CHICAGO—Brewing giant MillerCoors LLC plans to test-market a new beer called Batch 19, which is based on a pre-Prohibition recipe, as part of several initiatives aimed at rejuvenating sales in the sluggish U.S. market.
MillerCoors will start selling the new brew next month in draft in bars and restaurants in Chicago, Milwaukee, San Francisco and Washington, said Peter Swinburn, chief executive of Molson Coors Brewing Co., which co-owns MillerCoors. Mr. Swinburn said in an interview that Batch 19—named for the year, 1919, before Prohibition began—is designed to attract consumers looking for "a true, authentic, original beer." He said Keith Villa, master brewer at MillerCoors, found a recipe in the archives of Coors Brewing Co. in Golden, Colo., that was used to make one of its beers before alcohol was banned in the U.S. for a 13-year period. "It's the beer that got beer banned," Mr. Swinburn joked. MillerCoors, a joint venture of Molson Coors and London's SABMiller PLC that was formed in 2008, is rolling out new products and packaging styles amid one of the biggest slumps in demand the industry has faced in years. Shipments of beer in the U.S. fell about 2% last year. Miller Lite's shipments fell 6.5% and Coors Light's rose 0.8%, according to Beer Marketer's Insights newsletter. MillerCoors, the second-largest U.S. beer maker by sales after Anheuser-Busch InBev NV, said previously that it would expand to the whole country its $20, refrigerator-friendly draft-beer systems for Miller Lite and Coors Light. It also has said it plans this year to unveil a new type of bottle for Miller Lite that is designed with grooves inside the neck. The new bottle, when poured, will "actually increase the aroma" of the brew and "explode the flavor more," Mr. Swinburn said. Coors Light has been a bright spot for MillerCoors, but it has struggled to find a way to revive Miller Lite, which has faced declining sales for much of the past decade. "It just takes time given where the brand was," Mr. Swinburn said. "Yes, we're committed to the brand. Yes, we think we'll get it right." MillerCoors, based in Chicago, is trying to be innovative in a crowded market in which new products have shown a mixed track record. MillerCoors made a hit of MGD 64, a light beer with just 64 calories, and Anheuser did so with Bud Light Lime, a lime-infused version of the nation's top-selling brew. Some other beers, such as lime-and-salt-flavored Miller Chill, have done well initially but then foundered. Molson Coors has a 42% stake in MillerCoors. Its other big markets are Canada and the U.K. In February, it said its fourth-quarter profit more than doubled to $222.1 million as net sales jumped 11% to $820.8 million. Sales volume in the U.S. and Canada has been down in recent months because of high unemployment and penny-pinching by consumers. Mr. Swinburn said Molson Coors is seeing some encouraging signs for new products it recently rolled out in Canada, including a 67-calorie version of Molson Canadian, but "it's really, really early." He also said the beer giant, which has dual headquarters in Montreal and Denver, would consider more acquisitions, but only if they meet stringent criteria, such as adding to Molson Coors's per-share earnings in the short-term. Mr. Swinburn said the company was encouraged by the growth of Coors Light in China, and might look into buying a brewery in China or starting its own. Coors Light is currently brewed under contract in China by China Resources Snow Breweries, which is 49%-owned by SABMiller. "We will look to, when the time is right, underpin that volume because it's getting to the stage now where the margin that we would enjoy from producing it ourselves would justify a certain level of capital investment," Mr. Swinburn said. "We've painstakingly built that market over eight years, city by city." The company sells Coors Light in 42 cities in China and has about 400 employees in the country. Sales of the brand are growing about 30% each year, though off a small base.
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BAL HARBOUR, FL—Less than two years after the implosion of the Sheraton Bal Harbour here, the St. Regis Bal Harbour Resort project has completed vertical construction for all three of the 27-story towers on the site.
Scheduled for a 2011 completion, the oceanfront resort will offer 270 private residences, 37 condominium suites, 205 guestrooms, a 12,000-square-foot Remede Spa, a signature oceanfront restaurant, the St. Regis wine bar, meeting space and secluded beachfront access for guests across nine acres of landscaping. Residence prices begin at $1.9 million. Yabu Pushelburg is the project’s interior designer. STOWE, VT–Topnotch Resort and Spa here has joined the Preferred Boutique collection of the Preferred Hotel Group, one of only two New England properties in the collection.
Set on 120 acres, the resort offers 68 guestrooms and suites. Topnotch also has a selection of 40 two- and three-bedroom resort homes each with its own personality and full resort privileges. The Topnotch Spa covers 35,000 square feet, including 30 treatment rooms, and featurers more than 120 treatments and services. For sports and leisure, the resort features a tennis center with indoor and outdoor courts, cross-country and downhill skiing, fitness center, an indoor pool with a cascading massage waterfall, a whirlpool/Jacuzzi, and two mountain-view outdoor pools–one of which is heated year-round. ATLANTIC CITY, NJ—MGM Mirage plans to divest its 50% interest in The Borgata Resort and Casino here.
MGM Mirage is taking the step to satisfy demands of the New Jersey Division of Gaming concerning the company's practices in Macau. Boyd Gaming owns the remaining 50% of The Borgata and has the inside track on acquiring MGM Mirage's stake. NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--A rosy outlook from Morton's Restaurant Group Inc. (MRT) late Wednesday shows demand is starting to return to the upscale restaurant segment and corporations may be starting to loosen their purse strings when it comes to business lunches and other discretionary spending too.
The restaurant company projected current-quarter profit and full-year earnings and revenue above analysts' expectations, while adding it began seeing a modest increase in same-restaurant revenue beginning in December, which carried into January and February. Though consumer confidence has continued to struggle, retailers from restaurants to home-improvement companies have seen sales pick up in the last few months as the economy starts to turn around and consumers cautiously start spending again. Morton's operates upscale steakhouses under the name Morton's of Chicago, as well as other restaurants. The company suffered last year as luxury consumers cut back and as the recession sparked downturns in business travel, conventions and entertaining. The company does a big portion of its business through expense-account purchases and business travelers. A restaurant-spending survey from RBC Capital Markets published last week showed consumers planning to eat out at restaurants more often and at home less frequently, and said consumers are trading up more, skipping beverages less and ordering more expensive meals more often. Guest frequency is also improved, the survey said. The outlook, and particularly the hints of better same-restaurant sales in the current quarter, boosted shares of Morton's and fellow restaurant operator Ruth's Hospitality Group (RUTH), which operates upscale restaurants including Ruth's Chris Steak House. Morton's shares were recently up 5% to $4.61, while Ruth's, which traded below $1 as recently as November, hit a high not seen since September 2008, rising $8% to $4.18. Though Morton's is up against easy same-restaurant sales comparisons from a year earlier, analysts at Wells Fargo said they're encouraged by improvement into the first quarter, "which appears to reflect a pick up in weekday trends resulting from increased business travel." The company's overall results for the fourth quarter didn't see such a boost. Morton's posted a loss of $68.1 million, or $4.28 a share, compared with a year-earlier loss of $8.1 million, or 51 cents a share. Excluding items, such as a $30 million write-down, earnings from continuing operations fell to 25 cents from 29 cents. Revenue declined 9.4% to $79.2 million. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected earnings of 24 cents and revenue of $81.1 million. Same-restaurant sales fell 12% for the fourth quarter, which had an extra week compared with a year earlier. A recent survey of 1,389 chief financial officers in the U.S. conducted by Duke University and CFO Magazine showed expectations of increased capital spending over the coming year as the economy and confidence continue to recover, which could lead to businesses loosening allowing more discretionary spending on items such as business lunches, benefiting Morton's and Ruth's. -By Kerry Grace Benn Considered one of the best chefs in the world, Léa Linster experimented with the humble potato on a recent Monday afternoon at her one-Michelin-star restaurant in the Luxembourg town of Frisange. She intently examined the thinly sliced potatoes, looking for clues about their starchiness. "People underestimate how difficult it is to achieve the perfect combination of crispy and chewy," she says.
A favorite vegetable in Luxembourg, the potato appears in many forms in Ms. Linster's home-cooking eatery called the Kaschthaus. At her signature Michelin-starred Restaurant Léa Linster, the potato incarnates in more noble ways fitting for a French gourmet. In fact, the dish that won Ms. Linster the Bocuse d' Or prize in 1989 features the tuber and remains on Ms. Linster's menu to this day: a saddle of lamb wrapped in a crisp, wafer-thin potato pancake. Ms. Linster browns the potato pancake on one side before she wraps it around lightly breaded lamb and bakes the duo. At her two restaurants, Ms. Linster has long made a showcase of her native Luxembourg cuisine, which includes specialties such as flour dumplings called kniddelen and bouneschlupp, a green bean roux-based stew garnished with pork sausage. Now, some 20 years after Ms. Linster became the first and only woman to win the coveted Bocuse d' Or prize, she has become a formal ambassador of Luxembourg's cuisine. This year, for the first time, Ms. Linster will officially represent Luxembourg abroad at the ITB Berlin, the world's largest tourism trade fair from March 10-12. She will prepare Luxembourg dishes at the country's stand at the fair, which draws more than 170,000 visitors. The Grand Duchy's tourism authorities hope to position the country as a culinary destination, given that Luxembourg has more Michelin stars per capita than any other country in the world. Starred restaurants include Manoir Kasselslay, known for the creative use of regional products and its setting inside a natural reserve; Toit pour Toi, with its eclectic interpretation of French gourmet cuisine; and Restaurant Yves Radelet, also focused on regional ingredients, including some organic products. For Holger Gettmann, a restaurant critic and the publisher of the Guide Orange food resource, Ms. Linster's official appearance is long overdue. "Ms. Linster embodies Luxembourg's charm and peculiarities. You can see it when she's on German television. She's highly skilled and recognized for her experience," he says. Ms. Linster appears frequently as a guest chef on channel ZDF's cooking shows "Lanz kocht" and "Küchenschlacht." Ms. Linster, 55 years old, has trained alongside the world's best chefs, including Paul Bocuse, Joël Robuchon and Fredy Girardet. Yet, she hasn't let go of her down-to-earth principles that manifest in her personal style and cooking. She says she prefers dishes without overbearing sauces, such as scallops grilled with perfect brown trim that are tossed in a salad of endive and artichoke. She strives to let individual ingredients speak for themselves and retain their original character, describing molecular cuisine as a trend to which she refuses to adapt. "If you change food too much, you kill the soul of it," Ms. Linster says. Her choice of décor and the way she runs her kitchen speaks to her philosophy as well. She offers guests a sleek environment that isn't pretentious, and she says she avoids waste -- not an easy feat for a gourmet. While sticking to her principles, Ms. Linster is in the process of expanding and transforming her culinary empire, which includes her two restaurants in Luxembourg, her media brand (TV appearances and a food column in the German women's magazine Brigitte), and her publishing efforts, which include six cookbooks. She is looking for a partner to open a restaurant in Manhattan, where she has an Upper East Side home, and is remodeling her 60-seat signature restaurant. As part of the transformation, Ms. Linster has increased her marketing efforts. Years ago she wouldn't have been so bold, she says, but now she has draped a billboard-style photo of her face on the facade of her restaurant in Frisange, a village of several thousand people that is a 20-minute drive from the city of Luxembourg. Ms. Linster laughed with a hint of irony as she commented about the oversized photo that contrasts starkly with the rural environment. "It's big enough so that people won't actually take it seriously," she says. Ms. Linster grew up playing hostess at the family's restaurant in Frisange. She often helped her parents cook and serve. As a 16-year-old girl, the first meal she ever prepared for guests was chicken in a Riesling sauce with a prune pie. Ms. Linster began studying law but abruptly ended her time at the university when her father fell ill nearly three decades ago. She says she acquired her good taste and her intuition for cooking from her father, who was also a chef. "He had the palette of a God," she says, adding he had a knack for refining Luxembourg specialties with French touches. Connoisseurs will point out what gives Luxembourg's cooking its own character: Fresh-water delights, such as frog legs and pike, Riesling sauces on chicken or fish and a good dose of garlic to honor the country's large number of Italian residents who immigrated more than a century ago, as well as Portuguese new arrivals. Don't be mistaken. Although Luxembourg cuisine resembles potato-rich German cooking, with a dab of French finesse, it is more than a mélange. Maximilian von Hochberg, the general manager of the Hotel Sofitel Luxembourg Europe, says, "The French are attracted to Luxembourg because of its continental touch, while Germans appreciate the French overtones." At the same time, the business crowd is increasingly an Anglo-Saxon troupe, says Mr. von Hochberg. Luxembourg is expanding its niche from a hub for the banking sector and European Union institutions to a center for information technology. Skype, the Internet-telephony company that was acquired by eBay, and the e-retailer Amazon.com both have their European headquarters here. For business lunch, diners typically seek out restaurants in the Kirchberg district, home to the European Court of Justice and the European Investment Bank. Those interested in nightlife and cozier, smaller restaurants explore the cobble-stoned alleyways of the Grund area of Luxembourg's ancient city center, which holds the distinction of Unesco World Heritage Site for its Vauban fortifications. This expansion as a haven for high technology (and low taxes) bodes well for restaurateurs such as Ms. Linster. Back at her signature restaurant, Luxembourg's patron chef continued working on her potatoes, which she dramatically drizzled with sea salt. As she performed her magic, Ms. Linster mused about people and her own journey from girl hostess to celebrated chef. She says the way people evolve is more important than first impressions: "I love to give people a chance. I love it even more when they know how to take it." —Rhea Wessel is a writer based in Kronberg, Germany. |
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