Since I am in the Rose City, here is a connected to Portland post from the Beervana blog.
I will wait here for you to read….
Back? Cool.
The Novelty Curve or the similar Live Long Enough to Become the Villain corollary is a tough one to escape. Looking at coffee as an example, Starbucks had 46 shops back in 1989 and were a small part of the Specialty Coffee Association. Now, Starbucks is closer to Folgers than specialty coffee.
To negate this move, some breweries just start sub-brands with distinctive branding like Offshoot Beer with The Bruery or Hello Friend with The Rare Barrel to zig around this trap. Others just change marketing or design at frequent intervals so that consumers may re-notice a beer. Others double and triple down on a beer with long legs and extend out from that point, I am thinking about the myriad Yeti versions in the beer multiverse.
All viable paths but none really treat the root cause, craft beer fans with zero attention spans. I have to admit a preference for buying single cans and justify it with the I am writing about it, trying to keep up with trends excuse.
Once a fickle fan feels something is stale, they move on unless a brewery can dangle another, shinier object in front of them.
What to do? Well, a brewery should not jump at the first signs of being uncool. Instead lean into explaining even more why you brew what you brew. Make your experimental beers taproom specials and keep them to a minimum. It may seem better to crank out new IPAs each week but there leads the path of stale by overdoing it.
The other suggestion is to find the less fickle, work to get more women, more non-whiteys, older folks too. Canvas the blocks around your neighborhood. If the fan is a moving target, look for those who ain’t moving.
I don’t claim to have the best answers but maybe being awkward is OK.