Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Your first question comes from the line of Andrew Kieley from Deutsche Bank. Please proceed.
Andrew Kieley - Deutsche Bank
Hi good afternoon everyone.
Bill Urich
Hi Andrew.
Martin Roper
Hi Andrew
Andrew Kieley - Deutsche Bank
Hi, a couple of questions. First I wanted to ask you about on trade trends. Obviously given the numbers that you reported today looks pretty strong, but are you seeing any tail offs in those channels because we are seeing so many of the restaurant companies talking about their accounts getting hit there.
Bill Urich
Let me take that. I think we have seen a little bit but it’s mixed in with a bunch of other trends going on. One is at the consumer level there continues to be a strong trading up trend across a lot of food and beverage, but Samuel Adams is certainly included in that and the second is increasing retailer support. The operators want to encourage their trade up and they also want to encourage the beverage alcohol business because it’s just more profitable for them. So at this point it’s hard to tease out each of those three positive things from the overall softness especially in casual dining where we sell a lot of beers, so our trends remain reasonably good, but I think we are sort of holding our breadth to see what happens to the economy in the next three months.
Andrew Kieley - Deutsche Bank
And could you remind us what, maybe percent of volumes goes through the on-trade against the ?at home consumptions??
Bill Urich
For us it’s -- we can’t get an exact hand along it because we sell to distributors who then sell to on and off premise customers. Roughly on the order and order of magnitude it’s roughly 30 some percent, maybe in the high 30’s right now. It’s been probably, I don’t know as high as 40 I think, but if I had to guess and I am just guessing because I don’t have the exact numbers I’d say it’s in the high 30’s.
Andrew Kieley - Deutsche Bank
Okay thanks. And secondly I had asked before, I wondered if you could give us any sense of how much distribution runs through miller and course houses and if you see that as a risk as we get later into 2008 as those companies potentially consolidate.
Bill Urich
It’s a big piece of our volume. I don’t think we’ve added it all up, but I’d just be guessing, it’s well over half anyway and well over that number and where again it hasn’t happened -- I think there is going to be some time that is just going to be transitioned and from our point of view it’s pretty murky at this point. We certainly have a lot of miller course houses now and they perform at least as well as the end consolidated houses.
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