Mountain Crest Brewing Corp.
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Mountain Crest Brewing Corp. is a beer company in Alberta, CA founded by then 21-year old entrepreneur and petroleum engineer Ravinder Minhas.
Its sales in Alberta are worth over $55 million annually.
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[edit] Brand Labels
The brands sold include Mountain Crest Classic Lager, Mountain Crest Gold Lager, Clear Creek Ice, Mountain Crest Pilsner, Rani Indian Lager, Jack's American Lager, Axehead Extreme Extra Strong Lager, and Perfect 10 Extra Strong Beer. Its brands are contract brewed at Joseph Huber Brewing Company in Monroe, Wisconsin in small batches of 350 barrels.
[edit] Controversy
[edit] Can Design
One of the earlier logo designs for Mountain Crest's premier pilsner eerily resembled Molson Canadian's Pilsner brand. A teepe in the foreground with predominantly green and yellow color coordination was later changed when Molson sought legal action against Crest.
[edit] False Advertising
However, arguably the most controversial aspect of Mountain Crest/Minhas Creek involves where its beer is produced. The company makes no secret that it contracts out the brewing of its recipes to two Wisconsin-based breweries, City Brewery in La crosse and Joseph Huber Brewery in Monroe. But critics have countered that Mountain Crest/Minhas Creek, with its cans liberally decorated with the most Canadian of symbols, the Maple leaf, was misleading consumers into thinking that it made a "Canadian-style" beer. Plus, they added, no jobs were created on the north side of the border in the production of the product.
Labatt went so far as to take out a full-page ad in four Manitoba daily newspapers in June preying on local patriotism by accusing Minhas Creek of producing an American beer masquerading as a Canadian one. This is a serious insult in a country that prides itself on its high quality beer and where one of the national pastimes is mocking watered-down American brew.
The ad read: "This beer is pretending to be Canadian by slapping the maple leaf on the label. That's cheap, alright. Minhas Creek Lager isn't made in Canada. The beer's made out of a facility in Wisconsin, USA. So why are they posing as a domestic brew? Must be they think Canadians are easily fooled. (Signed) A message from Lucky Lager. Good, honest Canadian beer."
[edit] Packaging
In another controversial move, approximately one year after introduction in Alberta, Mountain Crest made a packaging change that angered many distributors. Traditionally, a beer flat holds 24 beer (usually 4 6-packs). This allows for relatively few breakages, and subsequent leaks, as well as more stable stacking of multiple flats. Mountain Crest chose to package 48 beer (8 6-packs) per oversized flat, with no additional safety guards to protect the thin cardboard from splitting at it's weak point - a single 1 inch overlap joint. The result was disastrous for many liquor stores. Because distributors stack pallates "bottom-up", placing larger products on the bottom, the unstable double-flats of Crest brands are usually placed on the bottom of 5-feet high beer pallates. The movement from the poorly packaged Crest cans often breaks through the plastic distributors wrap pallates in, and topples entire pallates - usually holding over CDN $3000 each in liquor.
Many distributors are in the process of creating a formal complaint to the AGLC, with documentation including pictures of toppled pallates with Crest packed at the bottom, as well as Crest's written unapologetic responses to voiced concerns. Similarly, many liquor stores have stopped selling the "value-priced" beer, turning to Labatt's similarly-priced, but much better packaged Black Label and Black Ice brands. They say that the cheap beer is not worth the hassle of returning damaged product to distributors, or taking the financial hit when Mountain Crest pallates topple, espescially when Molson has a similar product with traditional flats.
[edit] External links
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