Transitions
On Tuesday, Michael Kiser issued an unexpected announcement about the site he founded fifteen years ago: Good Beer Hunting was ending its run. The next day, the Brewers Association announced that Bob Pease was stepping down as CEO after ten years in the job. On the surface, the announcements don’t have a lot in common. The organizations have been headed in different directions; GBH had ascended into a rare tier of critical acclaim, winning three of the six James Beard it was nominated for, while the Brewers Association has lately been slashing programs while responding to ire from breweries and beer fans (more on that below).
But where they intersect is maturity. Both have been around through a lot of change. We’ve seen this in every sector of the beer industry: mature businesses or the people that run them have spent years or decades riding waves of good and bad times and they’ve decided it’s time to “move on.” Michael Kiser didn’t quite use that language, but Bob Pease did, as have many who have been making similar announcements these days.
These are big announcements. The beer industry is in a moment of transition, and when important institutions like Good Beer Hunting and the Brewers Association make big changes, that transition hastens.
A Mixed Decade
Bob Pease’s tenure as head of the Brewers Association corresponded to the most dramatic decade for small breweries since their revival in the late 1970s. Since 2014, the number of breweries grew by nearly 250%. The mid-teens were the moment when craft beer was the hot ticket in town and went from a niche product to mainstream. The letters “IPA” no longer get you a confused look from regular folk—they had become so normalized that regular beer drinkers and non-drinkers knew what they meant (roughly).
The press release ticks off a number of Pease’s accomplishments over that period: enacting the federal Craft Beverage Modernization and Tax Reform Act, launching the independence seal, and performing triage during Covid. But it was also a decade in which the BA tried to solidify those gains and supplant the old domestic lagers they have always treated as the enemy.
That didn’t exactly pan out. The year Pease came on board, the BA was talking about 20 by 20—that is, 20% market share by 2020. At the time, the craft segment was 11% of beer overall (up sharply from 7.8% a year earlier), with a decade of sustained growth. But despite the growing visibility of craft beer, the past decade was notably slim on growth. Today, the craft segment is just 13%, well below the goal, and flat or declining. Barrelage has increased, from 15.6 million in 2014 to 23.4 million last year, and any industry would be happy to notch 50% growth over a decade.
Yet most of that growth happened in the first five years and has actually declined by 3 million barrels since 2019. Last month, I posted the graph above, which illustrates the problem. These difficulties are hardly unique to the US and reflect global trends in the drinks industry: declining consumption, fragmentation across alcohol categories, the rise of imports in the US, among others. And then there was Covid. The Brewers Association was swept along, and it’s hard to see how Pease or anyone at the BA could have helped quiet the turbulence.
But perhaps the biggest criticisms of the BA were not focused on industry health, however, but issues more core to the organization. At the Craft Brewers Conference year ago, the organization came under justified fire for the way it addressed the concerns of underrepresented groups. It’s not surprising. Senior leadership of the BA is all White, as is much of the staff, creating blind spots the organization has been very slow to address. It didn’t help that the organization was busy cutting programs, including the SAVOR food and beer event and Homebrew Con, the latter of which enraged longtime supporters. Even the GABF scaled back, and to much astonishment, started allowing participants to serve seltzers, FMBs, and RTDs. During these past ten years, the definition of what constituted a “craft brewery” has become so blurred and confusing no one really seems to know anymore—and smaller breweries have felt increasingly marginalized in an organization that includes Monster, Tilray, and even Boston Beer.
All of this was inevitable for a trade organization representing breweries that were evolving and growing more diverse. In terms of the core function of the organization—lobbying for beneficial regulations and laws—the Brewers Association has had more success. Yet from the start, the Brewers Association set itself up as something more, staking out a promotional component for “good beer” and small, independent companies. As those companies became less small and less independent, the message became fuzzy and convoluted. Perhaps with Pease’s retirement, the Brewers Association can go through a reset. The general mood suggests its time.
Good Beer Hunting’s Opaque Future
Good Beer Hunting was a remarkably successful digital magazine. Michael Kiser started it as a blog, like so many others, a way to document his growing interest in beer. It quickly outgrew that format and became a proper digital magazine—even while Draft, BeerAdvocate, All About Beer and others ceased publication (the latter, thankfully, has made an online return). Michael Kiser handed off the editorial role to a series of great folks, but GBH always reflected Kiser’s interest in a particular kind of journalism that other beer magazines hadn’t explored. His editors found writers working in other fields, or sometimes interesting people with no publishing background, and brought them in to tell their stories in longer formats, usually with lots of lush photography.
People who don’t follow beer writing closely—most people, obviously—may not be aware of the crop of new writers who have come into the field in the past five years. It’s been the biggest influx of new talent since I started writing about beer in the late 1990s. The old model of the beer writer looks like me—White, male, and now middle-aged. Scan through the names of people writing about beer in 2015 and there was little deviation. But this new crop is far more diverse, and they bring life experiences and interests that are new to the world of beer. Good Beer Hunting tapped into this pool of talent, and now many of these writers have burgeoning careers. And it wasn’t just American voices, either. GBH had a European division headed by Evan Rail that was producing fantastic stuff.
This is why the loss of GBH is going to be such a big deal. Even before Michael decided to shut it down, there weren’t many places reliably covering beer. Without GBH there will be fewer stories and fewer opportunities for new and working writers. That’s just not awesome for readers, writers, or the beer industry. Yet as Michael mentioned in the announcement, despite all the commercial success, GBH was never a financial one. It lost money, which is what magazines and newspapers seem to do, no matter how many Beard Awards they win. At some point we’re going to have to figure out how to support good reporting if we want it to exist, but that’s a discussion for another time.
I did find Micheal’s announcement to be charmingly Kiseresque. It was far heavier on the “why” than the “what.” We heard a lot about how he came to the decision to shut GBH down, but far less about what exactly “shut down” meant. “Good Beer Hunting,” he wrote, “is going on a platform-wide hiatus. It’ll be indefinite. It might be permanent.” He is in talks about what to do with Good Beer Hunting, he wrote, but didn’t give any more information. So perhaps there’s a future for the site, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
I hope something does come of it. GBH had a lot of creative energy behind it, and many invested writers and editors. It would be a shame to see that all dissipate. I usually end these kinds of posts with an RIP, but in this case, let’s hope it doesn’t rest. Let it rest unpeacefully and wake up soon.