The Oracle of Oregon Predicts (Badly)
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As early as the 1920s, Henry Ford looked into the future. What did he foresee? “Mark my word. A combination airplane and motor car is coming. You may smile. But it will come.” He put his money where his dreams were, developing a “sky flivver” that eventually killed a test pilot. A hundred years and way more than a hundred predictions that flying cars were just around the corner later, we’re still driving to work.
Why do we find predictions so seductive? I think it has to do with conjuring reality. Predicting a thing is the first step toward realizing it. Predictions rarely influence anyone else, but boy do they convince the predictor. You may wonder how I know this. Well, at the risk of being immodest, I can boast of having built one of the largest records of bad predictions in beer. My guesses are almost legendarily bad. Part of being bad at predictions is cultivating a poor memory, but I’m so faulty even I can’t deny my record.
If fifteen years blogging has taught me anything, it’s to hedge my predictions. I no longer confidently announce the future, qualification-free. Now I know to preface prophesies with “no one can know the future, but…” I suspect this fools none of you.
So, in celebrating fifteen years blogging, let’s get started with some of my all-time howlers.
1. “Seltzer won’t last”
This prediction stands out not because it was recently disproven, but because it took so little time to disprove. Despite the title of the linked post, my actual prediction there was rather less bold: “Hard seltzer is a fad that will—eventually—run its course.” But on Twitter, in a tweet I can no longer locate, I really went all the way. Linking to an article in which industry folk predicted seltzer would reach 10% of the beer market by some future date (not that soon), I said something like. “Consider this an over/under on seltzer’s prospects. I’ll take the under.” I haven’t been able to track down the actuals for 2020, but I’m pretty sure we’re already there. Now everyone’s predicting seltzer will hit 20% of the market. Trust me, baby, there’s no way. It won’t last!
2. “The next big thing: tart IPAs”
As an act of pure prediction, I don’t think I was ever more explicit. Not only was the title a prediction, but I emphasized the point with my first sentence: “I have seen the future—or tasted it—and it is the tart IPA.” The article as whole stands up pretty well. Having tasted a tart IPA at (partner brewery!) pFriem, I learned how they made it and described its attributes. At pFriem, they used a small infusion of acidity in place of bitterness, and it brightened the fruit qualities of the hops. It was an extraordinary trick, and to this day I don’t know why they aren’t more common. But hey, we’re talking predictions, and a trip to the grocery store will illustrate how far off this one was.
3. The Ballast Point deal is a winner!
I’ll just admit it: I thought this might turn out all right. No one thinks that now, and while opinion wasn’t running quite 100% against it in 2015 when news broke that Constellation Brands spent a cool billion on this 119,000-barrel brewery, it was close. You won’t find me saying it outright in two posts (one and two) I wrote at the time. I was too timid to boldly assert what I suspected, and so I hedged. But if you read between the lines you can discern what I really thought. Constellation had a plan. They knew what they had to do to turn Sculpin into the best-selling national IPA. I understood it was going to be hard work, but I figured if they could do it, the deal would look smart in retrospect. It didn’t take long to expose what a disaster it was, and when a tiny exurban Chicago brewpub known for their golf machines bought it four years later for change they found in the sofa, it was a fitting end to our hubris.
4. Hazy about hazy IPAs
As hazy IPAs started making it west in 2016, I really wasn’t sure what the point was. The Northwest had been making hazy beers for 30 years, and hazy IPAs for twenty. We were well into the juicy phase of IPAs—and in fact, so was the rest of the country. I’d just completed a 26-city book tour and seen firsthand how the trend was nationwide. And so when our local alt-weekly wrote that their favorite beers “have been influenced by Heady Topper, Julius and Sculpin, beers that present hops as a reward rather than a challenge,” I had no idea how this was new. It wasn’t exactly a prediction, but I basically said, “nothing to see here.” Nevertheless, a regional trend was afoot, and it was distinctive in some weird ways that, ahem, breweries noticed.
5. “Can Oregon absorb another 15 breweries?”
November 2009 appears to be the first time I wondered aloud whether we’d reached “peak breweries.” I mused about this apparent brewery oversupply amid a brutal recession that would hang on years more, so it wasn’t entirely absurd. The US had already reached the towering heights of 1,653 breweries, and I wasn’t the only one asking this question. I’m retrospect, we may have been a little premature.
6. Flagships are doomed
I would have guessed the “flagships are dead” talk started about five years ago. Actually, it was closer to ten. I wasn’t out on a limb alone on this one—many have seen the death of flagships as a foregone conclusion for years. Yet this is a sneaky fail. No matter how many people believe it, the evidence isn’t especially strong. The majority of the flagships I would have cited at the time are still around. The business model for craft breweries has changed and most of the flagships of that era have lost volume, for sure. Yet they have proven to be durable warhorses, surviving a decade in which “novelty” became a dizzying hallmark. And, as many breweries discovered during the pandemic, they can be critical volume engines. (In that post, my mind reels at the thought a brewery would make 23 beers in a single year, which now seems worthy of its own special category of “hilariously naive.” A year later I wrote a post about Breakside making a hundred beers.)
7. The first brewery to put glitter beer in a bottle “will be rewarded with staggering sales”
My 2018 post on the three-month glitter beer micro-boomlet is the one you most often throw in my face. To go out with a bang and to demonstrate 1) how perverse I am, and 2) how seductive I find predictions, let me double down: I still believe it! Glitter beer will be huge! (That was also one of my favorite posts of all time.)
In case you’ve completely lost faith in me, I haven’t gotten everything wrong. I foresaw the decline of 22s in 2014, recognized as early as 2011 that we’d entered a “post-craft” world, guessed that when the craft market matured into stable, incremental expansion it would seem like the end of the world to breweries expecting explosive growth, and I even guessed we’d be stuck with the coronavirus through August 2021 back in August 2020. But I doubt those will convince you to forgive me for some of my more flamboyant misses.
Bad predictions are good fun. The next time I begin prognosticating, you can at least take heart knowing we’ll be laughing about it in a few years.