How Will We Understand The Craft Era?

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I’ve been writing a lot more “passages” posts in the past couple years than I ever did before. Breweries are aging, and many are passing away or being sold to larger concerns. Very few of the largest US breweries are independent anymore, and a lot of older breweries are shrinking, vanishing, or turning into something other than breweries. Meanwhile, hard seltzers have achieved a market share it took craft breweries decades to match, and many erstwhile beer-makers are busily investing in the latest hard coffee or canned cocktail.

There is every reason to believe the year-plus Covid disruption will have long-lasting effects on the alcohol market, and I wonder if we won’t use 2020-‘21 as a convenient place to divide the “craft era” with whatever we’re about to inherit. It will mean reckoning with this era, attempting to make meaning out of how we got here. We are a species of story. We knit together selected events and facts to create meaning out of a disorganized world. The stories we tell ourselves create the reality we inhabit. In our little corner over here in the beer world, that narrative, which has been broadly consistent since the late 1970s, has begun to fray. As we enter this new phase, where the very notion of “craft” loses any coherence, we’ll begin to tell ourselves a new story. In an effort to begin that reckoning, I’ve started to think about the last 44 years, noticing where it was less than we imagined in some ways, but also, perhaps, much more.

The Craft Era

Although brewery numbers hit a nadir around 1980, it was in many ways the pinnacle of a certain kind of beer culture in the US. The country, with a population of 230 million people, drank 188 million barrels, and almost all of it was made domestically. In the four hundred years Europeans lived in America, people never drank more than they did at that moment. (By comparison, last year we drank 191 million barrels, but had a hundred million more citizens.)

The craft brewing “revolution” was, measured in dollars, a tepid one. As an economic force, craft brewing had almost no impact on the US brewing market for decades. It didn’t achieve a single percentage of the market until 1994, and by the end of the century was still around 3%. Meanwhile, domestic beer steamed along, holding steady around 200 million barrels annually.

Craft brewing didn’t start becoming a real player for another decade—thirty years after its birth. And even then, it was making slow inroads into the fuller market. Only by the mid-teens had it achieved real substance, with 12% market share—though more important to an industry, it was earning more than one in five dollars of revenue.

So already we see two competing narratives emerge. Craft was a slow-building, minor phenomenon—or it was a revolution that changed everything. In fact, both are true. In the lived experience of beer drinkers, something more profound is happening. That’s why when we think about the post-Covid world of beer, we may have more luck understanding it if we look beyond sales figures. Indeed, my guess is those will appear relatively static—possibly for years to come. As I worked through a conceptual model for understanding the period, three different lenses emerged: financial, cultural, and evolutionary. Each has something to tell us about beer in America over that span, and yet each has limitations. Taken together, perhaps they come close to telling the full picture.

Volume growth in three Phases

Let’s stick with dollars for a moment but pull out the microscope and take a more granular view. The craft era didn’t proceed uniformly, but went through periods of growth and retrenchment. The first started with New Albion and ran through the middle-90s. This was a period of rapid brewery expansion but little real growth. By early 1996, entrepreneurs had founded a thousand breweries, but sold almost no beer.

That doesn’t quite capture the full picture, though. Josh Noel revealed a fascinating detail in Barrel-Aged Stout and Selling Out: in the early ‘90s, Sam Adam’s Boston Lager and Pete’s Wicked Ale accounted for a third of all craft beer sales. I suspect adding Sierra Nevada and one or two others would account for half the market. That success and dominance by leading brands both alarmed big companies and encouraged investors. The big companies began responding, making their own versions and investing in the new breweries, which probably helped craft beer attain broader cultural salience (see below). Meanwhile, investors created a gold rush atmosphere—not quite as big as the dot com era that followed, but with similar results.

Then craft beer crested. Sales never declined, but in 1998 they were completely flat, and a lot of breweries failed. The second phase was more like a hibernation. Brewery counts didn’t budge, and volumes barely ticked up. Breweries tried to survive, paying off debts from overspending in the mid-90s, and going through the first round of consolidation.

In the third phase craft beer became big business. It went on a decade-plus run of growth and became a substantial force in brewing. It featured the second round of consolidation, which confounds data analysis. But if you sweep up all the breweries making IPAs in the country, this segment probably now accounts for a third of the total revenue. Finally, by 2015, it had delivered on that early-‘90s promise.

Beer Evolution Before and After IPA

In some ways 2011 is the most important year in American craft brewing. That was the year IPAs finally became the best-selling craft style. It signals a watershed in beer evolution, and in this regard craft beer’s influence has been far more profound. Up through the turn of the century, most US craft breweries were reproducing European styles. They were learning different techniques and processes. Then, in the late 90s and early 00s, they began to rework those techniques to serve their own purposes and developed a new tradition in brewing built around the flavor and aroma of their native hops. It was a watershed moment that transformed not just the US brewing industry, but brewing around the world.

We notice what an effect this had in the US: brewery numbers skyrocketed, hoppy styles metastasized. From around 2,500 breweries in the early ‘10s, new brewery growth hit staggering levels, more than tripling in the next seven years. Breweries started building business models around IPAs, and those that did generated the most excitement. Breweries with different identities had to adapt, remaking themselves as IPA breweries or at least offering IPAs to satisfy that thirst.

Roman’s Sloeber IPA, made with Citra, Amarillo, and Simcoe.

But the effect was bigger than the US and rippled out worldwide. I really noticed this traveling around Europe in 2011-‘12. “Craft brewery” now meant a small operation making IPAs (along with a smattering of other styles that spoke “craft” in a loud American accent), usually down to the sleek, austere industrial spaces Americans favored. It was just starting then. When I returned for a European tour in 2019, American-style IPA breweries thrived in every city I visited.

American IPA has become a worldwide phenomenon, and is largely responsible for the thousands of new breweries that have opened since 2010 from Beijing to Guadalajara. Not since the spread of Bohemia’s pale lagers in the 19th century have we seen a style spread so fast to so many places. I would have found it literally unbelievable a decade ago if you told me staid Belgian breweries like Roman would be making IPAs, but now they must. And here at home, it is becoming as dominant among craft breweries as the classic European styles are in their home regions.

The Cultural Revolution

Applying a cultural lens is the final way to consider the impact of the last four decades. A lowbrow beverage in 1980, it was not considered worth drinking with food—pizza and burgers excepted, perhaps. A “pub” was a bar, a smoky, windowless room that attracted a hard-drinking crowd. Of course, most beer of the era was purchased in bulk at the grocery store, not on draft. People lugged home “suitcases” full of dozens of cans. Beer culture started in vacant, late-night parking lots among teens and didn’t become more sophisticated as they aged. This is another of the ways in which the change has been large, and why it feels large as well.

Breweries are everywhere. They are family-friendly and no longer lowbrow. They’re considered fun places for young people to go. Alcohol in general has lost its tawdry associations, but beer has managed to transition to a category of wholesome fun, safe for mixed parties and kids. (Brewery taprooms remain predominantly White spaces, however, as pubs have been for generations. This is one unfortunate area of stagnation.)

As beer has become respectable, the number of places serving it have multiplied. Restaurants mostly have taplists now, and chain restaurants, hotels, airport diners, and even coffee shops sell craft beer. I know Portland is an outlier, but businesses have learned that adding a few handles of draft adds fun, so now venues from movie theaters to game shops sell beer. That in turn has shifted who drinks beer, which now includes every demographic. In one of those strange paradoxes of culture, the more beer became special, the more it penetrated ordinary activities. Creating an upscale market has made it ubiquitous.

Cultural change didn’t proceed in phases, like the industry and style evolutions did. Nor did it happen at the same pace nationally. Some pockets of the country shifted sooner, and others still lag. Culture proceeds gradually, by accretion. And yet even in areas where breweries have been slow to sprout, pale ales and witbiers have found their way into mainstream life.

In 1977, beer played a stable role in the US, one most Americans would describe in similar terms. The beverage itself was easily definable. In the following decades, our perceptions changed, fueled by an evolution of the beverage itself and the people who made it. Once “brewery” evoked a factory, massive in scale and therefore unknowable to those outside its walls. Later, it became human-sized, and called to mind small buildings where you could meet the person who made the beer in your glass. Beer once meant something straw-colored and fizzy and now it means something slightly darker, less fizzy, and probably hoppy. Once it was common and unremarkable, and now it is accused of being twee and over-elaborate.

The past is always rewritten to conform to the story of the present. As beer begins its inevitable transformation—possibly accelerated by Covid—we will revisit the craft era over and over again. It has been a hugely consequential time. Yet the largest effects may be in areas we’re least likely to recognize them—the water to a fish’s eye. In the end, craft beer may not have been a financial rainmaker. The era changed beer, though, both here and abroad, as well as the way we drink it. We shouldn’t lose sight of how important those changes were.

COVER PHOTO: BOSTON GLOBE