How long can the boom last?

Permit me to add one more aspect as regards distributed beer: have fresh beers on the retailers shelves. Over the past couple of year's I had Stoudts beers in my hand but I put them back down on the shelves due to beer date issues. This happened just a week ago when I was at my local Retail Beer Distributor with a 6-pack of Stoudts Golden Helles Lager - that 6-pack was too many months old.

I have no idea how many other beer consumers check dates before purchasing but I sure do. Drinking (and purchasing for take away) at small, local brewers have the advantage of their beer being fresh.

Cheers!

 

Small Brewers- fresh beer (huge advantage given IPA popularity and the lack of shelf stability)... Control over where their product goes (like Carton ensuring refrigeration... Same for Kane). Ballast point, green flash.... There's too many choices and their beer too often ended up on unrefrigerated shelves and probably often in too large a quantity one place and not enough in another, which happens with national distribution.

Moreover traditional styles like lagers are loss leaders potentially.... Have to be priced lower, take longer to make sucking up space... Only places like tired hands who can absorb the cost for smaller long term profits and the value of variety can easily take advantage. Alternatively a Suarez can do that by being in the
middle of nowhere and staying relatively small overall while being close enough to NYC to sell some kegs and cans. (They're also quite good which helps obviously.)

I think you're more likely to see more Brewers expanding their markets like the coffee roasting and seltzers and even wine before you see things look like the early 2000s again.

 

Well the one general exception to the rule with "old beer" on the shelf is beer that ages well. Unfortunately, those tend to be beers that aren't as high in demand. (Translation, they aren't IPAs). It would be amusing if twenty years from now the shelf life issue pushed brewers to focus on these types of beers and most of what you see on the shelf is high alcohol stouts, sours, and smoked beers. Highly unlikely, but I wouldn't complain too much!

That's a shame about Stoudts, I really do like them a lot. It makes sense though. We got plenty of Stoudts years ago here in central Florida, and I can't recall the last time I saw it on any shelves. A few years, at least.

 

Agreed. It seems like I need to check 3 - 6 packs before I find one fresh enough. Despite the plethora of choices, only a few are acceptable to me.

 

I have no idea where you get the idea that Lagers are loss leaders. Draft prices are the same as IPAs, and while package prices may be lower, breweries still profiting from them.

If Lagers are Loss Leaders, how do you explain Lager-only breweries?

 

Jack's Abby is a favorite of mine. Killer lager biers at a reasonable price

 

To me, it seems like a brewery knowing it's place in the market is the big thing. It seems that too many mediocre local breweries try to overshoot their audience and get into the mass market. Everyone loves a decent local brewpub. Sure, maybe they aren't the absolute best, but they are local and fun and can put out fresh beer, who doesn't want to support that? Start canning some stuff on a small scale and still all good, and I would guess profitable. But overreach and try to distro further out where there are a ton of better (or at lest better known) options? Maybe not so much. Too many places seem to take local success as a sign they can get much bigger and that does not seem to work. More places need to follow the Vermont model of Alchemist and others and grow at a pace that is supported and they will be OK. I don't think the idea of drinking locally and supporting local places is going away, more places just need to accept that as a positive outcome.

 

I’m thinking the BOOM is long over here, and has been for more than a few years now. Gone are so many iconic beers from so many great Cali brewers, replaced by expensive local beers from breweries I’ve never heard of before. Why is this? I’m going to take a stab at they were slow to turnover because there was a monster glut of beers of the shelf, certainly too many for smaller retailers to maintain at peak condition. So you unknowingly buy an 6 month old ipa from a famous Cali brewery with stellar ratings and it sucks. It sucks because it’s old, pretty simple. Those Cali beers has dwindled down to Firestone Walker, and a few Modern Times. Sculpin gone, Moylans gone, Modus gone, hell Hop Devil gone, Prima Pils gone, so many more gone. Used to be the place was packed with beer shoppers, now when I’m there I’m usually the only one browsing. Im sure the business is in trouble beer wise, I can look at the dates on the cans to see that.

 

Tastes have changed. People who love bitter IPAs have partially aged out of regular beer purchases or have embraced their inner sweet tooth and reverse-lupulin-shifted over to NEIPAs. Newer drinkers never pushed past the ultra-high-rated, uber-hip, and ubiquitous sweet IPAs and pastry stouts and thus never developed a taste for bitterness, and they've overwhelmed in numbers those who've been in the hobby long enough to appreciate Real IPAs. Consequently, the California IPAs, aside from the Northeast wannabes like Modern Times and some big-name ol' reliables like Firestone Walker, no longer sell. Then of course there's the emphasis on the local and the abundance of local options, which just twists the knife in further.

 

I’m sure your right, but I cannot buy $12-13 sixers of any style of beer from breweries I’ve never heard if before. Oh, I’ve tried a few here and there and to say I was disappointed would be kind.

 

When did San Diego get moved to the Northeast?

That aside, those of us who still enjoy "Real IPAs" are being forced aside, and have fewer choices, as most breweries try to make more joose boxxx beers. Since we have fewer choices that fit our palates, we can only buy the ones that remain. If a brewery has given up on real IPAS, in favor of lollipop flavored bullshit, it's not our fault if they struggle.

Live by the fad, die by the fad.

 

That's my point; Modern Times, despite its California location, tends to imitate beers that gained popularity initially in the Northeast (thus "Northeast wannabe"), and that makes it immune to the plague that has felled so many other California breweries trying to distribute outside of the west coast.

 

I was in a total wine today, and most all of the major craft distributors had IPAs on the shelf that average 3-9 months old. Its annoying as hell and then makes me buy the local stuff that is more like 1-2 months old.

Examples were:
--Lagunitas Born yesterday dated in early October and they had several cases
--Alpine beers were anywhere from April-Nov 2019
--Bells Two Hearted was the most fresh at 12/31/19 package date
--Stone, O'dell and Ballast Point were all packaged 3+ mo. ago

 

it’s happening. It’ll take a year or two for it to all sort itself but a market like Chicago is and has been saturated for over a year. Yet we still have distributors signing out of market breweries and major expansions currently happening within the market.

 

Maybe I misread you then. But, most of the MT stuff I've had comes across as either SoCal or PNW style hoppy things. Shrug.

 

The boom may well be over, with seltzer being the death knell
But then again, people do get tired of, "malternatives," like Zima some things are not meant to last!
Good beer is not going any where.
But will we continue to see big craft breweries showing up? Well, we're not seeing that in an upturned economy.
What would I like to see? The return of the brew pub. When a student of Brewer extroadinaire Charles Bamforth said, "I want to own my own brewery." Bamforth said, "open a brewpub and get a good chef, that way you'll be able to pay the bills and enjoy your brewing." I think that is good advice.
Truly though, I hope the boom never ends, because craft beer has been quite the ride

 

Restaurant-oriented brewpubs double (at minimum) the challenges and put the establishment in an industry even more competitive than the brewing business (i.e., the restaurant business). We've already seen a crash in brewpubs during most of our lifetimes (in the late '90s). I'm not saying they don't have a place in both the beer and restaurant scenes, but they're usually not the right call for prospective brewery owners unless they also have dreams of and, ideally, experience in running a restaurant. That said, in many states, the line between a brewery taproom and a brewpub is blurry to nonexistent. Even then, the breweries that emphasize food as a major revenue source upend their ambiance (for better or for worse), massively complicate their operations, and place themselves at the whims of public tastes in a second capacity (which could be thought of as diversification but also provides another major source of risk).

 

I think that you're mistaken about modern times's MO. Perhaps the beers that they are distributing in limited quantities back east are all neipa-wannabes but out here they seem to be one of the best positioned breweries for whatever changes are coming to the beer market. They have a lot of locations spread around southern california and now oakland, they produce a decent variety of beers but the vast majority of brands are limited to their locations or their beer membership. They seem to have an excellent grasp on how much beer they can sell and allocate it with a deft hand that means that the shelf stuff from them is usually pretty fresh and always at a solid price point.

As far as some kind of boom, I think that what we are seeing is a correction from a half century and change of US beer culture being unusually weak for a country so large and with such a diverse set of deep cultural attachments to the historic heartland of beer culture. Breweries in every town is normal (we are finally getting back there), the availability of a wide variety of styles is to be expected (not only do many urban centers have populations with strong cultural connections to a diversity of european beer cultures, but we are also the country that has been the vanguard of globalized culture and are generally a space where folks try on all sorts of social behaviors that are exotic in their ancestral cultural context), we have a broad social acceptance of drinking and beer permeates our short history, we have the agricultural base and infrastructure to produce beer ingredients widely, and we have a self image that aligns well with beer (the blue collar, 'joe sixpack', beer and sports and country music, hard days work vibe that is so central to our collective self image). Surely the trends will shift and certain styles will wane and grow in popularity but I don't see some massive failure of breweries on the horizon. We are still well shy of our national per capita peak.

Something does have to give on the distribution/retail end of things though. My guess is that we will see a reduction in national brands. We will see larger chain grocers reduce their total beer selection and highly desirable out of hte area brewers' products will only be available at boutique shops. Stores that care will learn a bit more about beer handling and the local/regional hoppy stuff will find it's cooler and the room temp shelves will be stocked with a pared down selection of less delicate styles. Regional differences will also likely reassert themselves so that many styles will disappear from most locations while proliferating a few places. The basic styles (light and amber lagers, pale ales, porters/stouts) will remain the most common options.

I believe that 'craft beer' (by brewers association standards) accounts for something just shy of 15% of total beer consumption right now, add in those breweries making the same style of beer but not meeting the BA definition and your still under 20%. Does anyone here really think that 20% of US beer consumption being something other than AAL/ALL is a crazy bubble that has to burst? If anything I am expecting that market share of non macro lager is going to continue to grow, I'd personally be surprised to see it ever capture a full 33% of the US beer market but I'd be equally surprised if certain regions didn't push closer to 50% non-macro lager in the next few decades. There are bubbles within the craft beer market (looking at you slushy beers and milkshake IPA) but flavorful beer isn't a bubble.