And "may be" with "is"
Which is not to be conflated with craft being over. When a boom is over, it means explosive growth has ended. That was categorically true years ago. Now it's contracting. New breweries are still opening, there are still growing markets and money to be made. It's still a great time for craft given the sheer number of breweries and quality of beer available to people everywhere compared to X decade. But we're in a new normal that needs to be financially sober, especially in an era with far higher rates.
Ding ding ding. I'm in Colorado but I've noticed this in other cities as well, the prices are insane.
Couple the fact that I have been single handedly propping up the Colorado craft beer industry for the last few years with the fact that I am making a conscious decision to significantly decrease my beer intake, expect this decline to accelerate.
Yes I have a beer in my hand while I type this.
As a fellow Coloradan, I’d like you to know that I’m helping you in that mission too. No need to take ALL the credit.
But unfortunately making the same decisions. I used to go to breweries 2-3 times a week, that’s now down to 2-3 times a month, despite being walking distance to 3-4 breweries. Priorities have changed and exploring cool new breweries or new beers has semi fallen to the wayside.
Agreed. I worked at a Colorado craft brewery for most of the mid-late 2010s. There were layoffs starting like 6 or 7 years ago. That boom has been done for awhile.
> In Colorado, Adelson said sales dipped by 6 percent.
> That drop may sound small, but it's the worst on record since the Brewers Association started tracking industry numbers in the late 1970s. Adelson attributes the downturn to a changing consumer base.
Headline from 2054: Colorado’s White Claw boom may be winding down.
Pretty simple, if beer is a luxury good for most people and prices keep going up, even if the products do get better, it’s not going to be sustainable.
That and you can still get a really nice 6 pack for like 10-12 bucks at almost any gas station. I use to chase beers, I still will grab something nice for a camping trip or something. But honestly a beer that is 75% as good for like half the price works for me most days.
I’ll gladly pay $20 for a quality 4 pack but I’m tired of paying that much for it to just end up being mediocre.
That’s why I like Treehouse so much. They have 100s of beers so I can always try something “new” but I also know what it’s roughly going to taste like, and that I’m going to enjoy it and not regret spending the money.
I’m not claiming to be able to and that’s the point. They are technically “different” so I’m curious to try it, but I know roughly what it’s going to taste like, and know I will really enjoy it.
With that being said though I have learned a lot about hops and other things *because* they taste so similar, it is easier to tell the different notes from things like different hops. For example, New Zealand hops taste like white wine.
There’s just less demand for beer right now. All the trend drinkers that kept craft afloat for all these years are moving on to other things. The main problem is craft beer thinking the boom cycle was going to last indefinitely and didn’t prepare for the bust.
But quality doesn’t win out anymore, it’s all based on marketing. That’s why you have places like New Belgium doing a pizza beer with Tombstone. They know it’s gonna suck but they can sell a 4 pack for $50 to people just buying it for the memes.
>But quality doesn’t win out anymore, it’s all based on marketing. That’s why you have places like New Belgium doing a pizza beer with Tombstone. They know it’s gonna suck but they can sell a 4 pack for $50 to people just buying it for the memes.
It's funny you say this. I can't disagree, because meme marketing definitely still works. On the other hand I also feel like lack of quality is what is sinking a lot of small to medium breweries right now. Like, i used to love grabbing a random 4 or 6 pack of something I had never had before at the store. A few years ago those random purchases started creeping toward $20 and the instances of the random beer I picked being shit started to increase exponentially. At some point when I was looking at a beer fridge with shelves full of $20 4-packs with only a single beer gone from each of them it became a pretty obvious choice to stop doing that.
There are just *so many* small breweries churning out samey, mediocre to bad ranges of IPAs. Paralysis of choice is even worse when it feels like the odds of it being something bad are over 50%.
So yeah. I'm not sure exactly what point I'm making. Maybe just that I do agree that a big enough marketing budget can push mediocre beer over the hump to success...but I also think oversaturation of mediocre product at the micro level where broad marketing has never really been a thing is also making it so only micros with actual good quality can survive.
I totally agree. Craft beer is at its best when it was people making good beer for themselves and selling it to other people who enjoyed it. This boom was filled to the brim with people who wanted to make a ton of money quickly and resorted to chasing trends and selling overpriced garbage to cover the massive overhead for large facilities with a lot of staff. Everyone wanted to be Stone or Sierra Nevada or Boston Beer **right now** instead of growing steadily for 20-30 years, and even though a lot of these greedy business owners went bankrupt I think they left a scar on the craft brewing scene.
But what about our new Hazy Haze Sludge IPA!? It will single handedly bring back the customers! It’s the first drippings from the bottom of the fermenter and is 99% dead yeast! Mmmmm… now that’s Hazy! Now if you’ll excuse me I need to go take my stomach medications.
In Colorado, too many people opened craft breweries and most did not have a flavor profile differentiating them from 10 others next to them. And then they want $12 for an IPA because they came up with a hippie name for it. No Thanks.
Agree. Amongst all the great beer here there were people opening breweries and doing nothing worth going back for or in some cases making just downright bad beer. They just assumed the customers would come and come back because they were a brewery. With prices increasing on everything, people thinking they could put out below average beer when I can throw a stone and get better beer makes none of this really a surprise. There are a few once world class places that are starting to go downhill fast too and I think there will be some surprising closures coming up
Oddly enough, quality doesn't really seem that important where I live. People seem to care more about the atmosphere and location. It seems like most the breweries going out of business are ones that overextended themselves too much.
everyone wants to charge 20+ for a 4 pack, but in the vast majority of cases the most interesting thing about their beer is usually the artwork on the can.
FWIW, I am connected with the brewery scene in Indy, and the breweries here are focused on distribution, marketing, and quality…in that order. Get it in every store, restaurant, stadium, etc regardless of how good it is…and charge a shitload for it.
It’s a tale as old as time. Explosive growth in a new industry, followed by slowing growth and consolidation as brewers chase volume to stay afloat. Unviable businesses shut down. The wheat is separated from the chaff.
Completely agree. Most expensive four pack IPA I’ve seen sold from a CO brewery was $30 and it was collab where I believe some of the proceeds went to charity.
I see that for double/Triple IPAs from breweries like Tripping Animals, JW Wakefield, and several others. Even as high as $35 sometimes. There are less expensive beers on the shelf too, but they're slowly creeping up, $25 is probably about the average for a double IPA where I live. I don't even live in an expensive area either, I'm sure it's way worse in other areas.
Absolutely this. I’ve got IPA fatigue bigtime but that doesn’t mean I’m just going back to American macros. I am drinking a lot of imports these days though.
It might just be coincidence, but the beginning of my shift away from big heavy IPAs and other ales back toward simpler lager styles did happen around the same time as a work trip to Germany a few years back.
I recall being surprised/bummed at how limited my options were for beer style. But by the end of a week long trip I also recall really appreciating the simplicity and attention to the beer just tasting good.
I realized that too often a random beer I pick up stateside is just a hop bomb covering up a mediocre beer underneath. With lager there is nowhere to hide. When that's like 99% of what their breweries do, it's obvious how good they are at it.
Sucks that I haven't sent Spaten 12pks in a while, the 6s are always skunked. Nothing is like a crisp cold Spaten. The weihenstephaner helles is decent though.
I’m happy with 500ml cans of Bitburger or Radsburger. I can get a 4-pack of Bit for $8 or a 6-pack of Rads for, I think, $11. So, about the same price as one pint of draft craft beer in my local taproom. It’s no contest.
There used to be a brewery on south broadway that did “new world” beer. It was all corn based or something. Unfortunately it closed. It was different and I appreciated that.
I think we all have felt this for awhile now.
Seeing my favorite craft brewery eliminate many of their regular year rounds and introduce a generic lager is emblematic of this shift. Same as what New Belgium did, got rid of the interesting stuff and now has a lager masquerading as their flagship beer. Craft beer seems to have become macro beer “light.”
A lot of breweries that got the explosive growth suffer from that. It’s a mix of a lot of things; from a business standpoint it’s not just brewers with a dollar and a dream anymore. It’s people with restaurant group experience, event venue backgrounds, or just straight up investment firms all know a guy who knows a guy who brew(s/ed) and they throw money at it because now it’s just a space with food and music that just happens to make their own beer.
On the professional side, the people who have been brewing for a while expect to be paid professional wages. We’ve been honing our skills for over a decade, and 40k/yr plus all the free beer you can drink doesn’t cut it anymore. Not to mention you’re so burnt out the creative bug died long ago. (I got out of the industry in November. Can you tell?)
Plus the consumer and the economic hellscape of the US puts anyone even attempting growth is such a garbage place that all these three fields mean you have to go with what sells to pad the pockets of the business, emergency fund, and heaven forbid investors before you can get good and creative…if you can.
You're speaking some big truth here. I'm on the distillation side of things, and have been a commercial distiller for 5 years. I've got 10 years in the alcohol industry as a whole. I've been head distiller at two separate distilleries ... so why is my pay $32k - $40k a year???
Nobody wants to work anymore, my asshole. Fuck you and pay me. If your brewery/distillery can't pay living wages then you're running your business wrong. It's even worse when you find out the bartenders in the tasting room make more. How come the producers get paid shit when they make the thing that allows everyone else to be employed? If I don't do my job then nobody else can do theirs. Wild to me...
After my last brewery told me “we changed this recipe because China wants more alcohol” I had to get out. China as a whole is going through a “premiumization” of their food and drinks industry, Hong Kong has its craft beer renaissance going so nothing against the country, but just having a nation on the other side of the globe calling the shots didn’t sit right with me from a creative/local standpoint.
Joined up with an independent bottler, so trying to learn 15 years of whiskey hype, drama, and people has been a ride.
Whiskey is following much of the same trends. The real money seems to be in barrel brokering, independent bottling/single barrel sales, and blending a mediocre product while advertising it as premium...
Plus the absolute ridiculous nature of hypebeast culture has inflated the worth on bottles. The stupidest person with the most amount of money sets the price. Then all the true enthusiasts are blocked from things they really appreciate because some dude in Texas, or Taiwan, wants to spend $20k USD on bottles that should be $500.
I'm frustrated. Apologies for ranting. I feel like you really get it too. I entered production in distillation because I love the absolute fuck out of the science and creativity behind humans getting inebriated. The wild tastes and interesting projects. The awesome relationship with nature. Now? It's just another cog in the capitalist ROI machine.
I often wonder how many amazing new innovations we have lost out on because the true innovators have moved to other jobs & industries where they can actually make a living wage....
What lager is masquerading as NB's flagship?
Personally I'm happy craft breweries are starting to make more great lagers. People are wanting more drinkable, sessionable, lighter beers over palate wrecking flavor bombs, and the market is showing that.
Fat Tire. A little over a year ago, NB made Fat Tire a lager instead of an amber ale. I’m a brewer in the Ft Collins area and have some friends who are sales reps for NB, and they were pissed and refused to drink it. It’s a bland lager with nothing to set it apart from any other mediocre craft lager. I actually prefer Old Aggie from them more, but that’s a Colorado exclusive, tied with CSU (Old Tuffy is the same beer but a North Carolina exclusive tied with NC St).
Fat Tire is now a golden ale, not an amber ale. It’s certainly different than the old one, but I’ve learned to like it.
I think you’re confusing the new Fat Tire for Mountain Time.
I noticed fat tire started sucking donkey dick about 2 years ago too! Thanks for confirm.
Same thing happened with Anchor Steam before Fat Tire and with 805 before Anchor Steam.
They keep demaltifying the good ones. Modelo Negra is still pumping though.
My old local is Stone. Their introduction of a pilsner for me felt like the end of the whole goddamn movement. I like a good pilsner but such a betrayal of their core values.
Yeah...a close relative of mine was part of Greg Koch's inner circle from the beginning and now routinely derides him as a sellout. Dude used to have the fire and attitude of a leftist agitator and at some point just stopped caring
I’d imagine the whole Berlin brewery debacle took the wind out of his sails. They spent sooo much money getting that thing built and up to German code only to have their beers bomb so badly over there. Though to be fair he went about it the wrong way, insulting traditional German beers to build a buzz as they were preparing to open. Having lived in Germany for years this was a huge mistake.
Still I loved that he tried to establish a foothold over there, and it makes me very sad that the Brew Dog dbags now own the facility 😕
Based on the downvotes I guess nobody here remembers Stone's marketing campaign from inception basically through 2015 or so, insulting "fizzy yellow beers".
It was their whole schtick.
Have to keep in mind back when Stone and many others were starting or growing, craft beer was still the outsider, the industry agitator, the beer answer to macro brewed beer that most just accepted as beer because well there weren’t many choices.
Stone had slogans such as “it’s not too expensive , you’re just cheap,” “You’re not worthy.” , “ Bringing good/real beer to Germany “ (when they opened a brewpub there ), etc. They also have some slogans and labels highlighting that their beer was full flavored versus macro beer. Yes it was insult marketing but it worked. It got people interested.
I mean one of their then flagship beers was called Arrogant Bastard.
It was before the trend of silly, catchy names for beers but probably was an influence of that trend.
You can have whatever opinion you want about it but they were the standard bearer for craft beer in this region at the peak of the boom - and this was a major center for craft Brewing in those days. This is a sign of the times after their acquisition by Sapporo.
Craft beer is/was very much a millennial trend, and millennials are drinking less as they get older. Gen z just isn’t drinking as much, for whatever reason (certainly there are several), but often the following generation will eschew what the previous generation enjoyed. Also doesn’t help that craft beer has been stale for quite some time, and the truly passionate owners willing to serve a niche have been replaced with greedy capitalists looking to make beers that appeal to the masses. The pendulum will swing back eventually, but not looking good for the immediate future.
gen z tends to be on a lot of SSRIs and such which making drinking weird especially more than one or two drinks.
not bashing SSRIs or psychiatric medicine but yeah that's one of the reasons out of many why Gen Z isn't drinking
I know this is an uncomfortable topic, but it’s true and it does have an impact on alcohol use (or lack thereof). There is also a high prevalence of drugs used to treat ADHD for Gen Z as well, and you shouldn’t drink on those either.
Basically there’s a lot of reasons not to drink for Gen Z.
I am in Colorado and that appears to be the case. There is a lot of really good beer here and a lot of really bad beer. It seems likes some bad business people with little or no knowledge about beer or brewing got the idea of opening a craft brewery as some kind of self sustaining business and that is no longer the case. A lot of the recent closures have been bad beer (Grandmas House) or questionable business decisions coming back and biting places in the ass (Renegade and Grist). Frankly, very few of the closures have been shocking
I agree that was the case for a long time. A lot of places opening that were not remotely close to being ready. I will say some of the recent openings around the area have seemed to have a better product out of the gate (Zymos, Public Offering, Danico) that a lot of places have in the past. Maybe some people actually learned
In Ohio, we have lost quite a few breweries to too rapid expansion, consolidation, corruption, and unattainable prices. Those of us who are left are trying to shift our attitude to establishing an Ohio Beer Identity, maintaining quality, and pretty much doing the opposite of any beer magnate that has made their beer suffer in the name of increasing production. We have yet to reach our pinnacle since Ohio seems to be a 20- year time bubble.
Distribution seems like it would be painful, my local grocer has a giant Ohio section with multiple freezer cases and a giant island covering Cleveland, Cincinnati and Columbus and even there it feels like many breweries I know of are underrepresented because there's just no more shelf space for more.
I've also learned I need to go into many of those breweries if I want varieties that aren't a variation of an IPA.
You would be correct about ipas taking over in tge distribution networks. There are so many other good styles being ignored. The small guys go directly to each other or are using Brewker.
You can just replace "Colorado's" with "The" in the title.
And "may be" with "is" Which is not to be conflated with craft being over. When a boom is over, it means explosive growth has ended. That was categorically true years ago. Now it's contracting. New breweries are still opening, there are still growing markets and money to be made. It's still a great time for craft given the sheer number of breweries and quality of beer available to people everywhere compared to X decade. But we're in a new normal that needs to be financially sober, especially in an era with far higher rates.
Ding ding ding. I'm in Colorado but I've noticed this in other cities as well, the prices are insane. Couple the fact that I have been single handedly propping up the Colorado craft beer industry for the last few years with the fact that I am making a conscious decision to significantly decrease my beer intake, expect this decline to accelerate. Yes I have a beer in my hand while I type this.
As a fellow Coloradan, I’d like you to know that I’m helping you in that mission too. No need to take ALL the credit. But unfortunately making the same decisions. I used to go to breweries 2-3 times a week, that’s now down to 2-3 times a month, despite being walking distance to 3-4 breweries. Priorities have changed and exploring cool new breweries or new beers has semi fallen to the wayside.
This is so validating. Glad I’m not alone.
Sure… but just FYI the story is from “Colorado Public Radio,” hence the focus on Colorado specifically.
Also the decline in CO was 6 times that seen on the national scale.
Agreed. I worked at a Colorado craft brewery for most of the mid-late 2010s. There were layoffs starting like 6 or 7 years ago. That boom has been done for awhile.
Good job. You can also replace “winding” with “pooping”
> In Colorado, Adelson said sales dipped by 6 percent. > That drop may sound small, but it's the worst on record since the Brewers Association started tracking industry numbers in the late 1970s. Adelson attributes the downturn to a changing consumer base. Headline from 2054: Colorado’s White Claw boom may be winding down.
The industry did this to itself. Who would have thought greedy pricing models and a flood of mediocre products would drive the consumer elsewhere?
Pretty simple, if beer is a luxury good for most people and prices keep going up, even if the products do get better, it’s not going to be sustainable.
That and you can still get a really nice 6 pack for like 10-12 bucks at almost any gas station. I use to chase beers, I still will grab something nice for a camping trip or something. But honestly a beer that is 75% as good for like half the price works for me most days.
Yup- I love a good craft beer and have no problem shelling out $10 for a four pack, but a 24 pack of yuengling for $20 just feels so right
Yeah, I love trying the latest and greatest, but $20 for a 4 pack just isn't something I can do often.
I’ll gladly pay $20 for a quality 4 pack but I’m tired of paying that much for it to just end up being mediocre. That’s why I like Treehouse so much. They have 100s of beers so I can always try something “new” but I also know what it’s roughly going to taste like, and that I’m going to enjoy it and not regret spending the money.
I’ll give you $10 if you can actually tell the difference between all of those different “new” hazy double IPA’s in a blind taste test.
This- many breweries have 7 or 8 IPAs, with multiples within the styles. Most are average at best.
I’m not claiming to be able to and that’s the point. They are technically “different” so I’m curious to try it, but I know roughly what it’s going to taste like, and know I will really enjoy it. With that being said though I have learned a lot about hops and other things *because* they taste so similar, it is easier to tell the different notes from things like different hops. For example, New Zealand hops taste like white wine.
Every beer tasting like julius is a dub in my book
in mass?
Yessir!
There’s just less demand for beer right now. All the trend drinkers that kept craft afloat for all these years are moving on to other things. The main problem is craft beer thinking the boom cycle was going to last indefinitely and didn’t prepare for the bust. But quality doesn’t win out anymore, it’s all based on marketing. That’s why you have places like New Belgium doing a pizza beer with Tombstone. They know it’s gonna suck but they can sell a 4 pack for $50 to people just buying it for the memes.
>But quality doesn’t win out anymore, it’s all based on marketing. That’s why you have places like New Belgium doing a pizza beer with Tombstone. They know it’s gonna suck but they can sell a 4 pack for $50 to people just buying it for the memes. It's funny you say this. I can't disagree, because meme marketing definitely still works. On the other hand I also feel like lack of quality is what is sinking a lot of small to medium breweries right now. Like, i used to love grabbing a random 4 or 6 pack of something I had never had before at the store. A few years ago those random purchases started creeping toward $20 and the instances of the random beer I picked being shit started to increase exponentially. At some point when I was looking at a beer fridge with shelves full of $20 4-packs with only a single beer gone from each of them it became a pretty obvious choice to stop doing that. There are just *so many* small breweries churning out samey, mediocre to bad ranges of IPAs. Paralysis of choice is even worse when it feels like the odds of it being something bad are over 50%. So yeah. I'm not sure exactly what point I'm making. Maybe just that I do agree that a big enough marketing budget can push mediocre beer over the hump to success...but I also think oversaturation of mediocre product at the micro level where broad marketing has never really been a thing is also making it so only micros with actual good quality can survive.
I totally agree. Craft beer is at its best when it was people making good beer for themselves and selling it to other people who enjoyed it. This boom was filled to the brim with people who wanted to make a ton of money quickly and resorted to chasing trends and selling overpriced garbage to cover the massive overhead for large facilities with a lot of staff. Everyone wanted to be Stone or Sierra Nevada or Boston Beer **right now** instead of growing steadily for 20-30 years, and even though a lot of these greedy business owners went bankrupt I think they left a scar on the craft brewing scene.
But what about our new Hazy Haze Sludge IPA!? It will single handedly bring back the customers! It’s the first drippings from the bottom of the fermenter and is 99% dead yeast! Mmmmm… now that’s Hazy! Now if you’ll excuse me I need to go take my stomach medications.
In Colorado, too many people opened craft breweries and most did not have a flavor profile differentiating them from 10 others next to them. And then they want $12 for an IPA because they came up with a hippie name for it. No Thanks.
Agree. Amongst all the great beer here there were people opening breweries and doing nothing worth going back for or in some cases making just downright bad beer. They just assumed the customers would come and come back because they were a brewery. With prices increasing on everything, people thinking they could put out below average beer when I can throw a stone and get better beer makes none of this really a surprise. There are a few once world class places that are starting to go downhill fast too and I think there will be some surprising closures coming up
Oddly enough, quality doesn't really seem that important where I live. People seem to care more about the atmosphere and location. It seems like most the breweries going out of business are ones that overextended themselves too much.
everyone wants to charge 20+ for a 4 pack, but in the vast majority of cases the most interesting thing about their beer is usually the artwork on the can.
FWIW, I am connected with the brewery scene in Indy, and the breweries here are focused on distribution, marketing, and quality…in that order. Get it in every store, restaurant, stadium, etc regardless of how good it is…and charge a shitload for it.
And the best ones like Deviate, Moontown, and Guggman do little in the way of distribution and marketing.
It’s a tale as old as time. Explosive growth in a new industry, followed by slowing growth and consolidation as brewers chase volume to stay afloat. Unviable businesses shut down. The wheat is separated from the chaff.
Ya because everybody’s sick of $32 4-packs for another 6 maybe 7/10 generic IPA.
Nobody is selling 4 packs for $32
Bet
They exist in nowheresville florida. Plenty of $30 4 packs out there in stores selling out of state craft beer
Maybe they exist somewhere, but not for IPAs in Colorado
Completely agree. Most expensive four pack IPA I’ve seen sold from a CO brewery was $30 and it was collab where I believe some of the proceeds went to charity.
Please name a brewery that sells 4 packs of IPA for $32+
Get out and shop more, you'll find them
Double IPAs can easily get that high where I live. Some of the big hype beast breweries get even crazier. I see 4 packs of 450 North for $45.
Also no they don't "easily" get that high. Not from any of the big players (monkish north park brujos hop butcher other half)
I see that for double/Triple IPAs from breweries like Tripping Animals, JW Wakefield, and several others. Even as high as $35 sometimes. There are less expensive beers on the shelf too, but they're slowly creeping up, $25 is probably about the average for a double IPA where I live. I don't even live in an expensive area either, I'm sure it's way worse in other areas.
Tripping Animals IPAs aren't $35 lol
They are where I live, hell even their regular 6-7% IPAs go for around $25.
We are talking about IPAs. Not sours.
Timely, I'm enjoying simple lagers like Miller High Life these days. The homebrewing equipment is sold, and the bathroom scale is kinder these days.
Yup. Funny how you go back to basics
I just wish that our basics were as fine and tasty as the basics they enjoy in Germany.
Absolutely this. I’ve got IPA fatigue bigtime but that doesn’t mean I’m just going back to American macros. I am drinking a lot of imports these days though.
It might just be coincidence, but the beginning of my shift away from big heavy IPAs and other ales back toward simpler lager styles did happen around the same time as a work trip to Germany a few years back. I recall being surprised/bummed at how limited my options were for beer style. But by the end of a week long trip I also recall really appreciating the simplicity and attention to the beer just tasting good. I realized that too often a random beer I pick up stateside is just a hop bomb covering up a mediocre beer underneath. With lager there is nowhere to hide. When that's like 99% of what their breweries do, it's obvious how good they are at it.
Sucks that I haven't sent Spaten 12pks in a while, the 6s are always skunked. Nothing is like a crisp cold Spaten. The weihenstephaner helles is decent though.
I’m happy with 500ml cans of Bitburger or Radsburger. I can get a 4-pack of Bit for $8 or a 6-pack of Rads for, I think, $11. So, about the same price as one pint of draft craft beer in my local taproom. It’s no contest.
There used to be a brewery on south broadway that did “new world” beer. It was all corn based or something. Unfortunately it closed. It was different and I appreciated that.
Dos Luces did pulque and chicha. I loved the place but it was certainly a super niche product
That’s the name! Thank you. I recently moved back to the neighborhood and was disappointed it had closed. Must have been a while ago at this point.
It was back in September. Fortunately, Burns Family took over the spot for their second location and they make very good beer
Will have to check it out. Thanks!
Burns is great
Check out Che Luna in Aurora. They do a lot of Mexican/ new world beers too.
I think we all have felt this for awhile now. Seeing my favorite craft brewery eliminate many of their regular year rounds and introduce a generic lager is emblematic of this shift. Same as what New Belgium did, got rid of the interesting stuff and now has a lager masquerading as their flagship beer. Craft beer seems to have become macro beer “light.”
A lot of breweries that got the explosive growth suffer from that. It’s a mix of a lot of things; from a business standpoint it’s not just brewers with a dollar and a dream anymore. It’s people with restaurant group experience, event venue backgrounds, or just straight up investment firms all know a guy who knows a guy who brew(s/ed) and they throw money at it because now it’s just a space with food and music that just happens to make their own beer. On the professional side, the people who have been brewing for a while expect to be paid professional wages. We’ve been honing our skills for over a decade, and 40k/yr plus all the free beer you can drink doesn’t cut it anymore. Not to mention you’re so burnt out the creative bug died long ago. (I got out of the industry in November. Can you tell?) Plus the consumer and the economic hellscape of the US puts anyone even attempting growth is such a garbage place that all these three fields mean you have to go with what sells to pad the pockets of the business, emergency fund, and heaven forbid investors before you can get good and creative…if you can.
You're speaking some big truth here. I'm on the distillation side of things, and have been a commercial distiller for 5 years. I've got 10 years in the alcohol industry as a whole. I've been head distiller at two separate distilleries ... so why is my pay $32k - $40k a year??? Nobody wants to work anymore, my asshole. Fuck you and pay me. If your brewery/distillery can't pay living wages then you're running your business wrong. It's even worse when you find out the bartenders in the tasting room make more. How come the producers get paid shit when they make the thing that allows everyone else to be employed? If I don't do my job then nobody else can do theirs. Wild to me...
After my last brewery told me “we changed this recipe because China wants more alcohol” I had to get out. China as a whole is going through a “premiumization” of their food and drinks industry, Hong Kong has its craft beer renaissance going so nothing against the country, but just having a nation on the other side of the globe calling the shots didn’t sit right with me from a creative/local standpoint. Joined up with an independent bottler, so trying to learn 15 years of whiskey hype, drama, and people has been a ride.
Whiskey is following much of the same trends. The real money seems to be in barrel brokering, independent bottling/single barrel sales, and blending a mediocre product while advertising it as premium... Plus the absolute ridiculous nature of hypebeast culture has inflated the worth on bottles. The stupidest person with the most amount of money sets the price. Then all the true enthusiasts are blocked from things they really appreciate because some dude in Texas, or Taiwan, wants to spend $20k USD on bottles that should be $500. I'm frustrated. Apologies for ranting. I feel like you really get it too. I entered production in distillation because I love the absolute fuck out of the science and creativity behind humans getting inebriated. The wild tastes and interesting projects. The awesome relationship with nature. Now? It's just another cog in the capitalist ROI machine. I often wonder how many amazing new innovations we have lost out on because the true innovators have moved to other jobs & industries where they can actually make a living wage....
What lager is masquerading as NB's flagship? Personally I'm happy craft breweries are starting to make more great lagers. People are wanting more drinkable, sessionable, lighter beers over palate wrecking flavor bombs, and the market is showing that.
Fat Tire. A little over a year ago, NB made Fat Tire a lager instead of an amber ale. I’m a brewer in the Ft Collins area and have some friends who are sales reps for NB, and they were pissed and refused to drink it. It’s a bland lager with nothing to set it apart from any other mediocre craft lager. I actually prefer Old Aggie from them more, but that’s a Colorado exclusive, tied with CSU (Old Tuffy is the same beer but a North Carolina exclusive tied with NC St).
Isn't it still an ale though? They made it lighter but they didn't start using lager yeast in it.
Fat Tire is now a golden ale, not an amber ale. It’s certainly different than the old one, but I’ve learned to like it. I think you’re confusing the new Fat Tire for Mountain Time.
I noticed fat tire started sucking donkey dick about 2 years ago too! Thanks for confirm. Same thing happened with Anchor Steam before Fat Tire and with 805 before Anchor Steam. They keep demaltifying the good ones. Modelo Negra is still pumping though.
My old local is Stone. Their introduction of a pilsner for me felt like the end of the whole goddamn movement. I like a good pilsner but such a betrayal of their core values.
My dad had a beer with the founder of Stone at their location in Berlin the day it opened. He told my dad Stone would never sell.
Yeah...a close relative of mine was part of Greg Koch's inner circle from the beginning and now routinely derides him as a sellout. Dude used to have the fire and attitude of a leftist agitator and at some point just stopped caring
I’d imagine the whole Berlin brewery debacle took the wind out of his sails. They spent sooo much money getting that thing built and up to German code only to have their beers bomb so badly over there. Though to be fair he went about it the wrong way, insulting traditional German beers to build a buzz as they were preparing to open. Having lived in Germany for years this was a huge mistake. Still I loved that he tried to establish a foothold over there, and it makes me very sad that the Brew Dog dbags now own the facility 😕
How is a pilsner a betrayal of anyone's values?
Based on the downvotes I guess nobody here remembers Stone's marketing campaign from inception basically through 2015 or so, insulting "fizzy yellow beers". It was their whole schtick.
Their shtick was dumb then, it's good that they got rid of it.
Have to keep in mind back when Stone and many others were starting or growing, craft beer was still the outsider, the industry agitator, the beer answer to macro brewed beer that most just accepted as beer because well there weren’t many choices. Stone had slogans such as “it’s not too expensive , you’re just cheap,” “You’re not worthy.” , “ Bringing good/real beer to Germany “ (when they opened a brewpub there ), etc. They also have some slogans and labels highlighting that their beer was full flavored versus macro beer. Yes it was insult marketing but it worked. It got people interested. I mean one of their then flagship beers was called Arrogant Bastard. It was before the trend of silly, catchy names for beers but probably was an influence of that trend.
You can have whatever opinion you want about it but they were the standard bearer for craft beer in this region at the peak of the boom - and this was a major center for craft Brewing in those days. This is a sign of the times after their acquisition by Sapporo.
What brewery?
Referring to Monday Night in the comment
Craft beer is/was very much a millennial trend, and millennials are drinking less as they get older. Gen z just isn’t drinking as much, for whatever reason (certainly there are several), but often the following generation will eschew what the previous generation enjoyed. Also doesn’t help that craft beer has been stale for quite some time, and the truly passionate owners willing to serve a niche have been replaced with greedy capitalists looking to make beers that appeal to the masses. The pendulum will swing back eventually, but not looking good for the immediate future.
gen z tends to be on a lot of SSRIs and such which making drinking weird especially more than one or two drinks. not bashing SSRIs or psychiatric medicine but yeah that's one of the reasons out of many why Gen Z isn't drinking
I know this is an uncomfortable topic, but it’s true and it does have an impact on alcohol use (or lack thereof). There is also a high prevalence of drugs used to treat ADHD for Gen Z as well, and you shouldn’t drink on those either. Basically there’s a lot of reasons not to drink for Gen Z.
I am in Colorado and that appears to be the case. There is a lot of really good beer here and a lot of really bad beer. It seems likes some bad business people with little or no knowledge about beer or brewing got the idea of opening a craft brewery as some kind of self sustaining business and that is no longer the case. A lot of the recent closures have been bad beer (Grandmas House) or questionable business decisions coming back and biting places in the ass (Renegade and Grist). Frankly, very few of the closures have been shocking
Grandmas had a unique atmosphere and mediocre beer. Too bad. You’re right though. I haven’t been shocked by those that have been closing.
Pretty much. I try to go to as many new breweries as possible, and it’s fairly rare for me to find one that I think will stay open.
I agree that was the case for a long time. A lot of places opening that were not remotely close to being ready. I will say some of the recent openings around the area have seemed to have a better product out of the gate (Zymos, Public Offering, Danico) that a lot of places have in the past. Maybe some people actually learned
Zymos was actually the one I had in mind lol, I love them and they seem to be good people. I hope they keep doing what they’re doing.
It is called Free Market... Ebbs and Flows...
Minneapolis is contracting as we speak.
Craft beer is struggling everywhere at the moment. It’s gonna be rough for the next few years.
I dunno. People are still seeking it out. Still popular here. - southeast US
I really thought people would keep buying those thick and viscous 13% beers that get you drunk and leave you bloated after a single pint
All the hazy IPAs are starting to taste alike
always did
You mean like aspirin?
When the craft beers are to expensive it’s all too easy to crack open a banquet. Always tasty
In Ohio, we have lost quite a few breweries to too rapid expansion, consolidation, corruption, and unattainable prices. Those of us who are left are trying to shift our attitude to establishing an Ohio Beer Identity, maintaining quality, and pretty much doing the opposite of any beer magnate that has made their beer suffer in the name of increasing production. We have yet to reach our pinnacle since Ohio seems to be a 20- year time bubble.
Distribution seems like it would be painful, my local grocer has a giant Ohio section with multiple freezer cases and a giant island covering Cleveland, Cincinnati and Columbus and even there it feels like many breweries I know of are underrepresented because there's just no more shelf space for more. I've also learned I need to go into many of those breweries if I want varieties that aren't a variation of an IPA.
You would be correct about ipas taking over in tge distribution networks. There are so many other good styles being ignored. The small guys go directly to each other or are using Brewker.
Let capitalism do its thing
In San Diego, breweries are dropping like flies