The 2010s in Review: A Wild Decade
Alcoholic root beer, glitter, dry-hopping, Mexican lagers, and IPAs (white, black, fruit, and hazy) all had their moment in decade of wild change.
Ten years is long enough to feel like ages, but short enough to pass in a blink. Likewise, in some ways 2010 was not so different from the 2020 we now near. American craft beer had 30 years under its belt, and there were lots of examples of quality and mastery to be found. Big beer was already struggling. Citra hops had been released and the first phase of modern IPAs were being made.
In other ways, however, it seems like an impossibly quaint time. Consider that AB InBev (ABI) hadn’t yet made its first outright purchase, and when it did, paid a paltry $58 million. By the highly exuberant middle of the decade, two breweries (Lagunitas and Ballast Point) fetched a billion dollars. But, by the end, prices were back down: Ballast got sold again, and for about the same price ABI paid for Goose Island in 2019 dollars. It was a decade of growth, experimentation, professionalization, and ultimately retrenchment.
Just the Facts
The 2010s were a period of remarkable change. Things were looking good when the decade started: the US had 1800 breweries, more than anytime since the 1890s, and the craft beer segment had grown to ten million barrels. [I know the decade properly starts in 2021, math pedants, but you lost that war 20 years ago.] Over the decade, the number of breweries more than quadrupled to 8,000 and craft volume nearly tripled to 27 million barrels.
That conceals some darker trends that developed in the second half of the decade. The overall beer market has been static for decades—it’s been right around 200 million barrels since the 1990s—though the country continues to grow. That means per capita beer consumption, on the skids for 30 years, fell again, from 19.6 to 18.7 gallons. Domestic beer production has declined 9%, from 181 to 164 million barrels. (Imports picked up the difference.) ABI and the company now called Molson Coors dropped 26 million barrels over the decade, and despite the corn syrup wars, are receding still.
All those new breweries mean a huge explosion in products available, and the number of beers offered at grocery stores (measured by SKU) doubled. That hasn’t been enough for the avalanche of new beers, which are increasingly sold in brewery taprooms. Craft beer was a bright spot over the first half of the decade, growing by double digits each year. It continues to show strength, but ends the decade with a modest 4% bump over 2018.
Perhaps the biggest change over the decade was consolidation among the largest craft breweries. At the start of the decade, 46 of the country’s fifty largest breweries were independent. Now that list is dominated by brands owned in part or entirely by other breweries, or collectives that have banded together. And each year the number of true large independents grows smaller and smaller.
Year By Year
It’s fun to review the past, because you discover trends or events that present themselves like old friends. Some vanish so completely that we marvel that they were ever a thing to begin with. (Remember white IPAs?? Trippy.) So, in what is almost certainly not an exhaustive account, let’s look back.
2010
The decade dawned with a quaint battle: what to call roasty IPAs? Most of the country agreed to “black IPA,” but in the Northwest, people called them “Cascadian Dark Ales.” Didn’t matter: they both faded fast. That was also the year Texas-based Gambrinus quietly trademarked the word “Beervana” to promote BridgePort—enraging Oregonians. It marked the peak of the “imperial” frenzy, when breweries were making steroidal versions of everything from kölsch to dark mild. Miller Lite “innovated” the “Vortex” bottle, illustrating the state of affairs in corporate beer.
2011
The second year of the decade was a watershed, for two reasons. That was the year IPA finally became the best-selling style in the craft segment, the maturation of trends that had been building for years. The rest of the decade would be characterized by experimentation with hops—and style diversity would begin to decline. It was also the year ABI bought Goose Island—a move seen as controversial at the time. It wasn’t clear in 2011 how drinkers would respond, and ABI waited another three years before buying their second craft brewery. Those early acquisitions caused huge public blowback—but didn’t seem to dent sales.
In the elusive manner of time, this was also a year when beer with weird ingredients started breaking through—at least in Oregon. A couple big hits were Burnside Brewing’s peppery Sweet Heat and Bend Brewing’s pomegranate and hibiscus Berliner weisse, Ching Ching. We think of these kinds of beers as a recent phenomenon, but they’re not.
2012
The number of breweries started ticking up in 2011, but this was the year explosive growth started in earnest—and probably the first year people started warning of a bubble. (That growth accelerated and continues improbably along.) Citra hops fueled the first wave of proto-juicy IPAs, and Mosaic hops, released this year, fueled the next. Gluten-free beer existed already, but craft breweries started making them, offering an alternative to the dreadful products available in grocery stores. Saisons have never been a commercial hit, but they have carved out a durable niche and are usually available wherever you go. I date that transition to 2012. This was also the year (and it didn’t last much longer than that) of white IPAs.
2013
The single, unifying trend running through all food and beverage categories (and entertainment and news and…) since the middle of the last century is fragmentation. The mass market for everything is shrinking, and consumers sort themselves according to proliferating options. 2013 marked a brand new category: cannabis. Colorado and Washington embarked on an experiment with legal weed, the efforts of which no one has yet quite gathered. In other cases of fragmentation, 2013 was the year cider became widely available. Shandies, led by Leinie’s, also had their day. I believe the year also marked the high-water mark for IPLs. Finally, auguring a trend that wouldn’t get going for a few years, small malthouses started to organize and created the Craft Maltsters Guild.
2014
I was super excited by a 2014 development that seems to have fizzled—the commercial availability of native hops from New Mexico (neomexicanus). They were strong, which may account for the lack of interest. Too bad—they seemed like a lot of fun.
A trend that didn’t fizzle was the terminal point of a method that had been underway for several years—“hop-bursting” or “zero IBU” beers. Americans had been trying to use those hops like Citra and Mosaic in ways that let them express their fruity flavors and aromas. It eventually led to the practice of using none of them at the traditional point of hopping—at the start of the boil. Hazy IPAs were being made this way, but so were many other IPAs all over the country (which were often hazy but not opaque like those in New England.) If consolidation was the business trend that defined the decade, this was the beer trend that did.
Although you can’t really call it a trend, enough breweries had started making beer spontaneously that you could at least say it was established—and one brewery, De Garde, was only making spontaneously fermented beer.
Finally, pumpkin beers were also at their peak, which pointed at another feature of the mid-decade: seasonals. For a time, they were the most sold “style” (or SKU, really), buoyed by seasonal offerings like pumpkin ales.
2015
Consolidation hit its stride by mid-decade. Between November of 2014 and December of 2015, ABI snatched up five breweries. It was also the year Constellation Brands made the billion dollar bet on Ballast Point. No surprise that this was also the year fruit IPAs were in their full flowering, thanks principally to Grapefruit Sculpin. (And they have crashed almost as far as black IPA in the years since.) While we’re on flashes in the pan, remember Not Your Father’s Root Beer? That was 2015.
Kettle souring became a nationwide practice, and goses were the most common product (especially ones made with fruit). Session IPAs also got going, filling the space left by pale ales, which were at the time terminally uncool. Finally, this was also the year crowlers started coming into regular use.
2016
It seems like hazies have been around for a long time, but they didn’t depart New England until 2016. Unlike most style trends, however, hazies were a real force, and formed the nexus for a trend that would last throughout the decade. Breweries making these styles started packaging them in brightly-colored 16-ounce cans and selling them from taprooms, offering new entrants a blueprint for their businesses. The taproom era followed.
Despite the excitement they engendered, craft growth crashed, going from 15% a year earlier to 6%. At the same time, the market for 22-ounce bottles crashed, too, another hardship for many breweries (profit margins on them were high). Radlers replaced shandies and everyone suddenly decided they hated pumpkin beers.
2017
As we near the end of the decade, our memories of events are sharper, so I’ll trot through matters more quickly. In 2017 we saw flagships flag, milkshake IPAs and pastry beers rise, and a nice little trend in exceptional mixed-fermentation saisons develop. (These may actually be America’s most accomplished beers.) Imports had been a bright spot for years, and so Americans started doing locally-made versions. In 2017 it was Mexican lager’s turn. The big beer in the craft segment was golden ale, sparked by Firestone Walker’s 805. Cannabis started filtering into beer both in the form of CBD in regular beer and cannabis drinks in states with legal markets. Finally, it was the year of “dilly dilly,” a Bud Light campaign that turned out to be more popular than the beer it advertised, which continues to sink.
2018
Last year—is it clear in your mind? The decade-long patterns continued—more consolidation, regional breweries suffering, and craft beer’s growth slowing almost to a stop. It was the year of brut IPA, glitter beer, and locally-made Japanese lagers, which replaced Mexican lagers as the import trend. Finally, exclusive bottle clubs, an idea California breweries cribbed from the wine world, went national.
2019
Which brings us to this year. Acquisitions and mergers continued apace, with a few big names in the mix (New Belgium, Craft Brew Alliance, and Ballast Point). Closures were up as well, highlighted by what happened here in Portland, where six went kaput (and another two, including CBA, were purchased). In 2019, Oregon lost its two founding breweries, BridgePort (closed), and Widmer (sold), and a third, Portland Brewing, closed its brewery restaurant.
It was also the year seltzer went from being an FMB curiosity to a major threat to beer—which caused scores of breweries to make their own versions. Seltzers are just one element of a push toward “health-conscious” offerings—low-alcohol, low-cal, or low-carb beers. Craft breweries, which might have ignored this slice of the market during growth periods (and when they were largely independent), are now panicky and scrambling to produce anything that keeps volumes up.
Finally, one of the most consequential development is brewery-adjacent: the wholesale tier, which is going through its own phase of consolidation. The laws that governed the three-tier system well enough when there were a few hundred breweries is now broken in a world of 8,000. The challenges of distribution exacerbated tensions between breweries forced to focus on taprooms and retailers watching traffic drop. The only winners are the giant distributorships in whose hands the fates of so many breweries rest.
As endings go, this one looks something other than purely happy—pensive and anxious is more like it.
So here is where we are forty years into the craft beer era of American brewing. Thousands of breweries are thriving, and rare is the town of any size that doesn’t have its own producer. Most cities are now vibrant hubs of brewing activity. During the 2010s, the brewing industry became fully professionalized, and the quality of beer—both at the high end and median—is better than its ever been. I’ve personally been astonished by the level of brewing I’ve seen, and a few beers I encountered this decade have caused me to raise the bar on my own expectations of what is possible. Retailers now carry a wide range of styles, even in the bleakest of hotel or airport bars. “Craft” beer may only have 15-20% of the market, but among the whole population of people who drink beer, it has been widely adopted. In short, for the beer drinker this is the best time in history.
But among larger producers there’s a different story. Most are no longer independent, and their corporate owners care little about developing the next Orval—or even SeaQuench—and are quickly plugging “craft” into the mass market bloodstream. They are happy to co-opt trends rather than spark them, and in the age of fracturing interests, feel no particular fidelity to beer. Constellation and Molson Coors have both indicated they’re more interested in FMBs than beer right now, and are scrambling toward a post-beer “beverage” era.
Regional craft breweries are trapped between these tectonic plates, neither big enough to compete against ABI nor local and nimble enough to hold off the thousands of little guys—which makes the independents ever more vulnerable.
As we exit this amazing decade, it feels like one of those “something’s gotta give” moments. The question is—what? The coming years are likely to continue offering surprises, but which trends and key events will come to characterize it? That’s anyone’s guess. The only prediction I’m willing to make is this one: it will be interesting!
See you on the other side—