While shopping this week for the Founders classics that recently came out, started to wonder, will I still be anticipating their arrival in 10 years, or will there be a whole new batch of beers that will become popular? While I look forward to the new beers, I was hard pressed to pick one that I am confident will be around in its same form in a decade. Of course BMC, Sam lager, SNPA and the like will still be around. Will Heady, Cigar City, Russian River,Three Floyd's or the like have national distro?
What with the recent spike in mergers and acquisitions occurring in the craft beer world, only time will tell.
Breweries having big distribution would also depend on their production too and personal choice wether to stay local or not. also trends come and go. When i turned 21, i thought th e top tier fancy beer were Troegs Nugget Nectar, amd Mad Elf. And Sam Adams Oktoberfest. Now they're arent really talked about. I had no idea what a Gose was and it a sought after style now. Anything can happen at any time. I am excited myself for the future in brewing and what it will bring
I honestly don't think there's anyway to know if a brewery will become national or if the same beers will be brewed in the future. I'm just going to enjoy great beer and not worry about how long they'll be around.
If there is sufficient demand for a given beer, then it will still be around, tweaked perhaps, but around.
I would assume that breweries that stay competitive and innovative will do nothing but grow. I think of DFH as a great example, as they have been around for years. They are still very much craft, yet have an extensive distribution network and create a lot of beer. I would assume that other breweries will eventually get there, just as long as their stuff stays good!
Any Future beer should be called "Same Damn Time Ale". Wait, what are we talking about again? Biggest threats to current brewer lasting ten years IMO Shift in local (local to each brewer) "feel" where location becomes less desirable to travel to / live in - Neighborhoods being built, suburbia growing more desirable than city life or vice versa and numerous other factors that could upset the balance that provides decent foot traffic or destination status of a brewery loss of interest by one or more of brewery principle - at some point a few of these brewers may very well figure out that running a business is more like work than a big fun homebrewing venture with friends and money. lifestyle change in current crop of 20 somethings - this group will eventually have kids that play soccer, need a trumpet, need clothes, play travel anything and otherwise become money vacuums disguised as children. Loss of time and disposable income will have some sort of effect. I've said before that the best worts case scenario is that breweries figure out that they aren't going to last in time to sell their recipes and trademarks to other brewers. Like under the GM banner there was Pontiac, Buick, Cadillac, etc., (bad example as Pontiac dried up....), perhaps the next step is not buying out breweries and keeping them in place, but rather treat the acquisition more like contract brewing. For example (purely example, nothing else) Sierra Nevada buying Foothills, brewing Jade, Torch and a few others at a Sierra Nevada facility and then just distro'ing it in areas where it was most successful. Hopefully I am describing this scenario well enough, but that's kind of a future model I could see happening.
