This column is getting expensive.  While beer is available pretty much anywhere I can want it, finding something I haven’t reviewed means finding something obscure for my home market.

Relax, I am not panhandling; I am going somewhere with this.

This is my review of Wren House Brewery Jomax Coffee Stout:

In 2018 the City of Seattle followed along the footsteps of other cities and levied an excise tax on soda.  A lot of such taxes are levied as a public health measure to encourage consumers into making better choices.  If the “better choice” is significantly less expensive than the “poor choice” due to the tax, the idea is a rational consumer will choose the former.  This is the impetus, among others, for taxes on cigarettes.  The other reason? Nicotine addiction creates an inelastic demand curve and thus people addicted to nicotine will pay the tax regardless of the total price to get their fix…and the cosmic ballet goes on…

Yet, something funny happened in Seattle:

FEE argues this is the Cobra Effect in action but I caught wind of a different concept that might be in play here:  Hedonic Quality Adjustment.

Hedonic quality adjustment is one of the techniques the CPI uses to account for changing product quality within some CPI item samples. Hedonic quality adjustment refers to a method of adjusting prices whenever the characteristics of the products included in the CPI change due to innovation or the introduction of completely new products.

The use of the word “hedonic” to describe this technique stems from the word’s Greek origin meaning “of or related to pleasure.” Economists approximate pleasure to the idea of utility – a measure of relative satisfaction from consumption of goods. In price index methodology, hedonic quality adjustment has come to mean the practice of decomposing an item into its constituent characteristics, obtaining estimates of the value of the utility derived from each characteristic, and using those value estimates to adjust prices when the quality of a good changes.

What this means is the average consumer may have made a determination based on the fact they are aware what they are buying  is inherently bad.  When you buy a Coke, you are buying it knowing you there are 39 grams of sugar within the sweet, ice cold, syrupy goodness.  There is nothing healthy about it, but you are buying it because you like it.  Compare that to alternatives and you might find something else that has similar qualities, similar value on a cost basis that might check the box to bring you joy on the most primal of levels—

—except this alternative also gets you drunk.

I don’t know about you, but if soda and beer cost about the same where I live, I know which one I would pick.

 

The Jomax stout however, cost $15 for the 4-pack so I doubt I will have to make such a decision.  This is a coffee stout that will allow the average office worker to daydrink without anyone being the wiser.  Coffee in the sense that Starbucks lights their beans on fire resulting in something that tastes and smells like burned dirt.  Jomax is delightful in its intensity.  Chugging it however might be a slight challenge. Wren House Brewery Jomax Coffee Stout: 3.2/5