Some say the craft beer industry is in decline, others say this is just a healthy resizing. Whatever is happening nationally, here in Worcester, the three liquor stores I have most relied on for craft beer since moving to the area in 2018 have all declined significantly in the last 2-3 years. Specifically, I'm seeing: - the selection is not only narrower, but reflects less knowledge of the industry on the part of store managers. Highly anticipated, freshness-sensitive annual releases (for example, Troegs Nugget Nectar, Bell's Hopslam, and Sierra Nevada Northern Hemisphere) are either not brought in at all, or stored warm. Local/regional breweries offering high quality (like Schilling, Oxbow, Notch, and Long Live) are not available, while breweries that seem to have been the darlings of ten years ago, but offer lower quality now (Night Shift, Lord Hobo, and others), occupy lots of cooler space. - there is little variety, with >80% of the cooler space devoted to beer being taken by hazy IPAs, most of which are several months old or older. Even Jack's Abby is now completely absent from the cooler at one formerly craft-friendly store; at another, only House Lager is available out of all Jack's Abby's beers. I haven't seen a fresh four-pack of Hoponius Union for sale in several months. There's nothing available from Von Trapp, and even the non-IPA options from breweries like Berkshire are getting hard to find. - there is usually nobody at the store who knows anything about craft. If I ask about a beer that a beer buyer/manager should know, I often get blank stares. On the rare occasion Alchemist beers are available, they are still trying to charge $30+ for a four-pack. When asked about that price point, they insist, "that beer is really rare, you can never get it here. You should just be happy we have it." No surprise that there are Focal Banger cans from August still sitting at one such place. - the decisions about what product is stored warm versus cold show a glaring lack of knowledge. For example, Curieux is stored in the cooler, while Pseudo Sue and Zombie Dust sit warm. Alesmith's Speedway Stout is cold; Firestone Walker's Wookey Jack is warm. - the coolers themselves are not very cool. A couple of my local shops are now setting them at 48 degrees. I know energy costs are rising, but this shows not only a lack of commitment to keeping craft beer fresh, but also, I would assume, hampers the customer experience of the typical macro beer buyer, who is likely to want to drink the beer very soon after purchase, without needing to chill it down first. - overall, I get the impression that the people running my local stores simply don't know or care very much about craft beer. This was not the case before the pandemic. I believe there are some stores in the area that do things right (I've heard good things about Julio's, Wachusset Liquors, and Yankee Spirits), but those are all ~30 minute drives from me. It's frustrating that living in a decent sized city, I don't have access to a high quality beer store. Maybe I should start planning the occasional trip to one of those better reputed places, but then I might as well just to go Tree House since it's equally close and, these days, no pricier than most other craft. I'm curious - is this just a Worcester problem, or are you seeing similar patterns where you live?
The Berkshires are a bit of a dead zone for beer stores in general, and there are only three stores I really trust in the entire county for beer: Guido's Market in Great Barrington, Spirited in Lenox, and Kelly's in Dalton. They all keep the majority of their beer cold, the beers are usually fresh, and there's a good selection. But at all of these places over the last five years the coolers have definitely gotten a bit more bare / homogenized. We have to face it, craft beer isn't cool anymore. People will buy stuff from their favorite breweries because they know them. That's why you're not seeing any variety from places like Jack's available. We may not drink Night Shift / Lord Hobo but a lot of people do, because they're at every store.
I've noticed this, too, in the framingham/natick area. Just a general lack of fresh options at the store.
I am pretty loyal to Bradford's in Plymouth. They do a good job with selection, keeping as much product in cooler as possible, & freshness.
Absolutely. I am in Dracut, and feel like there is a real dead zone here for good quality stores. There is a big store in Lowell that is convenient, but I have always steered away. They keep too many items warm and are awful about dates. And it always rubbed me the wrong way when years ago they had a big warm 'drink local' display of beers from the local breweries like Navigation and Merrimack, but also had a few bottles from the Do Can brewery that had shut down two years earlier when the head brewer passed away. That was all I needed to see to know about checking dates there.
Yeah, I 100% feel that local stores are slipping in quality. I think I have shared these feelings here but I think Covid had a lot to do it. Stores had to cut costs and the beer buyer was one of the first casualties. In addition, I think distributors have done a good job of convincing stores that they don't need a beer buyer and presenting them with beers to get. Part of the reason that I have become a MBC evangelist is because Lunch is one of the few beers, when available that is always fresh. Although there was a recent period where it was unavailable and it lost its space in the cooler. Lunch is one of the few things that rotates through and the buyer at the store didn't even get that Half Acre collab. Very frustrating. I saw some year old Toppling Goliath in the cooler. Like the care isn't there. The curation isn't there. The other store close to me occasionally has Schilling that the other store does not have but is otherwise a graveyard. I mentioned this also a while back, but the store by the Garden (Coasters) was selling Heady/Focal for $40. The guy behind the register said "Everyone has their price." I was just like "you are selling this for at least 2x a normal store is selling this for." For me, Heady and Focal are an easy way to build up goodwill with people. That store has a decent selection, but I feel like if I went there, now i feel like I have to be on guard for this kind of predatory pricing. I have not been to the store since but I could still see it sitting on the top shelf of the cooler last time I went by.
I have both a cold wall and a dry wall at work, and as a buyer it's real tricky to balance between what the regular customers want, what I want, what the vendor wants, what the ultimate beer nerd wants, and what management wants. Generally, I keep the stuff that's okay outside of the cooler outside of the cooler, and all the IPAs, the vendor-requested stuff, and yummy, new stuff on the cold wall. I try to bring in a wide selection of craft beers and make it my mission to grab relatively obscure ones from both the US and Europe and the rest of the world. Honestly, a lot of my customers don't even know how amazing it is that I have something like Lawson's Double Sunshine on the wall, or that I managed to get Transmitter Brewing up here from NYC, or that it's really out of the ordinary to have a selection that includes altbiers, schwarzbiers, rauchbiers, saisons, and other not-so-typical beer styles. I work at a specialty grocer, and even here I feel like the most profitable course of action would be to just put slop on the walls, but I feel a certain sense of obligation as a buyer to curate the selection in a way that will convince people to have Good beer.
Oh, and margins are pretty ridiculous here, but as long as I stay below what Half Time Bev is charging, I still feel like I can sleep at night lol As an example: my local best seller, West Kill's Kaaterskill is a 4-pack we buy for 12.50 and sell for 19.99 (with a slightly higher than required margin). Half Time Bev sells it for 22.99 Also, I just realized I'm in the New England forum, not NY but we're pretty closely related so please forgive me!
Appreciate you sharing this info. Feel like you are more the exception now as pre-Covid, it seemed like a lot more stores were trying to do what you are still doing.
I started a thread along this line several months ago. There is only one decent beer store around here anymore and its offerings have really been reduced. The store has been taken over by almost primarily Vermont beers, at the expense of foreign offerings. They are catering to local trends, but the quality has really suffered.
Other than Fiddlehead and Guinness, I've mostly stopped going to most beer stores for many of the reasons others have stated. Mostly draft for me or buying direct (Schilling, Notch, Treehouse, Trillium, etc)
I think they started slipping in quality many years ago when the distribution arms race began and New England shelves were suddenly awash in Pipework, Three Floyds, Bell's, et al. There will very little refrigerator space for all this new stuff, plus regional beers, so this new shiny shit got placed on end caps. If you're like me, you bought a four-pack of something shiny and new and were like, "Okay, nice, yeah that's good" and never bought it again. So then the shelves -- warm and cold -- were filled multi-colored cans of multi-state mostly hazy IPA options that became as boring to sift through as the years when Bud, Bud Light, Coors, and Miller were our only options. This was the turning point for me. I did not know or care who these new people were. It was easy to get bored of almost every single brewery in New England solely making New England IPAs, and all of those then landing on shelves at local beer stores. Now it's similar except half of those beers are the same (often old, too) and the other 50% are seltzers and ready to drink cocktails. The beer options shrunk and somehow got both "better curated" and worse. Yes, beer stores are declining, but they have been for a decade now. Honestly, if you want to be a selective beer drinker, go to the brewery you like and buy directly. If you don't do that, just know that some days at a beer store you'll leave super happy but most of the time you'll have settled.
I think this peaked around the pandemic. I had so many new beers I could try and have them delivered to my door (Covid, so we couldn't go out). Now I just stroll by beers from The Veil, Other Half...etc. that would have flown off shelves years ago when they first hit the area. That being said, I just moved from the city to the suburbs, so it's hard for me to really tell. Wegmans where I lived had a decent selection. This blows away what I can find in the Northshore. Otherwise go-to store was always Ball Square. It's probably the only store I know of between the city and the Northshore that I can go to and almost always leave with more than one interesting beer. I still try to go every few weeks to stock up. Liquor Junction in Reading hasn't been bad. I usually find a decent four pack each week. For example this past week I got West Ghost from Sierra Nevada and the new Lager from Lawsons. The week before I got the Schilling Pre-Prohibition Dunkel. Aside from that I'm buying straight from breweries.
There's only so much shelf space, only so much customers are willing to pay, and only so many beers they're willing to try. Decline in sales means beers are sitting around longer. Beers that sit around longer are less likely to be ordered again, or even offered by the distributors because the brewery didn't get the sales they were hoping for at that location. $25.99 4-packs (haze) are also not helping the cause. Neither is the vast number of different cans that have the same style of beer. Too many options of breweries you haven't heard of are going to actually deter you from trying something new. Not putting date codes on a lot of those new offerings is also hurting, even though the tactic is to not let you see it's 7 months old so you buy it. I will never buy an IPA that's not dated. No exceptions. I've been burned EVERY time I've done it in the past. Storing beer cold has only really been an issue at small, non-beer knowledgable stores and places like Total Wine. Your local "good beer store" will generally get it and store them in the walk-in coolers. From my experience, at least
Unfortunately yes. And I hate the big box stores. I have a shop local to my workplace in Brooklyn that maintains a great quality selection, and they curate it well enough to keep enough new stuff rotating in every week. Inventory is pretty well managed - kept small - and they’re never really sitting on old beer too much. And prices are not through the roof (by NYC standards). This place is beer karma btw. I typically visit once a week to pick up a mixed pack. They have a nice draft list that rotates pretty quickly too. Basically your ideal neighborhood spot. All it really takes is one place in a general vicinity to really make a difference. Unfortunately a lot of similar shops in other neighborhoods/cities/states had trouble keeping the doors open.
Beer Karma is great. I think the fact that NYC (and possibly other parts of NY) has bar/store combinations where you can actually have beers and connect with the people there as well as other patrons is awesome. Wish we had those in MA.
Honestly a lot of people’s focuses have changed. Expensive ipa 4 packs and even the regular crew you see (Lagunitas, Sierra, Jacks) people aren’t buying as much. Canned cocktails, tea’s, non alcoholic beer and the old standards (bud, miller and coors) are selling more so. Also legalized weed hasn’t helped either.
Don’t forget, there is the non-beeradvocate crowd who will buy the random four packs no one in the know really wants. As stated above, those have all just clogged up the shelves You all can list out what those cans and breweries are.
