Is the Hazy Trend Drying Up?

It's seasonal/regional if it's anything at all.

What's missing that you noticed from your area shelves?

Not seeing that issue around here in KY/OH. Plenty of macro haze and regional haze and still lots of specialty haze in the nerd stores.

 

I’ve never thought that mass craft hazies are actual hazies. They are poor interpretations trying to capitalize on the craze. Real hazies pumped out by the local usual suspects are still popular.

 

Not a trend

It's still the king of the shelves in NH. Literally dozens of options from local to widely distributed.

 

Not seeing much change in Maryland, except brewers now trying sell 4pack 5% German lagers for $16+ on par with the 8% DIPA hazies. Trendy beers get trendy pricing I suppose.

 

Truth. I wanna support the slightly resurgent, classic beer movement in our country but these breweries are not making it easy. Especially when it’s starting to become a bit easier to find fresh(er) European options at half the price. A local brewery near me won gold at the New York State Brewer's Association Craft Beer Competition with their brown ale (one of my fav styles) a couple years ago. They responded by canning it and charging $18/4 pack. It’s a f***ing brown ale! I liken prices for a beer like that to the whole flies with vinegar/honey theory. You might be able to take advantage of a few suckers with that price but knock it down $5 and you are making up for profit with volume and better exposure to the beer and brewery. In the end, that beer sat on shelves, collected dust, and no one benefitted.

 

I don’t think I would go so far as to call it a trend yet, but it is common now for IPA centric breweries to have several lagers available.

It must be extremely difficult to try and compete just on the basis of one style so I would think branching out a bit would be helpful.

But, NE style IPA still the most dominant.

 

I feel like most breweries seem to at least offer non-hazy options, where for a while some had mostly hazy IPAs. It was nice that Sierra Nevada brought back Summerfest & Oktoberfest this year. Hopefully sales were high enough to continue brewing these yearly.

 

Still dominates the IPA section at my favorite craft spots, they do well at stocking a variety of styles fortunately. The more I talk to others I've noticed we're talking about lagers, barrel aged beers and how we need more clear IPAs.

 

In my area the ratio of hazy to non-hazy IPAs available is like 4 to 1. Maybe I'm exaggerating but I think it is going strong, at least as far as what is available. This goes for both macro and micro.

 

In the Pacific Northwest the ratio is the opposite—hazies make up only about 25% of all IPAs available. So I agree with those saying this trend is regional. Both styles are readily available but hazy IPAs apparently never gained the foothold here that they have elsewhere. I think there’s plenty of room for both and it doesn’t have to be an “either/or” situation.

 

The haze craze still seems to be going strong in the Carolinas. Unfortunately, when we go out to eat, unless it is a craft beer focused place, their tap list consists of 8 hazy IPAs, a pastry stout or two, and two or three beers of various other styles.

I miss the days of seeing amber Ales, Brown Ales, Porters, and various Belgian styles on tap.

 

I think so, to a certain degree. I chalk it up to the lack of variation within the style. Breweries around here have fairly well settled on murky recipes that work for them, and are continuing to pump them out. We're not seeing as much of the "New Murkbomb of the Week" type beers, the ones where it's just the same beer with very slight differences in the hop bill and a new name.

 

This x1000

 

Still the most popular option here. My favorite locals are pumping out between 2 and 7 new brands per drop depending on which brewery were speaking of. It does slow down this time of year since breweries seem to favor darker styles but I can still easily find several hazies between 2 weeks and a month old.

 

It was a thing up here, but at least it was (likely due to the size of the breweries around here) mostly a draft thing, not packaged. It was certainly a trend, but a couple breweries really ran with it. It kept the Untappd tickers happy, and they moved product, so a success overall?