But Where Is It All Going Then?
Everything anybody in the craft beer market is asking these days, and by ‘market’ I mean Brewers of beer, owners of breweries, the producing class, is the same question “Are Beer Sales Going To Come Back?” Sales are down big, and it doesn't seem like that's going to be changing anytime soon.
Sales are Down, and they’re not coming back.
As a point of comfort, it's not only beer that is going down. Wine is down, white spirits are down, bourbon is crashing to the floor. Where does it all end? Where did all the drinkers go? And it's not even like drinkers are flocking to other beverages like hard seltzers or RTD's, those markets are flat too. So where is it all going then? THC/CBD Beverages? N/A drinks of various kinds?
The hard and uncomfortable truth is that it's going... nowhere. It's not just that people are drinking less because they're less enthusiastic about alcohol, it's far worse. People are drinking less because they are hanging out less. Our society has changed, and the entire alcoholic beverages industry has yet to reconcile with that fact. The sales numbers that we had ten years ago, or even five years ago are gone, and they're not coming back. The way that Ameircans interact with each other, utilizing online spaces versus public spaces, has changed forever. Blame COVID if you must, but we live ina different world now for drinking than we did in February of 2020 when the future seemed bright.
Just look at dating patterns. Ten years ago dating apps were just beginning to emerge, but most of the time if you were young and wanted to meet somebody it involved going out to a bar, buying a little (or a lot) of alcohol, and hopefully working up the courage and lack of inhibitions to speak to someone that you fancied. Nowadays, all of this can be done online. One never need leave the comfort of their couch to have the chance to speak to somebody.
And it's not just the dating scene, even hanging out with friends has become a profoundly different experience with the ready availability of online gaming. Look at the success of the recent game Helldivers 2 for PlayStation and PC. Once a week I hang out with my friends online for five to six hours playing this game, shooting bugs, robots and aliens. Ten years ago that would have been five to six hours I spent at a bar, with a commensurate spend on alcoholic beverages fueling the conversation. And millions of people do this, and millions more are doing the same with different games. We've built a society where there is no specific encouragement to get people to go outside any longer to meet up. If they're not meeting up in a public forum, then they're not buying beer, or wine or spirits, or anything.
At the risk of this diatribe sounding like the unhinged rant of an old man, we have created a society that disincentivizes hanging out with friends in public spaces, and encourages low to NO social interaction. And our societal problem with lack of common spaces to come together is just as true as kids as it is for adults. There are not a lot of spaces where children can hang out together without their parents spending money, and for teenagers this is disencouraged to the point of active hostility from the police. We are isolating ourselves in digital cocoons. Our friendships are enjoyed in segmented boxes. We are trapped behind black mirrors and there's no way out.
My prediction over the next 20 years is that most of the very biggest beer brands will suffer severe losses in sales, and the mid sized ones will have to focus on state specific sales strategies if they want to survive. New Glarus in Wisconsin has already mastered this, and if other breweries don't begin focusing their entire sales strategies on saturating their local specific regions, they are going to die. ABI and MillerCoors are going to get hurt the worst by this, as consumers turn to increasingly local options for when, and if, they decide to drink alcohol. A few centuries from now I'm certain beer historians will look back on the last century as a historical aberration, a unique fluke period of standardization driven by the horrific and traumatic aftermath of two World Wars sandwiching a Great Depression. A unique set of circumstances that are long gone, and that won't be repeated.
The glory days of early craft beer are dead. If craft wants to survive into this next century, the entire focus of smaller breweries should be on servicing a local area to saturation and no further. Growth is a trap, and new national brands, such ones as emerge, will either be the artificial creations of marketing departments from large companies, or will be co-opted by them. Our new digital frontier doesn't involve people hanging out at real life physical bars, and it doesn’t seem like that is going to change anytime soon. The future looks, frankly, bleak for alcohol, and nothing I've seen indicates that it's going to be any different than that.
Bottoms up.
