A Spot of Rare December News
It’s all connected, I tell you!
December, when nothing serious ever happens, is the time we manufacture lists and offer retrospectives. So imagine my surprise when real, hard news started coming over the transom this week. (Or as hard as the news ever gets in the world of beer.) This isn’t a news site, and I am far from a bloodhound, so while these news items aren’t exactly breaking, they are worth revisiting and considering.
What did we learn? This week, RateBeer announced it was throwing in the towel, the Brewers Association elevated a familiar name to its top job, and two related items in the war twixt the forces of booze and temperance. Each one of these was interesting in that surprised “huh” kind of way, but they seem to have an even greater force when lined up together. Perhaps, if we look at them in just the right way, we can even discern a pattern or themes emerging.
The news from the Brewers Association legit surprised me: the trade organization announced that longtime in-house economist Bart Watson would take over as President and CEO, effective in early January. My longstanding criticisms of the BA have revolved around its outward-facing role in shaping and policing the definition of “craft beer.” It was a self-appointed task not central to the function of a trade group, which is typically focused on the inside game of improving the regulatory and legal environment for its members. (I’ve written about this in the past and won’t rehash it here: this post will sate you with my full argument.)
As a writer working with the Brewers Association, I often had a hard time getting past the rah-rah messaging about craft beer. Over the years, I increasingly relied on Bart’s precision and transparency to cut through the spin. He looks at the numbers and he’ll tell you what they are. He doesn’t sugarcoat facts or try to package them for public consumption. I don’t know if his skill set lines up with the role of CEO—mainly because I don’t know anything about being a CEO—but I am impressed with the organization for selecting their straightest-shooter for the role. Whatever else happens, I expect that transparency to be a hallmark of Watson’s tenure.
The RateBeer news was less surprising. It was an old platform with a mission that has grown obsolete. At the turn of the century, a few years after the birth of the internet, it helped beer fans locate and sort good beer, a task that became ever more hopeless with the proliferation of breweries and beer. Moreover, it was one of those strange acquisitions Anheuser-Busch was making as it was casting around for new opportunities—one that was a head-scratcher even at the time. Of course, once it went into ABI’s hands, its identity as a plucky crowd-sourced community site (sort of the Reddit of Untappd) vanished. It was losing eyeballs to Untappd already—ABI purchased about six years ago—but one imagines it surviving as a message board for beer.
Communities have a great capacity for self-perpetuation in the face of change, but ABI was pretty clear it was purchasing the community to transform its passion into 💵💵💵. That, of course, could only destroy the community. So here we are. (Organizers are trying to buy the site back, and I have no idea whether that’s viable. The site is a decent repository of data, and for that reason alone I would welcome its preservation—and who knows, perhaps a can-do DIY site is exactly what the world needs to cut through the chaos.)
Finally, we have news in the ongoing “alcohol health wars” picking up steam around the country. I characterize it that way because this debate is a proxy war over the place of alcohol in society. One team, the alcohol producers, sellers, and drinkers, want the status quo. The other team, a shaggier collective of interest groups with separate goals, wants to vastly diminish alcohol’s role in American life.
The two sides are fighting over the health effects of alcohol, which is a powerful tool in the war. We are all aware of the avalanche of data on alcohol abuse and addiction. Drinking too much is bad for individuals and society. The remedy to this problem is addressing problem drinking. But what if any alcohol is bad for you? That would suggest trying to stamp out alcohol like a disease—or treating it like cigarettes. So what the science actually says has become a very big deal.
Two recent developments advanced the narrative. Last week, a legislatively-mandated task force in Oregon announced its findings. Members were tasked with evaluating how dangerous alcohol was, whether more treatment was needed, and whether the alcohol industry should fund more treatment with higher taxes. It was created and headed by a legislator who proposed recent ultra high taxes. Surprisingly, they concluded there was no compelling case for a new tax, for a variety of complex reasons.
Nationally, there’s an effort to follow the lead of some European nations and declare that there are no safe levels of alcohol. In 2025, the feds will release new guidelines on health and nutrition and may follow suit. Except: this week, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a review of scientific studies on the effects of alcohol—and affirmed moderate drinking is fine.
For the alcohol industry, these findings have been created with a big “whew!” More dominoes to fall, but this is a good start for those of us who think $7 a pint is plenty high enough.
Now to stand back and look at all these things from a distance. What do they tell us? I would summarize it like this: the main thing is the main thing. The beer (and larger alcohol) industry can no longer indulge in magical thinking. For the Brewers Association, that means focusing on industry health rather than marketing a nebulous concept like “craft beer.” For ABI, it means ending the relationship with craft beer drinkers. And for the already-trouble alcohol industry, it means holding off the effort to shut down them down.
I will probably do one of those year-end retrospectives, but this point is an amuse-bouche. Breweries of all sizes are in a retrenching phase, and they need to focus on the most essential parts of their business. That will continue to have consequences in the coming months or years—at least until the beer industry starts growing again.