A very interesting newsletter from Nokian Panimo just landed in my inbox. I won’t copy it here in its entirety, but I’ll highlight the most interesting parts.
At Nokian Panimo, December went great in terms of sales, and I want to warmly thank all our customers, partners, and our own staff for the excellent performance amidst a busy year-end.
For this winter, Nokian Panimo had two seasonal products: winter beer and Christmas beer. Both were prominently displayed in my local stores and I came across them every time I went shopping. Of course, my eye also catches NP’s products particularly easily these days.
The operating environment also brings challenges. Now in January, excise taxes on all alcoholic beverages increased, and additionally, later in the spring, significant tax increases are coming for non-alcoholic drinks, as the soft drink tax will be tiered into six tax levels based on sugar content.
Based on my own taste buds, I had perceived Nokian Panimo’s soft drinks as higher sugar products. Closer inspection reveals that Cream Soda has 10 grams of carbohydrates per 100 milliliters. For example, Jaffa has 9.1 grams and Coca-Cola has 10.6 grams. So perhaps Nokian Panimo’s sodas aren’t as sugary as I had thought.
We are bringing a record number of new products to the market this spring, and the first novelties will be available as early as February.
So, the ingredients for growth are there for the future as well.
In many of those Nokian Panimo drinks, the sugar content is 12 g. I think Laitila’s drinks are a good comparison, where the figure is consistently around 8 g at a quick glance. Between these two examples, there is a 16-cent difference per liter in the soft drink tax. A lot or a little? Considering retail margins, taxes paid on taxes (VAT), and other factors, I think it’s a lot when considering price perception.
On the other side of the scale of the tax changes are the rising alcohol taxes, which in turn increase price competitiveness relative to larger breweries due to the small brewery discount.
The new year is apparently starting off with a record number of new products, with 14 of them coming during the spring. https://www.instagram.com/p/DUQWjjODe12/
If even half of these launches remain permanently in the selection, it would again be an excellent thing, although it always complicates production optimization the more products are pushed out.
The first three new products were just published on Instagram, and Elowehnä is shown as a novelty due to a changed recipe.
These three should already be on sale nationwide today, and we’ll keep following the upcoming launches.
The midpoint of today’s 14 km walk was the Nokia Brewery shop. The main reason for the visit was to buy some of the new beers. Using owner discounts, I picked up some craft beers; for the 39.00 euro / case offer, you could mix and match different varieties, and the clerk proactively mentioned that smaller quantities were available at the same promotional price. That was good news, as by halving that amount, I was able to limit the total purchase to about twenty cans, which is roughly the comfort limit for someone traveling with a backpack.
The shop wasn’t crowded this time either—I was the only customer. The clerk was a woman I hadn’t seen on previous visits, and all the clerks at Nokia Brewery are truly super friendly.
Yesterday, Nokia Brewery’s daily trading volume was 1,341 shares, of which I bought 1,281. Today, the volume has been 1,390 shares, of which 1,344 are my own purchases. Things are very quiet indeed…
Would you like to post some kind of review of Nokian Panimo’s new releases once you have the time to enjoy them amidst your other busy schedules? I’m asking because Pyynikin käsityöläispanimo once started putting out new beers at a very high frequency, and while the selection on store shelves certainly expanded, at the same time the quality of the beer began to suffer significantly—at least according to my taste buds, and I heard the same from others. Later, the brewery ended up going bankrupt.
I could taste these myself, but my dry period will continue for at least another couple of months.
I can at least try to remember to drop a comment in the coffee room side, although I don’t really know what my credentials are for judging, for example, a “Japanese-style light lager.” I remember buying Japanese beer once when I played a mean trick on a certain Spanish liquor company. At that time, they shipped orders to Finland without delivery costs if you ordered at least 800 euros worth of products. I made a few rum- and whiskey-heavy orders from the firm, and those euro-amount orders arrived home in quite a manageable shipping size.
But then once, I put together an order where an absurdly large part of the shipment consisted of individual beer bottles from exotic countries. As a professional specialty shop, they naturally packed every bottle into styrofoam bottle compartments, so one large cardboard box contained 12–24 beer bottles. Good lord, the number of cardboard boxes the courier company carried into the hallway. The neighbors probably thought someone was moving out. But not at all; it was just Uncle Juha’s beer shipment coming home.
For some reason, that Spanish company introduced a limit on how many bottles an 800-euro free-shipping order could include…
To return to Nokian Panimo. I have high expectations for the company’s product development. After all, they’ve secured Jani Vilpas as the new brewmaster, who has a track record with products from Vakka-Suomen Panimo, Brewcon, and Laitila. Still, I somehow can’t think of the company as a quality challenger to those “ripe-for-bankruptcy” boutique breweries, but rather as a player that challenges the premium products of large breweries with both quality and price.
Speaking of challenging on price, the price for Keisari Hinode Rice Lager and Keisari Biere Blanc seems to be €2.75 / can in the Keisari shop, and S-Kanava seems to show similar prices. Quite cheap for a 5.2% beer; in fact, the same price as many of the brewery’s standard mid-strength beers and about a tenth less than the Keisari Mosaic IPA of similar strength.
I took a look at Nokian Panimo’s products from a year ago on the Wayback Machine just for fun. At least these have been removed from the beer section selection:
Pint Please Indian Pale Lager
Keisari Dry Radler Lemon
Keisari Sauvin Sour
Unfortunately, I haven’t tasted the first one. I wouldn’t have even wanted to taste the second one. And the third was a pretty weak effort.
Instead of reckless expansion of the product range, I think this looks like a controlled updating of the product selection. If something like Hinode (opinion without having tasted the product yet) stays in the selection for a longer period, I think it would be a bit of a surprise. It seems like such an exotic product in the lineup. On the other hand, I might have thought the same about something like Mexican Lager, but it has gained surprisingly good shelf visibility in many stores. And besides, in the category of 4.5% cheap lagers, I think it’s a pretty successful creation.
Outside the beer selection, I came across this online:
Right from the start, they are talking about a limited edition product there. Perhaps among those 14 products, there are other similar ones, such as summer beer replacing winter beer, etc.
