As promised, I'd like to delve a bit deeper into Dave Infante's excellent article on Thrillist and discuss its implications, should his speculation end up coming to pass.
There's little doubt we're in the midst of some sort of beer golden age - the number of breweries in the US has more than doubled in the past ten years, sales of craft have been growing by double digits every year during that time, and breweries are still very cooperative and chummy.
This is a very unusual state of affairs. It's not often you'll see an industry where a a lot of the major players see themselves as comrades and not opponents.
Why is this, and what might cause it to change?
I think that a large part of the reason for this interesting sense of brotherhood is that small brewers actually don't view each other as competitors. Instead, they see themselves as opponents of Big Beer - of the light-lager heavyweights behind Budweiser, Miller, and Coors. And much of craft beer's growth over the past 15 years is attributable to craft siphoning off a bit of Big Beer's market share at a time.
Another reason is that many of these new breweries are small pubs that don't intend to distribute beer much outside their chosen city - but these are the exception. Small pubs generally don't make a ton of money, and most business owners would seek to grow - especially in such a fertile and skyrocketing market.
The center can't hold, here. As Infante opines, there's just too much beer being made these days - too many varieties competing for a finite number of tap handles and supermarket cooler racks. And Big Beer's share of the market is flattening - consumers are buying less beer on average, and more spirits.
So now craft brewers are competing for a bigger share of a smaller pie - and many of them are doing it through endless iteration and novelty. Unthinkable as it might have sounded 15 years ago, there are now plenty of breweries that don't have a standard lineup or even a flagship beer.
And people like me aren't helping, here. Though there're a few breweries I love and support when I can, beyond that I'm brewery agnostic. If I'm at a bar and want an IPA, I'll generally take whatever IPA's on. And unless I'm at a beer bar, it's likely I won't have much of a choice.
I'm also one of the people helping to drive the novelty trend - most of the time, I tend to seek out new beer when it's possible (and when I believe the available new stuff is going to be reasonably high quality). Sure, I'll buy a case of Total Domination for home drinking if it's cheap, but I'd much rather pick a mixed six-pack at the Bier Stein or 16 Tons.
I suspect that a great deal of craft drinkers are like me - we're the ones pushing brewers to constantly make new beers, because our libation-attention-span is very short. There's a big problem looming, though. It's simply not a good long-term business practice to keep rotating new beers - brewers will lose out on people who find a beer they like and stick with it.
So I think we'll start to see breweries become more selfish and sociopathic over the next several years - that is to say, more like the traditional corporations we love to hate. I think that increasing competition for the same slice of drinkers will drive breweries away from each other sooner rather than later. It's a sad thing, to be sure, but there's a possibility some vestige of the current fraternity will remain.
