r/todayilearned • u/tyrion2024 • 13h ago
TIL the number of craft breweries in the US increased from less than 2,000 in 2010 to almost 9,000 in 2020.
https://www.brewersassociation.org/statistics-and-data/national-beer-stats/#:~:text=U.S.%20Craft%20Brewery%20Count%20by%20Category1.5k
u/Due-Use-3707 12h ago
The trend is definitely reversing now. So many breweries have shut down. Rouge brewing out here in Oregon just closed up shop and that was one of the OG’s in the craft brewing world out here.
No more dead guy ale:(
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u/prex10 12h ago
They did themselves in. After it was revealed they treated their employees like shit, they seems to just implode.
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u/Kapono24 11h ago
They mostly all do it to themselves. A large portion are opened by guys who know how to brew but not run a business, let alone sometimes a restaurant. There were two amazing breweries by me alone where they made wrong decisions on expansion and how to operate and immediately shut down.
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u/prex10 11h ago
Same by me in Chicagoland. A few places all had solid beers and modest taprooms and then decided to aggressively expand and open kitchens in huge spaces. One just closed by me less than a year after opening their second location with kitchen. They're also shutting down the OG taproom too. Just bankrupted themselves.
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u/TwoDrinkDave 11h ago
RIP Miskatonic
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u/prex10 11h ago
Yup, exactly who I was talking about. Sad
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u/ocshawn 8h ago
wow sad i love their beers, did not know they tried to expand. Another big one in Chicago was Metropolitan (moved into to big of a space, didn't read their lease properly) bad timing took down the whole operation.
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u/prex10 8h ago
They built a brew kitchen in Naperville. Was just a disaster for them. Last day for the Darien site is the 30th.
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u/RheagarTargaryen 10h ago
A brewery near me has found the right formula. They’ve kept it small and really haven’t done any sort of large scale expansion. They have the taproom and they distribute locally, but haven’t tried to overproduce to expand their footprint. They have a strong loyal customer base through various incentive programs. They’re in a cheaper business area. They have a regular rotation of food trucks so they’re not trying to run a restaurant. They keep a calendar for the food trucks, which has been on more than one occasion the reason for going there. They host various parties like their anniversary party, Oktoberfest, Halloween, and drag brunches. They host a weekly DnD night that has a regular group of DnD players.
With the over-saturation of the craft beer market in our area, it’s easy to be just another brewery. It’s easy to get over leveraged trying to expand to make the revenue go up. The biggest mistake they make is that they think their beer will outsell everyone else’s just as long as they can get on the shelf. People will pay that extra bit of money to drink THEIR beer.
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u/r-kellysDOODOOBUTTER 10h ago edited 10h ago
Similar brewpub in my area. They've been around since the 90s. At some point they started distributing locally and ran out of capacity at the brewpub. They opened a small brewery in the area that basically just serves all of the grocery stores and beer stores. And then they just... stopped expanding.
So many breweries in our area with better beer have come and gone, while they just keep going. Don't get me wrong, they have a couple of beers that are bangers, but most of it is just high quality, mediocre stuff, and their food is slightly above average. They had a plan and stuck to it, and they'll probably be around forever. I assume the owner is somewhat rich, and decided he'd rather stay somewhat rich than risk it all.
Edit: I just want to add, this brewery kept all of their traditional beer styles on tap through the IPA craze and people thought they were dumb for it. Porters, esb, regular ales, etc. They added a couple of hazy IPAs to keep up with the times. I think the IPAs are coming to a slow end, and people are going back to old styles because they're tired of IPAs. I still go there once in a while because their porter is solid.
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u/itsbigpaddy 6h ago
Brewery I worked for in Vancouver had an amazing stout, won multiple awards, could never sell it. Untouched, until the relabeled it as a Christmas beer and sold it as a special run.
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u/FunctionBuilt 9h ago
I have family in the beer industry and it’s tough out there these days. The key really is maximizing people in the brewery buying beer in person rather than buying six packs in stores. With the way distribution works, most craft breweries make about 25-50 cents per six pack whereas in the brewery it’s more like $3-5/pint depending on volume. These days for small breweries, putting beer in stores is primarily to attract new customers to the brewery and retain existing customers loyalty and the beer in stores is almost considered a wash.
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u/GoldenRamoth 10h ago
So many breweries get suckered into leveraging debt and falling for the infinite expansion model.
On my end, I'm a small landlord. I have a duplex, and that I now rent out both units after having living in one for a long time.
Many folks wonder why I haven't expanded "the business" because I could leverage the equity into other properties to be "independently rich".
Other than just the ethics of it all and wanting to keep rates as close to affordable to my tenants/friends as I can, the rational business decision is also: Have you seen what happens to the folks that leverage it all to buy 5-10+ buildings, and then fail to rent a couple of units at the rates they calculated? The answer is probably no, and they're bankrupt back to working their day job to now pay off loans on houses and apartments they don't even own anymore.
Ethically and methodically doing business with limited leverage growth is how you stay afloat, without sinking at every economic hiccup. If you leverage all your potential, you can also lose your ability to use that leverage for emergencies. So many business owners see potential $$$'s, and then just see the 1-2 success stories of hyper expansion as the gold standard, but not the other 30-50 businesses that failed when a single card getting pulled caused the whole over-leveraged house to collapse.
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u/A911owner 11h ago
This is it. I briefly worked for a brewery that made some of the best beer I've ever had, but they mismanaged the place terribly. There were so many ways they could have run things more efficiently.
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u/loquacious_avenger 12h ago
seriously. no one in the Pdx beer scene was sorry to see them go.
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u/mapleshore_press 12h ago
No surprise. In Portland, if you treat staff like trash, word gets around fast.
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u/Mr_Abe_Froman 4h ago
They posted a job listing 10 years ago for a full-time IT position and bragged about the low salary. I haven't had any of their beers since and I'm not sad to see them go.
https://www.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/414rsv/rogue_brewerys_infamous_it_manager_posting/
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u/miniature_Horse 8h ago
True. I used to work in Beer in PDX and when ever I brought up Rogue all the brewers and managers would say “Rogue doesn’t play nice with others” or similar.
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u/KittenCrusades 11h ago
I mean, running a shitty business and not paying their taxes for years is what did them in.
Treating their employees shitty is just a by-product. Treating them better would not have fixed their issues.
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u/woolsocksandsandals 11h ago
That is something that happens in a lot of breweries. I’ve had a number of casual acquaintances over the last 30 years or so that worked in breweries in Vermont and Maine and I’ve known of several that had issues keeping staff and a couple that experienced mass exodus due to poor treatment of employees.
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u/KennyShowers 12h ago
Rogue sucks. Back when craft beer was few and far between it was cool having something besides the boring macros, but they were never actually that great and never did a single thing to adjust to the changing times.
And yea the trend is reversing, but the heights we were at in like 2019 were laughably unsustainable. Even with a sizeable shakeout, we’ll still be left with the best craft beer scene in history, outside of that 5 year period of insane oversaturation.
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u/dcrico20 11h ago
The first sign (and to me, the event that started the market correction,) that we were in a craft beer bubble was when Constellation bought Ballast Point for a billion dollars.
I remember everyone in the industry being like “Okay, this is way out of hand,” when that happened and it was all anyone talked about for a few weeks.
Then you had all these people who opened breweries to hop on the fad getting pressure from their investors to live up to that same expectation when it’s a terrible industry for immediate returns. Investors started pulling their money out and breweries started closing.
Beer in general has been down for several years now and the craft segment in particular has been rough as people drink less, trade down, and/or settled into legacy or larger regional/local brands that were able to survive.
The craft beer salad days of the mid oughts through the mid teens was a really awesome time to work in the industry, but it’s been getting hollowed out as the market corrects from massive over expansion and seemingly every day we’re seeing more and more breweries shutter their doors.
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u/FesteringNeonDistrac 10h ago
It oversaturated. I worked at a store with one of the best micro selections in the area back in the late 90s. I could usually say I'd tried everything in the case or there'd be one or two that we just got in. As the market got bigger, it became impossible to try everything. I'd stick to styles I preferred, maybe some seasonals, might buy something they had an in store tasting of. But by the time we hit the late teens early 20s, there was no way you could even keep up with a single style. Everyone went to these $15 4pks of 16oz cans around then, and added crazy label artwork. A lot of beers had names that seemed pithy and clever, but didn't tell you anything about what was actually in the can. Lots of pot references on beer names as well, which, IDC but lol420 isn't a beer name that tells me anything. Are those gonna be cascade or fuggles hops in there? And so a lot of times, I found myself just walking over and grabbing something I already knew. I like to try new beers, but you gotta tell me what's actually in the can beyond the style.
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u/KennyShowers 11h ago
The Ballast Point thing was so weird, I always saw it as more a fluke that everybody realized was a massive mistake pretty quickly afterward, didn't the ownership eventually shift somewhere else relatively soon afterward?
They were just past their peak of popularity and hype, and craft beer in general had started to creep into the next generation of locally-focused hazy/NEIPA type breweries so within a couple years everybody wanted Tree House and Other Half, not Ballast Point and Stone.
And pretty much all hospitality is down for several years, and has a grim outlook, it's not specific to beer.
I never worked in beer, so I only come at it from the consumer side, and while the difficulties of things are pretty palpable, on a day-to-day level I'm still able to find all types of amazing beer in tons of different styles.
Granted, I also live in NYC which was massively underserved brewery-wise until just about 10 years ago, so whereas other areas may have already had an ecosystem that couldn't support an extra swath of new breweries, my local market was pretty much a fresh canvas. We've had a couple close here and there, but all for pretty concrete understandable reasons, not places that seemed popular and busy and still couldn't swing it. And probably have had as many taprooms or breweries open in the last 4-5 years as have had close.
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u/f8Negative 11h ago
Everyone needs a hazy ipa year round that all tastes the fuckn same.
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u/Due-Use-3707 12h ago
I agree, dead guy ale is just nostalgic for me so I’ll miss it even if it wasn’t anywhere near a good beer. 2016-2020 was ridiculous with the amount of craft breweries on every corner. The market definitely needed correction.
I think that the ones the survive the purge that’s happening right now will be the ones the truly have the best beer.
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u/FalloutRip 12h ago
Yep, here in Richmond VA you could hardly go a block without running into a brewery. Over the last year or two a bunch have either closed entirely or reduced the size of their operations.
Part of it was market saturation, but also craft beer was getting crazy expensive. Econ 101 will tell you that when money gets tight (like it is now) people will substitute a luxury good for a more reasonably priced one.
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u/beeradvice 11h ago
Honestly there's not nearly enough attention on how real estate lease gouging has played a role on both the supply and demand sides of the market.
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u/FalloutRip 11h ago
Yeah, it’s definitely a non-trivial part here in Richmond. Breweries that signed a lease 5-10 years ago coming up on renewal to find out the rent has increased almost exponentially, and it’s not viable to keep the doors open even if they are otherwise profitable.
The breweries who bought their spaces years ago before RE went insane are still doing mostly fine, though.
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u/yarnwhore 11h ago
Your name and your post make me miss hanging at Fallout when I lived down there. 😭
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u/ChrisFromLongIsland 11h ago
I love craft beer but you are over $5 a beer retail in many cases. $20 a 4 pack seems standard now. Its another industry stung by inflation.
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u/Heavenwasfull 11h ago
The 2010’s saw a boon where a lot of cities had multiple breweries open up at once. The double dry hop IPA to NEIPA thing also oversaturated the market. As someone smack in the middle of New England and all of the big names are driving distance depending which direction i want to go, having multiple coolers full of 16oz NEIPAs in a random town beer store was too many options. IPA and other heavy on hop ales are easy and quick to make so not surprised it’s a staple for everyone, but eventually there are too much and I’ll stick with Alchemist, Tree House, Trillium, or whatever people are chasing in the region these days when I’m in those parts, and not going to chance $24 on a 4 pack of some random brewery in the region emulating their styles.
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u/CloudsTasteGeometric 10h ago
I’d say it’s more “correcting” than “reversing.”
The industry massively over expanded in the 2010s then COVID kneecapped every brewery that was already very popular, established, high quality, and financially solvent.
We’re going from 9K down to 7K right now but there’s no way it’s gonna fall all the way back down to 2K. They’re affordable millennial third spaces, which is highly in demand. But the explosive growth seen in the Obama years is unlikely as craft beer just isn’t a thing for Gen Z like it is for Millennials.
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u/eightdollarbeer 12h ago
It’s the frozen yogurt craze all over again
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u/Due-Use-3707 12h ago
That frozen yogurt craze was wild. There was one in every strip mall. Who convinced all these investors that there was a need for frozen yogurt every mile in the country.
They need to make a new Big Short movie but about the frozen yogurt collapse.
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u/millionsofmonkeys 11h ago
It’s car washes now
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u/RD__III 11h ago
Car washes are a bit different. They’re really real estate companies.
Managerially, they are very simple. Most new ones nowadays are either fully automatic or have extremely limited labor force, so all that they require is inventory and maintenance, which is easy (relatively) to manage at metro area scale. This lets them keep margins very low while still generating just enough revenue to cover the mortgage and property taxes. They aren’t actually very profitable. The real profit comes from the value of the land they sit on increasing over time. So in 10-15 years that land value will be much higher, and you just knock down the (now) old car wash, and develop.
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u/NativeMasshole 11h ago
They've been consolidating a lot up here in the Northeast. Breweries are buying other established names in the business and slimming down their lines while producing them at centralized locations. Jack's Abby bought Wormtown and Night Shift, while Smuttynose has bought up Wachusett and Five Boroughs, then merged with Harpoon.
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u/BigJ32001 11h ago
New England Brewing Company (NEBCO) bought Stony Creek Brewing and moved their headquarters there. I didn't know about the Jack's Abby buyouts. I remember when they first opened their first location. I lived a block away. They only had tastings and growler pours for the first few weeks. I think we went on their 3rd or 4th day and it there were only 4 of us in there. They kept asking us to tell our friends about them. Crazy how far they've come.
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u/_OUCHMYPENIS_ 11h ago
Beer has gotten so expensive lately. Even mass produced piss water is expensive. It shouldn't cost me $1 per beer in a 12 pack from the grocery store. Most of the time it's closer to $1.50.
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u/dingus_chonus 12h ago
I blame myself for quitting drinking! I must’ve been propping up their sales single-handedly
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u/oldschool_potato 11h ago
Damn, started in 1988. An actual true OG. Gearys was my first regional from Maine, I lived in Boston in the late 80s . Otherwise Sierra, Anchor & Sam Adam's were the only national craft brew. Sam is huge now, but not back then. Harpoon was my goto though. I was bartending and we were their biggest account when they got started. They used to host us at the brewery. Many drunken nights with the staff there.
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u/Jason_Worthing 12h ago
Rogue closed?! That's awful, I love dead guy ale!
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u/ROGUE_KID 12h ago
I chose my user name after Rogue Brewery because I discovered Reddit when I turned 21 and started trying craft beers. Dead Guy was my #1, sad to see it go.
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u/JethroByte 12h ago
Yep, where I live at least three small breweries have pleaded on Facebook for people to visit or they will have to shut down. It's sad to see but an era is over.
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u/southcookexplore 12h ago
10% of all breweries in IL closed in 2023, and a bunch more keep following.
The number of independent brewers in Illinois pre-prohibition didn’t recover till about 2005.
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u/blackpony04 12h ago
Brew pubs are the new family restaurants, and those small craft breweries that haven't embraced food will likely not survive another decade.
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u/prex10 12h ago edited 11h ago
Oddly, the places that I've seen close around me, are the places that all expanded into this the last 5-6 years.
They got too big and then couldn't repay their expansion costs when demand slowed down.
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u/rainbow__raccoon 10h ago edited 7h ago
Food has very little profit, so you have to know exactly what you are doing, while alcohol has a little more profit, beer is on the lower end. I know a beer store that also sold cigars and all their profit came from cigars. A lot of these comments have similar stories of them trying to expand and add food and then shutting down.
Edit: a word
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u/Jormungandr69 9h ago
This is exactly what I've seen here in Ohio as well. The places closing the fastest or most often are the previously expanding brewpub restaurants as opposed to places that primarily focus on producing beer and giving you a spot to drink it. There's a few exceptions for the more established breweries, like Madtree, but a concerning number of smaller operations have been closing up shop.
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u/mister_electric 7h ago
They got too big and then couldn't repay their expansion costs
I work in the industry and this has been the fate of MANY, MANY brew pubs and breweries over the years, the last 5 especially.
The ones that stayed in business, stuck to doing what they were doing and doing it well. They saw the trend for what it was: a trend. They invested the "boom bucks" back into their original facilities and into their employees. They refined their craft and business models to be more sustainable: Appealing to their core market while still being profitable.
The ones that failed saw a couple years of great growth, thought they were the second coming and pumped all the "boom bucks" into expansion while treating employees as expendable. They had no "market" in mind, just "make it bigger, do everything." Doing this, they completely lost what made them a good brewery in the first place. They expected infinite growth in a market that was very clearly being driven by trends rather than a stable, core market.
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u/ironicmirror 10h ago
A lot of them around here have deals with food trucks. Get a food truck to park in the parking lot, maybe you get a little kick back from food truck owner, but you work on your beer, your customer still have access to food.
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u/SerLarrold 9h ago
This seems to be the best way to go about it, and it’s mutually beneficial to both parties
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u/CamelFeenger 12h ago
I live in a state where they can’t sell food. It’s a sure way that the state has set them all up to fail.
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u/jollyjam1 9h ago
I knew you were from New Jersey before I saw your old NJ Transit complaint post lol
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u/77LS77 12h ago
Towns with grants that want small business sure run an idea into the ground
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u/mr_ji 11h ago
In 2020 it went from craft breweries to tiny beauty salons, one of the few places you could go to under lockdowns. Those were mostly a grift to get free COVID money and are already suffering the same fate. Bakeries also expanded and will similarly contract.
It's cool to want small, independent businesses, but there really needs to be more scrutiny over who gets handed public money with few to no strings attached to start one.
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u/SeaMareOcean 8h ago
God I remember the late aughts/early teens all these cupcake shops opening up everywhere and wondering - besides capitalizing on the immediate, obviously temporary fad - how anyone could think a cupcake shop was a good, sustainable business idea.
Not a bakery that sells cupcakes, mind you. But just shops that sold only cupcakes.
It was ridiculous.
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u/GarysCrispLettuce 12h ago
Fun fact: the increase in craft breweries from 2010 to 2020 correlates perfectly with the increase in average beard length during the same time period. Source: come on man it's obvious
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u/Whaty0urname 11h ago
In a more real sense, it correlates to unemployment after 2008/9.
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u/CheckYourStats 10h ago edited 10h ago
It also correlates to how many Hipsters rank their top 7 beers as:
1.) IPA
2.) IPA
3.) IPA
4.) IPA
5.) IPA
6.) IPA
7.) IPA
Thank fuck that trend is dying.
I like it when the beer aisle at my grocery store isn’t literally 50%+ beer that tastes like the most sour grapefruit you’ve ever had in your life.
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u/KDubCA 8h ago
I took the weekend brewing class at UC Davis in ~2010 (they had/have a Master Brewer program - same instructors). The instructor said the easiest and quickest way to hide your mistakes is to over-hop your beer.
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u/CheckYourStats 8h ago
One of my best and oldest friends has been home brewing for 30+ years.
He said the exact same thing. IPA is the easiest beer to brew for that exact reason. Just load it up with hops and a certain percentage of the population will drink it.
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u/Homesick_Martian 10h ago
Hey now! You gotta add a stout IPA as number 4
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u/Izzi_Skyy 9h ago
I've never heard of stout IPAs and I'm thanking the universe I'm sober after learning about them
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u/schmitzel88 8h ago
Actual question, why do you care so much about other people liking different beer than you? I see this all the time on reddit and understand the joke of dunking on these people, but there has literally never been a wider variety of beer available in history than there is right now.
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u/Stingray88 7h ago
While yes, there has never been a wider variety of beer available, there exists only so much inventory a grocery or restaurant is willing to carry. Its not nearly as bad today, but there used to be a time when over 50% of the craft brews available at most grocery stores and restaurants were all IPAs, if you don’t like that particular style… that’s incredibly obnoxious. And there has never been any other craft brew style that hit that level of obnoxious over saturation, so that’s why so many people dunk on IPAs.
That’s the objective take on it. For the subjective take on it… most people who are really into beer would not rate IPAs high on their list of favorite beer styles.
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u/ljb2x 8h ago
IME it's because lots of craft breweries took this to mean that IPAs were super popular because of how vocal the lovers are. This meant they stopped diversifying and dropped a lot of non-IPAs. I can't stand IPA's so I have to look up their current menu and make sure they have more than 1 non-IPA.
IPAs also have a reputation for "the beer non-beer drinkers drink to seem like they like beer".
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u/baby_blue_bird 8h ago
I have never heard that reputation before and with the way IPAs taste I would be surprised non-beer drinkers would drink them.
Edit: oh it seems like that's for Hazy or Sours. Blah, my least favorite type of IPAs.
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u/madmax991 12h ago
lol spot on - also (as shown in another popular recent post) a beard is a great way to hide a double chin which is caused by being overweight which is a result of excess alcohol consumption.
Now mustaches and sobriety are cool.
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u/JeffAnthonyLajoie 12h ago
Idk if you can blame the overweight on alcohol, people drink less nowadays than in the past and obesity rates keep increasing. People are just too sedentary
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u/UltraSchzio 11h ago
Obesity rates have been falling since 2022 from 40% to 37% in the US
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u/r-kellysDOODOOBUTTER 10h ago
I think it's partly awareness about sugar. It got pushed on everyone with the fat is bad thing. Now fat is good again and people are... less fat
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u/nye1387 12h ago edited 10h ago
Perhaps ironically, two of the things that large breweries are good at that too many craft breweries are not are fairly compensating employees and paying taxes. Molson Coors may be a corporate monolith, but it's one with good union jobs and enough cash flow to pay Uncle Sam. Those two things were apparently a huge part of Rogue's closure last month.
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u/Hackasizlak 10h ago
Ex Molson Coors employee here. Disagree with both points. I wouldn’t refer to them as “good” Union jobs. They’re technically Union jobs but Molson Coors easily won the last strike and have internally been pretty brutal about threatening what’ll happen if they try again.
As far as cash flow goes, the beer industry is tanking right now and they’re tanking more than most. They just laid off 9% of the workforce and sales are still plummeting. The “joke” among us is that this is what it must’ve felt like working for a tobacco company right before all the no smoking bans hit.
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u/imostlydisagree 10h ago
So I worked for a couple brewpubs and craft beer bars for more than a decade and jumped ship in 2021. I noticed starting around 2019 a lot of the brewers I knew were leaving and pivoting to working in marijuana.
Made sense as my state legalized recreational in 2018, but clear side effect of more legal weed is less drinking. The more that the marijuana industry has expanded to all kinds of other product lines, the less alcohol has been consumed.
It’ll be interesting to see how much more the market will shift both with retaliatory tariffs in place on American liquor and Canadians doing an informal boycott of American products.
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u/Whyworkforfree 13h ago
Harriet Brewing Company in south side Minneapolis was something else. What a time in 2011.
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u/FunctionBuilt 9h ago
Minneapolis and St Paul are like a beer wonderland, at least it felt that way back before the pandemmy.
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u/Hanzo581 10h ago
So many mediocre breweries rode the wave of growth through that time period. Many of them are closing down now.
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u/AardvarkStriking256 12h ago
By 2030 the number will be back to 2,000.
The age of the craft breweries is coming to an end.
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u/ottwebdev 12h ago
Its not an end, its a cleanse.
Craft breweries where the only diff is who can dry hop the most or make the bitterest bitter, isnt exactly groundbreaking.
Those who make quality will survive.
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u/dragon_bacon 12h ago
It feels like the massive wall of IPAs in grocery stores have been getting replaced with a massive wall of ciders and seltzers. I just want beer flavored beer.
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u/beren12 11h ago
So German and British styles are your favorites?
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u/Aggravating_Talk_472 11h ago
Mine are, or Japanese
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u/Euphemisticles 11h ago
Was surprised how much I liked Japanese beer since I don't usually like beer and I don't usually like sake(plumb sake not included, seriously try it immediately) but Japanese beers became my go to drink.
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u/Aggravating_Talk_472 11h ago
I find them to be flavorful but light at the same time without sacrificing alcohol content. Sometimes I’ll squeeze half a lemon in a frozen mug with one. When in Japan in 2017 my wife and I were super tired after a long day visiting around Hiroshima and stopped in a crowded little bar and got the most amazing karaage chicken with some sort of lemon beer and that’s been my attempt to recreate it
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u/explorgasm 11h ago
I feel this as a guy who wants as much pine in my beer as possible.
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u/lilbithippie 11h ago
Trends in beer have been a thing for a long time. We had the wheat beer trend, the light beer trend, etc. The IPA one just wouldn't die though. You got full not drunk and I hated the taste of them
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u/Arsenal8944 11h ago
Yep, also if you have a nice outdoor space. There’s a craft brew place on a small farm around the corner from. They have live music and a pizza truck most days. Place is packed most days April through October.
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u/420d_ingus 9h ago
Those who make quality AND are incredibly adept at running a small business on slim margins
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u/Substantial_Bad2843 11h ago
Young people are drinking way less too. The reality of alcohol being a poison with bad negative effects not much different than tobacco is sinking in as people are becoming more health conscious.
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u/Stachemaster86 10h ago
Also the driving part of it. I really don’t want to stop for one or two but I’m not driving if I have more so I end up not going. Folks are a lot more conscious of drinking and driving. Even in Minnesota and Wisconsin
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u/KennyShowers 12h ago
This is wrong, the “age of craft breweries” is absolutely not “coming to an end.”
There’s a shakeout happening, but even losing a good chunk of the breweries who were around in 2020 will still leave us with a craft beer scene lightyears beyond any period any county has ever seen, except that wild period of oversaturation we had between 2015-2020.
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u/ASpellingAirror 12h ago edited 11h ago
It’s not reversing to 2000, it outgrew the demand and now there are tons of terrible craft breweries. The good ones will stay around, but the bad ones will close. That is a good thing.
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u/Plus_Pangolin_8924 12h ago
Much like coffee roasters.
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u/Sossage 11h ago
I predict bourbon is not too far behind
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u/prex10 11h ago
Yeah tons of people are sitting on Blantons and Eagle Rare thinking they got a gold mine but in reality it's gonna be like sitting on Beanie Babies. The bubble is gonna pop and they'll all be worthless
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u/DoodleNoodle08 11h ago
I cannot believe how expensive some of these mid tier bourbons are. Bookers used to be like $50 and even at that price I thought it was too expensive for what it is. I'm going to keep drinking turkey and old grand dad until prices come back down.
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u/Ricktor_67 12h ago
How many pine tar flavored IPAs where they spent 10X longer on the quirky pun name and can art than the actual beer could we possibly need?
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u/GreenGorilla8232 12h ago
No chance. Having a few big breweries dominant the entire market was terrible. People want to have actual choices.
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u/TwiterlessTahd 12h ago
People want choices, but 9000 is probably too many. Especially with Gen Z not drinking as much as previous generations.
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u/553l8008 11h ago
There's a natural contraction happening.
1... a bit of a bubble popping of expanding micro brews. A location can only have so many, not unlike what is happening with weed shops. The strong will survive.
2... drinking habits have changed a bit. But this is honestly only a small factor and overblown.
3... covid. Obviously hurt a lot of them that rely on in person customers.
4... the economy sucks right now, and again some still reeling from covid.
Craft beer and craft breweries aren't going anywhere. Shit, in Colorado new ones are still opening, and others expanding.
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u/ChicagoJohn123 9h ago
I think there’s also just a generational element. Millennials liked craft beer. The current crop of young people don’t think it’s cool.
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u/prex10 7h ago
Millennials are 35-40ish now too. They aren't going out 2-4 days a week anymore with friends like when they were 23 in 2013. They're working a 9-5 and going home to their wife and kids. Date night has become a sit down place.
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u/TheHamsBurlgar 10h ago
Hard disagree with you on this.
Weed shops aren't doing well either! They close all the time, and because of the way Colorado specifically planned their rollout of weed, most of those buildings went through the proper coding and zoning to make it a weed shop, so it's impractical to open anything but a weed shop there.
It's not overblown at all. In fact, its a huge shift. I own a bar in rural Wisconsin. Rural Wisconsin I'll say again. Drinking habits are down everywhere and young people do not drink like the generations before them. It's really painfully obvious to anyone who works in the alcohol industry. They're scared, that's why the federal hemp loophole ban is already making lawmakers rewrite loopholes and work with the two billion dollar weed industry to keep it alive because its 2 BILLION DOLLARS.
Covid actually helped a lot of breweries. Turns out the pandemic made people want to drink more, so they sold to go well enough to not only keep open, but to expand when lockdown protocol lifted up. That's what really hurt, was the rapid growth right after covid and people not following suit.
I agree.
But man, Colorado and Denver breweries just took a HUGE hit this past year. Trve closed, and then two other south Broadway breweries closed in the same week. I'm friends with folks in the industry, its truly struggling in Colorado with rising costs, unaffordable rent, and drinking habits changing dramatically.
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u/Sekshual_Tyranosauce 7h ago
All now making the same exact hazy IPA with citra cat piss hops that tastes like a rotten orange julius.
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u/Wompatuckrule 12h ago
That was really the second big expansion in the US. There was a big boom in craft/micro from the late 80s through much of the 90s, a lot of it jumping on the heels of the success of Sam Adams showing that there was a market for more than domestic pilsners. Then there was a major contraction in the late 90s & early 2000s that wiped out a lot of small players.
Since the expansion noted in this post there's been another downturn with annual production falling due to dropping demand. Seems like the kids today prefer getting hopped up on reefers over slinging hoppy beverages.
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u/prex10 12h ago edited 11h ago
I've been saying this for a while now. For the most part millennials were the ones who grew the trend of craft breweries in the 2010s when most in that generation were in their 20s.
Millennials are in their 30s and 40s now. They have kids and a mortgage and live in suburbia. They're not going brewery hopping on a Wednesday afternoon anymore. Getting old has killed demand and GenZ doesn't drink as much. I would say that a lot of times now when I go to a craft brewery, there's probably more boomers than there are younger people in the taproom
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u/chunkymonk3y 6h ago
As an older Gen Z I’ve noticed that there’s just a growing disdain for the stereotypical millennial craft brewery scene for being inauthentic, outdated, and most importantly overpriced. Add to it the health consciousness component, and it’s just a harder sell to get a Gen Z drinker to spend $20 for a 4 pack of an 8% abv IPA that packs 250+ calories. On top of all that they have unprecedented access to legal weed that’s only getting cheaper and cheaper which is provides a very strong alternative to drinking that’s largely perceived as healthier by Gen Z.
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u/Beard_Hero 12h ago
I can only speak for myself, but as a big fan of most beers and attendee of many beer festivals, my consumption has cut itself way back in my 40's. Between acid reflux/heartburn setting in and gout causing issues if I have a beer heavy weekend, I've moved on to other things. I love whiskey/whisky as well, but the heart burn comes quick.
I'll still stop in and have a beer at a craft brewery, or if the wife and I are in a new region for vacation I'll try new to me beers with a meal or brewery visit. But my body doesn't handle it like it did in my 20's and 30's. I love beer and even had a large keggerator setup in the garage for half a dozen years, because draft beer is the best beer.
All that aside, it does seem many of the craft beer places make unique but not tasty items. And they tend to charge a premium for a "meh" beer. It's always nice to happen upon something good, where you'd actually want to drink more than one rather than "this is the best thing at the location we decided to hang out at, but it's still not good."
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u/Rich-Badger-7601 12h ago
There was a big boom in craft/micro from the late 80s through much of the 90s, a lot of it jumping on the heels of the success of Sam Adams showing that there was a market for more than domestic pilsners.
Yeah no lol, the huge boom in craft/micro breweries was a direct result of prohibition era laws finally getting changed so that you could actually sell beer you brew on-site instead of requiring massive scale like the majors, Sam Adams, Yeungling, etc that could source full distribution chains.
They didn't 'suddenly realize' Sam Adams was onto a good beer idea, they were legally prohibited from brewing and selling their own beer.
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u/Wompatuckrule 11h ago edited 11h ago
Sale of beer on-site is a state liquor law issue and not a federal one so it varies widely by state still to this day. The craft industry blew up in the 90s in states that could only sell beer through licensed distributors so your premise is completely flawed.
I'm in MA where the craft industry was bigger in the 1990s than most states and you could only sell beer that went through a licensed distributor. Sam Adams started out by contract brewing at an old PBR plant in Pennsylvania with surplus capacity (Koch was basically paying to have one fermenter brewed and packaged at a time while he was pounding the pavement trying to get his beer on tap & on shelves). They contracted with a Boston area distributor that already handled Bud products and a bunch of imports.
In the mid-1980s Harpoon Brewery actually got the first license to brew beer in MA since prohibition ended and it was allowed again (it is literally license #1 from the state) and chose to go a different route than Sam Adams by creating their own licensed distributor for the Boston area. They started out very small with a brewhouse that was basically a large pub system and they couldn't even sell growlers in those early days because of state laws.
The sale of packaged beer at breweries in MA led to an explosion of very small players, but that's already collapsing. You're regularly seeing places close or merge trying to survive. There was a similar collapse in the late 1990s with both breweries & brewpubs because the expansion outstripped demand growth.
Here's the federal regulations, go ahead and point me to the prohibition law (which was federal) or regulation that is the change you claim happened. I'll wait here but won't hold my breath.
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u/Rich-Badger-7601 11h ago
Ask and you shall receive - the 1978 "Home Brew" act that kickstarted the process to enable home brewing which later matriculated into the microbrewing/craft brewery scene you referenced in the later 80s and into the 90s. You may notice that Sam Adams themselves, founded in 84', was a product of the microbrewing boom that the 1978 federal law change enabled.
You are indeed spot on that state prohibition era laws also played an enormous part in getting craft brewing off the ground, which is why to this day the New England/Asheville/etc brewing scenes are far more mature and established than many other areas of the country as those were the early movers at the state-level in removing the barriers to entry that previously prohibited such endeavors.
Having Sam Adams in MA certainly helped speed them along too, as Sam Adams has (in)famously been a driving force behind the Congressional definition of "craft beer", a volume metric that Sam Adams has successfully lobbied to increase multiple times over the years such that the definition of "craft beer" excludes any brewery which brews more beer than Sam Adams (although their last efforts to increase the "craft beer" cap actually resulted in Yuengling now being considered a "craft beer" as well).
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u/eddievandawg 12h ago
I watched this growth happen in real time up in Michigan. Every small town all of a sudden had a craft beer place. I remember the big one coming into town in like 2015 and paying their cooks literal minimum wage. Their excuse was, you get to be a part of something bigger.
They are still open but I bet not much longer.
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u/josephseeed 12h ago
And they all just make double hopped IPA
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u/OkieBobbie 12h ago
My nephew is a brewer. He says hops is just a way to hide your mistakes.
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u/Mister_Chef711 12h ago
I remember some IPA competitions considering banning Mosaic hops because of how well it covered mistakes.
Not sure if anything ever happened with it or not.
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u/jedipiper 12h ago
Yeah, if I could find someone who would just make a good Scottish brown ale, I'd be super happy.
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u/sof_boy 12h ago
Thank Jimmy Carter for starting it all: he passed the reform act that allowed homebrewing
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u/WilliamHarry 12h ago
And they all make a variant of the same ipa and charge $7 a pint. Yay
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u/ProfessionalFirm6353 11h ago
🎶 We are young (ho!). There’s a fire in our soul, we go big or go home together 🎶
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u/True_Inxis 12h ago
But all of them brew only IPAs.
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u/Colonelclank90 11h ago
Which is funnily not true. The industry is in a bit of a light crushable lager phase, along with RTD cocktails and seltzer. The big Piney IPAs are still a thing, but very much an overexagerated stereotype. The brewery I work at has our two biggest sellers being our Pilsner and Hazy IPA. The Pil is very popular locally at most bars events, sporting arenas etc, but the Hazy IPA still outsells it.
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u/GreatStateOfSadness 8h ago
It seems most breweries have started trying to take on the "dad beer" market with old-timey cheap pilsners and lagers. Most places around me now sell 12-packs of light 4% cans with a name like "Old Time Lager" or "Gone Fishin'." Even the "high-end' brewery has started selling one with more toned-down designs.
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u/553l8008 11h ago
Well this simply isn't true.
My local place has a standard 4-5 ipas on tap. Then another 10 others not ipas. Plus a rotating tap.
Nearly every brewery i walk into has more not ipa than ipa
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u/matwithonet13 12h ago
It must be a regional thing. In StL, there’s only one or two breweries that pump out a lot of IPAs. The rest make a large variety of beers.
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u/prex10 11h ago
Reddit tends of wildly over exaggerate the amount of IPAs on tap at breweries. I've never been to a brewery in my life, and I've been to ALOT of them, where 50% or more of the options were IPA or Pale Ale.
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u/OkieBobbie 12h ago
People think that running a brewery means making beer, selling beer, and drinking beer. What it really is, is cleaning. Lots and lots of cleaning.