Chris Anderson calls ‘the Long Tail’ in a book by the same name. In a nutshell, small niche products are having a big impact on overall sales, especially online.
“Beer has been with us for millennia. Bland brands aimed at the lowest common denominator are a more recent development. In 1870, when commercial refrigeration began to allow regional brewers to expand their reach, there were more than 4,000 breweries in America. As the technology spread, the increased competition caused the number of beer makers to decline, so that by 1910 there were only about 1,500.
“That much could be attributed to good beer driving out bad. But then the government entered the picture…Prohibition decimated the industry, and in World War II the military requested watered-down drinks so soldiers wouldn’t be too inebriated to fight. The upside: They won the war. The downside: Many came home with a taste for milder beers.
“With the advent of the Interstate Highway System, and of TV as a nationwide advertising medium, national breweries became possible for the first time. To appeal to a much wider consumer base, beer – like other products – was retooled to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Brewing history is littered with the losers of this period. In 1950, 400 breweries were left. By 1960 that number dropped to 230, only 140 of which were run independently. In 1980, fewer than 50 remained.
“There’s a business maxim that says 80 percent of sales comes from 20 percent of available products. That is certainly true for beer, where sales are overwhelmingly dominated by three domestic brewers. But in recent years, the Internet has changed the way we do business, reversing the trend toward bigger and fewer brands.
“That’s where the Long Tail comes in. Unlike conventional brick-and-mortar retailers, online companies such as iTunes and Amazon can offer a limitless number of products. They thus get revenue from the non-mainstream 80 percent of products that, although their sales are small individually, might one day add up to equal, or in some cases more than, the revenue from the most popular 20 percent…
“The relationship between mainstream and craft beer roughly follows the same model. Big brewery beers are available literally everywhere beer is sold. As in a record shop, everybody stocks the ‘hits’ while few carry ‘deep catalogue’ drinks. Yet hundreds of local markets now exist for quality niche beers, often sold only in their local communities…
“In the age of craft brewing, we can think globally and drink locally. Call it the longneck tail.”
To read the complete article, click on http://www.reason.com/0610/cr.jb.the.shtml
“AN EVEN BRIGHTER IDEA”
Our quotes below are from the 09/21/06 The Economist print edition:
“How long does it take to change a light bulb? According to iSuppli, a market-research company that specializes in technology trends, the answer is 131 years. That is the amount of time that will have elapsed between 1879, when Thomas Edison first demonstrated his incandescent light bulb, and 2010, when semiconductor-based light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are expected to have made significant inroads into general illumination, a market worth $15 billion…
“LEDs have become popular because they have numerous advantages over conventional light bulbs. For one thing, they last much longer; they can endure up to a decade of non-stop use compared with a few months or less for incandescent bulbs. They also take up much less space (a typical LED is about the size of the rubber on the end of a pencil), are shock resistant and, perhaps most important of all, are extremely energy-efficient.
“An incandescent bulb, made of a wire filament encased in glass, emits only 5% of the energy it consumes as light; the rest is wasted as heat. Fluorescent lights, which consist of tubes filled with mercury vapour, are roughly four times more efficient. LEDs, however, contain no mercury and already rival fluorescents in efficiency. Upfront costs make them too expensive for most general lighting applications, but experts expect that to change over the next five years as prices come down and efficiencies go up.
“…Besides being environmentally friendly, LEDs all unprecedented control over lighting. Unlike incandescent or fluorescent lamps, which spew light in all directions, LEDs generate directional, making them ideal for selectively illuminating areas. Moreover, the ability to mix and match the output of red, green and blue LEDs makes it possible to ‘tune’ the emitted light to produce any desired colour. Lighting designers are already using LEDs to illuminate monuments, restaurants and even famous paintings, such as Leonardo da Vinci ‘Mona Lisa.’ Because LEDs emit monochromatic light, any potentially harmful or unwanted radiation, such as ultraviolet or infra-red light, can be eliminated…
…To compete with the light output of a single 60-watt incandescent bulb that emits about 800 lumens (a measure of light power as perceived by the human eye), companies such as LED lighting Fixtures and Permilght of Southern California are designing lamps based on clusters of white LEDs that achieve a similar lumen output, but consume only a fraction of the power. Initial costs are still higher for such fixtures than for traditional bulbs, but lower electricity bills could make up the difference within a year or two, says Dr. Hunter…
“Those in the field may disagree about the prospects of OLEDs, but they do seem to agree on one thing: the days of the incandescent bulb are numbered. Conventional light bulbs are among the last devices that use vacuum tubes, an old technology that has long been replaces in radios and most televisions, notes Sandia’s Dr. Simmons. ‘Ultimately, incandescent light bulbs will end up in a museum, just like vacuum tubes did for electronics,’ he says…”
To get a catalogue of LED bulbs and fixtures, click on http://www.photonlight.com
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