The Best Thing(s) in Beer Since 2018
BridgePort Brewery spent 2018 dying and Gambrinus shuttered it in February of 2019.
The Covid-19 pandemic created a temporal anomaly. Trying to remember anything that happened before it seems simultaneously impossibly distant but also, given that time stopped, more recent. Today we’re going to discuss what happened in beer since 2018, which means trying to figure out what was happening in 2018 and working our way forward. At the moment, it’s feeling more “impossibly distant” as I consider the facts.
About “The Session”
“The Session” is an old-school, bloggy institution that died the way institutions do—through inertia and neglect. The last round-up occurred in 2018—thus the title of this revival version, six years later. The idea is simple—folks all address the same subject, offered each month by one of the regulars. For our first outing after the hiatus, this is the prompt: What is the best thing to happen in good beer since 2018?
Here in the United States, we were two years into the first Trump presidency. People still went to movie theaters. Anyone wearing a surgical mask was considered a loon. In the beer world, Sierra Nevada launched Hazy Little Thing that year, taking national a very big trend that had been bubbling up in the taprooms of Boston. White Claws had only been around two years and though they were experiencing explosive growth, few were yet feeling existential dread about the words “hard seltzer.” There were 7,700 breweries, craft beer was still growing, having reached 13.2% of the total market (it would peak the following year), and about a quarter of the revenue. It was a balmy sunny day for the beer industry, and no one thought winter was coming.
Now we know that small-brewery growth was about to hit a wall. Thanks to a little help from a pandemic (an accelerator, not the spark), we were nearing the end of the prior era, the Second Great Heyday of Craft Brewing. Most people making and selling beer probably recall this as a golden era, a time of easy living before the hard time landed like a lead pipe. Drinkers probably remember the buzz surrounding “craft beer”—a word I try not to use except in situations like this—with all the excitement about those hazy IPAs, smoothie sours, and dessert beers with a tinge of embarrassment. In spite of the breakfast-cereal beers, it was all sunshine and light, don’t you remember?
But was it?
Then
One thing I don’t think we consider as much is all the negatives that were slowly festering, like a clogged pore, beneath beer’s glossy aluminum surface. The socially-tumultuous years of Covid exposed what was hidden underneath, one by one. Two important reckonings would follow: George Floyd’s murder and the reaction to systemic racism that followed in 2020 and the “Me Too” movement, which visited beer in 2021. That allowed the voices of underrepresented groups—really underrepresented in beer—to get a hearing for the first time. Feelings are still raw about that time, but it’s hard to argue it shouldn’t have happened. The results, which I’ll discuss below, were much needed.
But it wasn’t all social. Within beer, the pandemic exposed the excesses of a land-grab era that began crashing down on the most aggressive players. The most florid example was Modern Times, whose story still amazes me, but it was far from the only example. The market for beer made by small breweries had been growing by healthy, sometimes shocking, percentages for a decade. I remember seeing a lot of confidence that this was the new normal. Based on that optimism, some breweries went deeply into debt to expand. If the market was growing by an average of 7-8% a year, not expanding meant leaving money on the table. Well.
Now
We are clearly in a better place in a number of ways than we were in 2018. The number of women who brew professionally has exploded. At this point, if I visit a brewery with more than a brewer or two and they don’t have a woman in the brewhouse, I wonder what’s wrong. Oregon, where Teri Fahrendorf founded the Pink Boots Society, and which has hosted SheBrew for a decade, is probably a bit of an outlier, but things have changed radically since 2018 in terms of gender equity.
Things may not be moving as fast with racial equity in brewing, especially on the ownership side, but they’re moving in the right direction. Garrett Oliver founded the MJF Foundation in 2020, and the National Black Brewers Association came online in 2023. More and more, brewers from underrepresented groups are managing to found breweries, and others are coming into the industry in brewing, sales and marketing, and hospitality.
More women and underrepresented groups entering the industry is an incredibly good thing. I think the best way for beer to flourish is to expand the number of people who are drawn to it. So my answer to this Session’s question—and I hope and expect it to be a common one—is how the composition of the brewing industry is changing to reflect national demographics.
I keep going back to my visit to Chicago in the fall of 2023, where I met the owners of Casa Humilde and Funkytown. They pointed out that the city was about evenly split in thirds in terms of demographics (Black, Latino, and White), but almost all the local breweries catered to White audiences. That meant the two-thirds of the city that were Black and Latino were massively under-served. It’s hard for me not to look at those kinds of breweries as the best thing that’s happened in recent years. It’s still slow going, but I think it will be a permanent and inexorable trend. Beer goes to where the people are, and there are lots of women and drinkers of color out there yet to be exposed to the joys of a great pint of local beer.
(I am a middle-aged White dude and I represent the bog standard beer writer from the 80s until the middle teens. Even as late as The Session ran, the writers were overwhelmingly White men. I don’t know who will join the conversation in this version, but so many more diverse voices are now the ones writing the story of beer. If this session doesn’t includes names like Ruvani de Silva, Kate Bernot, Courtney Iseman, Stephanie Grant, Jen Blair, Emma Inch, David Jesudason, Lily Waite-Marsden, Anaïs Lecoq, Brandon Hernández, Jamal Lemon, Louis Livingston-Garcia, Don Tse, Em Sauter—and all the people I’m forgetting—we’re repeating the mistakes of that pre-2018 period.)
Peaks Are Good—But So Are Valleys
Any given moment in an industry’s life contains bright lights and shadows. In 2018, breweries were overly exuberant about their own prospects and beer’s more broadly. Business models were in flux, the market was very interested in experimental beers and new flavors—all part of an expansionary moment. Cyclically, it’s healthy to have expansionary periods, but they come with a lot of baggage that’s easier to see six years later than it is in the moment. All that experimentation led to some bad beer, and the smoothie sour/milkshake IPA category looks like an excess in retrospect.
By contrast, the contraction in the market now—mirrored by shrinking product lines at the brewery level—has provoked a healthy reevaluation of what’s important. Now breweries are thinking more about the things I care about, like: narrowly focusing on quality, balance, and drinkability rather than just trying to out-compete the market on the weird and new. Is this the best thing since 2018? Probably not, but I am very relieved to see it arrive. At some point beer will grow again, and the remaining breweries will be making better, more tightly-focused products to meet the demand. Put this another way: in 2018, there was a lot more variety than now, but there were also a lot more bad beers. Today there is less variety, but more consistent quality.
What else? I love the slow, steady birth of American lager, which is sometimes called West Coast pilsner or something else. It’s a beer made with local malt and hops, brewed in the way Americans increasingly brew. I am a big fan of the return to lagers, but not just light pale lagers—it’s very common to see “Czech dark lager” or “Japanese lager” or “French pilsner” or even “kellerbier” on beer lists. I love that we’ve started to refine hazies so they’re no longer a soupy, sweet (and strangely chalky and bitter) mess. I love that bitter IPAs are back. I really love Lorien hops. Finally, I love that no matter what else is going on in beer, change is a constant.
I often tell people that I was lucky to fall into beer as the subject of my writing. It was completely accidental; I got a gig to write about beer and that led to a career. There are a million topics out there, and I might have started writing about any number of other subjects. But some force was looking out for me, because I got beer. In the decades since I started writing about it, it has never gotten boring or stale. Something new is always around the corner, and the subject is so vast it may involve the liquid in the container, the container itself (remember 22s??), the people who make it, or our understanding of the history or culture or politics that shaped and continues to shape it. If I live to a hundred, I will never have to worry about what to write next. Something will come along. I love that, too.