Parrotdog made a real splash this week the launch of Raptor, an American Pale Ale that replaces their popular and award-winning Falcon APA.
As a long-time lover of Falcon, I was curious as to why you’d swap out one APA for another (with an admittedly different flavour profile) rather than just tweaking and rebranding the existing beer.
Paul Watson, Parrotdog managing director, said it was more about pale ale as a category in decline than the beer itself, although they did need to create a point of difference with their recently launched Bright IPA, Thunderbird.
“Falcon’s been pretty steady in our range for several years,” Watson said. “But as you’ve recognised, we have seen a decline in APA. The style itself is trending backwards.”
When the brewery introduced Thunderbird last year it also chewed into some Falcon sales, being of a similar ABV and also offering a close-but-different flavour profile … so “we sort of cannibalised Falcon even further”.
“It’s hard in this market to continue to push a product that’s struggling — and it is hyper-competitive on the supermarket shelf so if your products aren’t turning units, you just don’t get the ranging.
“We saw that the ranging for Falcon had declined and had to decide: do we put everything behind Falcon or is there an opportunity to reinvigorate that APA space?
“Despite Falcon’s and pale ale’s decline, APA is still a big chunk of the market … so what’s the best way of getting a share of that?
“We talked about whether or not we were going to drop an APA completely but once we crunched the numbers we thought we could have success with a new product. So that’s where Raptor was born.”
The can design is starkly different to what Parrotdog have done in the past and it’s also strongly pushing a sports theme in the branding and marketing, which is new for the brewery.
“It certainly is louder and bolder than any of our other beers, but we’re really proud of how it looks on the shelf.
“It’s about trying to keep the range relevant to the consumer and to continue pushing the boundaries.
“And it’s a kind of a new angle for us to target sports, but it’s something that we’ve always talked about. We do a lot of sports stuff at the grassroots level, sponsoring football teams, rugby teams, predominantly in the Wellington area. So, we’re using this opportunity to lean in to that and champion that sports side more than we have through previous campaigns or other products.”
One of the big things with the switch to Raptor was changing the flavour profile to position it as different to Thunderbird, which is light, bright and fruity.
That left room for Raptor to go “more old-school”.
“We wanted to lean towards an old-school recipe, but using modern processes. Some of that piney character just takes me straight back to beers of ours from yesteryear like Pitbull and some of the IPAs we used to create with those piney, resinous hops.”
Raptor has also had an ABV bump and at 5.7%, compared with 5.4% for Falcon, bringing it more aligned to the other best-sellers Birdseye and Thunderbird.