What is the next craft beer trend? It is focus on the troubles all around but there are avenues to grab interest from new customers.
I think the next market are the kids. Not as in underage but in those who are aging into 21+ and are going to sprint far away from their parents abstemious ways, in my opinion.
My folks were wine drinkers so I pivoted to beer. Kids who got drug to brewery taprooms got tired of them but their kids might want to go sow some wild oats that Covid denied them.
A new beer style variant might come around and prove me wrong, but outside the box thinking might be the way to go.
The wheel of beer blog ideas has landed back on children at taprooms and the chaos and carnage they leave in their wake.
But first, to basic facts before the conversation moves on:
a good chunk of adults act like children and are more insufferable
kids are gonna kid, ain’t no getting around it
Now, stitch those two rules together and it means that breweries have to deal with 2x the amount of godawful behavior.
I was recently at a taproom and a group of parents and their kids were on the patio. The kids were not loud or aggressive but they were underfoot as food was being delivered and you could see that the parents had one eye on them and one ear on their conversation and were toggling back and forth. Neither truly watching the kids or engaging in the conversation. Maybe that is daily life as a parent, as a member of the Childless by Choice Club, I do not know.
What I do know is that there seem to be always enough parents who seem to stop parenting when they get to the beer garden when, in actuality, that is the time when you need to parent even more. You need to model courtesy and social interaction. You wouldn’t take your kid to a work function at the bosses house and let them run wild because there would be consequences. You don’t go to the grocery store and then stand out front chatting with the cashier while your kids rampage through the aisles.
But turning a child with energy and no spatial awareness loose at a brewery or brewery restaurant seems to be A-OK. Which is a level of disrespect for the people working there and to patrons who may just want to enjoy a beer and a ball game.
If nothing else, run the kids around the block a few times before you arrive.
Entertainment zones. San Francisco has a new one as does Long Beach now. Infamously Bourbon Street in New Orleans is an example of one as well. Areas where you can have a drink outside.
Since this is a beer blog, you might expect that I would be pro entertainment zone. (By the way, worst and least helpful name that I have seen in a while.) But, I do not like them.
The main reason is it’s a garbage issue to me. Not the people, thought that can happen. Bars have to serve their alcoholic beverages in plastic cups and not re-usable glassware. And where do those cups go? Mostly on the ground because Americans simply cannot be bothered to walk an extra few feet to a trash can. And even if that cup does make it to a proper spot, what are the chances it gets recycled?
Also, it encourages bar hopping and now you get the possibility of drunken people ambling about like they are in 28 Years Later. And eventually those zombies find their way to a street with moving vehicles on it.
I do think that at least these cities in California are at least trying but more effort, especially now, needs to be focused on getting the T.A.C.O. to stop his tourist witch hunt so that people will visit.
I was recently watching a reel on Instagram from The Beery Godmother where she gave the 411 on the science of drinking on planes. Several lines and control points later at the Shannon Airport, I saw two beers on tap steps from my gate. One for Carlsberg and one for Beamish.
The Beamish, inexplicably, was 20 cent Euro cheaper. But on my flight over Aer Lingus was passing out Carlsberg like water and charging extra for Heineken.
And when one travels, which gate you land at will dictate what beer choices you have. Whenever I fly into PDX, I have limited beer choices because I generally use Alaska. I do have Westward Whiskey, which is a positive.
Cities should be demanding that the airports have local craft beer, spirits, heck even kombucha which I can’t stand. Don’t wait for someone to have a strange beer choice and diminished flavor on a plane.
Get ’em arriving and departing instead. That is just economic science.
I fully understand and am aware that I have whinged on about events at brewery taprooms that seem divorced from what a brewery does but in the last week I have seen many emails and social media posts about speed puzzling in taprooms.
And, I guess, it is better than having tipsy patrons throwing axes but how many puzzle pieces are found the next day on the floor? I can barely muster the enthusiasm to do a puzzle when my mind has the latest software updates loaded, let alone after a couple 7% hazy IPAs.
Now compare that to this wonderful Pellicle Magazine piece by Anaïs Lecoq about a small pub in France where thought has been put into the brewery that is poured, where the owner has your pour ready when you cross the threshold and the ephemera on the wall is earned and meaningful.
This is not a slam on any modern day brewery trying to survive and expand their beer drinking base but I do worry that the lessons of pubs are not being learned.
Is your social media feed beer driven or activity driven? It is a question that I want to pose to as many brewery media folk as possible. I know that my lens is introverted and geeky and that a new beer with a new hop or a heritage barley will get me into a taproom more than cornhole but I feel like the pendulum has swung a little too far away from the actual liquid.
This is of course also coming from someone who recently posted about thinking outside the box when it comes to activities and who also posted about a book extolling community at taprooms.
Themed nights are an effort to get butts in seats and buying beer from a crowd who is not buying currently. Economics are at play here. A new beer release is probably not going to bring out a line of beer buyers willing to pay a premium as much as a casual drinker who knows not of Dynaboost and Fonio.
But, the casual / weekend drinker is more fickle than a beer geek and losing sight of that in a rush to a cater to a crowd who are not tied to your beer but by karaoke is harder work in my opinion.
Last month, Vinepair posted a piece about overhyped beers. Even though I detected a sarcastic comment and one that did not take introverts into account, on the whole, it got me to thinking about what is a style that give me the cringes.
Non-alcoholic is certainly one that I share and for the most part milkshake IPAs tend to be just a bunch of lactose that steamrolls any hop note, the one style that I wish was pulled back though is the light lager.
If your brewery already has a lager or (hopefully) more, there is really no need to have a second runnings lager. If people are that calorie conscious, they are splitting hairs.
Beer is highly dependent on agriculture. But agriculture is tied to beer as well and nowhere is that seen as much as with hops.
Dave Infante from Vinepair recently delved into that connection with his rhetorical flourishes HERE but I want to add my two cents as well.
What struck me was that hop production was only down 16% in 2024. I expected much more than that. It does take a while to reduce, it is a big boat to steer after all, but it has been three down trending years already so I thought the number would be in the low 20’s.
My question is how will craft breweries rebound? Will it be with a hard thud onto a plateau? Or will there be some bounce to it as new breweries seize on opportunities of used equipment or turnkey operations.
If it is the latter, I hope that farmers prepare for the former so that they can re-calibrate acreage from a position of too little rather than oversupply. That may sound odd but brewers can steer to lower hop usage styles better than hop growers can control hop growth.
Whatever happens, this is more economic uncertainty and business does not handle that very well so there is probably more shifting ahead.
Just before leaving office, the Surgeon General of the United States, following the lead of officials in Europe has suggested that an additional warning of cancer risk be added to alcohol products.
You can read up on the main points HERE but I have three questions that I would like additional information on…
is this for ALL alcohol? are grapes better than malt or apples better than toasted oak? are the botanicals in gin OK?
what is the math on amounts? is 16oz of 5.5% beer better than a cocktail with 45abv spirit?
what is the research (if any) on people who drink but do not get cancer. we have all heard about the old lady who drank scotch every week for forty years and lived to be 100. what is different about those folks.
This is all bearing in mind that science is ongoing, what seemed obvious now might be much murkier ten years from now.
I am not inclined to doom and dread when it comes to the New Year. Perhaps because the bar of past years is not the highest of hurdles.
But I do feel mighty trepidatious about our breweries in Los Angeles and this country overall. Zooming out, it is clear that most voting Americans have no idea of the deleterious effects of tariffs and how they are best used in tiny, targeted doses. It is also clear that the ultra religious right cannot stay in church and rather enjoy pushing their twisted morality onto anyone and alcohol is one of their targets.
On a local scale, breweries here are closing or are in trouble. Will that balance out naturally with the remaining breweries getting the dollars? Perhaps. And I do think that turnkey breweries and cheaper kit may lead to a new set of exciting beer but that may not come to fruition until 2026. Until then, we may be looking at a lot of light lagers as draws since slushies and seltzers are fading fast.
The one thing that I will be tracking in 2025 are beer prices. I routinely purchase mixed 4-packs and I used to be able to get them at the $20 mark but in the last half of the year it has been more $24 to $25 and I am looking at barrel-aged beer prices with a sharp eye and substitute a hoppy pils for them. And I don’t even look at big bottles.
However this year turns out, I hope you all have a great beer year and I urge you to visit local and also travel to beer. It might make a difference.
