The Founding of the Draught Beer Guild

The following is an article describing the founding of the Draught Beer Guild, and a discussion of its organizing principles.

The Draught Beer Guild was founded on June 1, 2000. It is the first professional trade organization established to serve the specific needs of the draught beer dispense industry

The Guild is a non-profit corporation with the sole purpose of protecting and promoting the quality of "draught beer". International in scope, The Guild is designed to be all inclusive of the technical dispense segments of the industry: brewers, beer wholesalers and retailers, and all manner of allied industry suppliers of products and services.

The objective of The Guild is, simply, to ensure consumers can always enjoy the highest possible level of quality draught beer. The beer industry universally acknowledges the complexities of assuring that very expectation of consumers, and the reality of the chain of industry interdependence of meeting those expectations.

Without a doubt every industry party vested in the quality of draught beer recognizes the limitations it has in controlling the desired consumer experience with "on-premise" draught. From large breweries to small, the successful care and feeding of draught packaging and dispense systems is typically dependent on too many factors outside of its respective scope of operations and resources. And more and more, the same can be said for beer distributors. Add to these the widely known problem of adequate expertise at the retail level, and too often then combined with poor system design, installation and maintenance, all of this frequently relegates the draught package, perceived or not, to an unsatisfactory consumer experience.

Every brewer is familiar with its product brilliance and consistency in the confines of the brewery and industry competitions, and then, its often inexplicable shortcomings in too many retail accounts, the rule more than the desired exception. And the frustration and sheer difficulty in effecting any significant change.

The Guild's mission is to provide the forum and formal processes to engage the industry's draught technical brain power and business leadership to raise and maintain draught quality at retail.

A number of Guild tenets are designed to serve the overall best interests of the industry:

* The non-profit nature of the organization.

* The premise of voluntary compliance in all respects as opposed to punitive measures.

* A wide range of incentives to encourage that voluntary compliance.

* A geographically diverse, volunteer Board that includes all industry segments.

* An organizational infrastructure that provides for the long term flexibility required to meet ever changing industry business and Member needs, accommodate technology advancements, and a charter that will allow The Guild to grow beyond and survive its Founders, an organization for the ages.

* Recognition of the highly competitive nature of the beer industry and the requirement of The Guild to establish and maintain itself at all times as a safe zone of exchange without compromising the proprietary or competitive interests of any party.

* A policy of accepting, on their own inherent merit, historical, indigenous and regional beer culture preferences, as well as proprietary packaging, process and dispense practice.

* An organization that properly represents the collective interests of the draught beer community to other related consumer industries and, if needed, engage the legislative aspects of the business environment of the day.

* A policy of neither endorsing nor discrediting any given brand or style of beer, nor dispense and maintenance products or practices. Rather, The Guild will at the ongoing consensus direction of the industry identify desired results at retail, then measure actual retail account results against those standards, always leaving the decision of product and service selection, and level of upgrade desired, to the respective parties. And again: Voluntary Compliance is the key word, and the tone with which all Guild business is conducted.

"Impact at Retail" is really the heart of The Guild benefits to the common business interests of the on-premise, draught beer industry. The Guild's primary feature of service is The Retail Certification Program. This certification outlines reasonable and achievable levels of care of the draught package at retail, dispense system minimal design and maintenance standards, and then appropriate presentation standards to suit any particular style of beer and brewer preference.

The retailer has a vested interest as well in a number of ways by voluntarily complying with these standards: in addition to serving a more consistent product, Guild affiliation for the retailer includes Guild endorsement of the establishment as a universally certified quality draught operation. The retailer must maintain The Guild standards to remain in this status.

The retailer is awarded a special, omamental plaque of recognition for display, is listed in Guild publications and on its Website as a certified establishment, and is authorized, within the policies outlined by The Guild, to market and promote itself as a Guild certified establishment. In short, to borrow the same concept from other consumer service and product industries, a publicly acknowledged system of quality ratings is the intended result: everyone understands, for example, from whatever recognized authoritive source it comes, that certain levels of quality are presumed for a "five star" restaurant or hotel, verses a two star operation.

That is precisely the climate of informed expectation that consumers gravitate to and depend on for many purchase and patronage decisions, when it is available.

It is high time the draught beer industry raise its own bar to accommodate an increasingly sophisticated and discretionary buyer audience.

The challenge to brewers, wholesalers and the allied industry is twofold:

* Recognize the interdependence among themselves that is necessary to raise the overall quality of draught at retail, and then work together to establish agreeable standards

* As a united entity, engage and incent the retail segment to comply, voluntarily, with the standards

The Guild provides the entity through which all of this can be accomplished in many ways: a business structure and accepted authority of the industry, the resources to establish and monitor industry technology standards and practice, and a third party presence to promote at arm's length everyone's collective and best interests but still with oversight of and management by the very industry it endeavors to serve.

We hope the draught beer industry, especially brewers, agree with and support the concepts forwarded through The Guild. Wide and diverse industry support is necessary to establish and maintain The Guild as the "Voice of the Draught Beer Industry" for generations to come. Please join us in making The Draught Beer Guild a long needed, viable organization, and a smashing success for all!

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