On That NYT Op-Ed About Craft Beer
When I was a less-experienced writer, I was pretty sure I had the beer industry figured out. It was easy to spot brewery mistakes—they made boneheaded gaffes with their marketing and pursued beer styles that were obvious losers. I did not look closely at how my own preferences seemed to align perfectly with my opinions about business. As I started developing sources within the industry, however, my certainty wavered. The beer industry is big and complex, and vast sums of money are at stake. Sometimes breweries make mistakes. More often, what we take as mistakes are often canny calculations based on factors consumers can’t possibly intuit from their seat at the beer aisle. In short, there are many self-correcting mechanisms within an industry, and assuming everyone is an idiot can be a fraught position.
“There are a few simple steps the craft beer industry can take to immediately address its downturn. For starters, it must abandon the I.P.A. arms race. Craft beer’s obsession with hops has gone too far... Most taste like pine resin with a splash of grapefruit pith, and not in a good way.”
Which brings us to an opinion piece in The New York Times on craft beer. Written by Mark Robichaux, who worked as a Wall Street Journal business reporter until 2001, it reminds me of my blog posts from about 2008. It has the hallmarks of a writer who mistook his own preferences as solid economic analysis. I commented on it briefly on Bluesky, and then let it go. I didn’t think it would have much resonance. It apparently has, enough so that the new economist at the Brewers Association, Matt Gacioch, wrote a great reaction piece.
It includes the kinds of real data Robichaux should have consulted before advising craft breweries to, in the most amusing example, stop brewing IPAs. Gacioch pointed out that half the craft beers sold are IPAs, a number that is still rising. The rebuttal is gentle and skillful, and I appreciated Gacioch’s tone. (I blame Robichaux less than the Times editors, who should have challenged some of the claims, but this a moment when it seems like every publisher wants a piece slamming craft brewing, and they ran with it.)
As comprehensive as Gacioch’s piece is, though, I have a few comments to add in quickie blog-style fashion.
1. I think many people have internalized the idea that craft brewing is a niche industry. It’s not. It’s a $30 billion industry that touches most beer drinkers in the US. We have something like 7,000-8,000 breweries in the country (the figure the BA uses is inflated), and those breweries release, back-of-the-envelope math here, somewhere north of 150,000 new beers a year, in addition to the, again, guesstimate, 60-100k that are permanently on the market. That is to say, there’s an example of something strange or silly or bad everywhere. But we need to be careful about generalizing these examples as representative of the industry.
2. Related to that point is that breweries sell to many different consumers now. The 19.2-ounce double-IPAs sold at convenience stores attract a different customer than the 3.5% cask bitter at the British-style pub. Robichaux critiques label text and design as being too obscure for the common drinker. There’s a critique in there I agree with, but it’s not the one he’s making. “Today’s overwhelmed consumer doesn’t have time to decode a beer called Sour Me Unicorn Farts (a glittered sour from DuClaw),” he writes. That beer was clearly never made for “today’s overwhelmed consumer.” It’s part of a series of kettle-soured beers (all called “Sour Me”) that is aimed at a very specific consumer. This is not a stupid idea—trying to reach a diverse customer base means meeting them where they are.
As he continues on with examples, Robichaux stumbles into this very bad one: “… or Hopportunity Knocks (a perfumed, piney I.P.A. from Caldera Brewing Company).” He uses it as an example of a beer that will leave customers scratching their heads. “They want to know: What does it taste like? Will I like it? Design matters, yes, but clarity matters more. Make labels that tell drinkers what’s inside, not just what’s funny at 2 a.m. in the brew house.” But an IPA called Hopportunity Knocks will confuse approximately 0% of the Oregon consumers who have been drinking IPAs for 35 years, and this beer for fifteen. Caldera is not stupid—this is an important beer in their portfolio.
3. In much the way that breweries make a bunch of different beer for different consumers, they also package it in different ways to attract them. Breweries package beer in 12-once, 16-ounce, and 19.2-ounce cans for different reasons. Robichaux’s argument is that 16-ounce four-packs are smaller than 12-ounce six-packs, and therefore a worse deal (usually true). He speculates that “breweries leaned on the logic that a bigger boozier can equals a better deal,” and urges them to “bring back the 12-ounce can. It’s better for pacing, better for flavor and better for trying a few different beers in one sitting. That’s good for drinkers, and smarter for the industry.” Again, this mistakes a bunch of stuff, not least is that within the mass market of craft beer, the 12-ounce can is still king by a mile.
Everyone likes a good rant, and plenty of people are going to cheer Robichaux. I sort of hate 16-ounce four-packs, too. But the point of his article was to offer sound advice to breweries in an industry suffering a slight downturn. And this ain’t that. It’s a pity the Times didn’t hire Gacioch instead—I’d love to hear what he has to say.