Sam Calagione thinks so. With a sudden spike in craft breweries, and a flood of similar beers, have we reached a jump the shark moment? "We’re heading into an incredibly competitive era of craft brewing,” he says. “There’s a bloodbath coming.”
This may seem alarmist. After all, the Brewers Association just announced that 3,000-plus craft breweries now operate in America. Last year’s craft sales climbed 17.2 percent...The highway, however, is getting mighty crowded. Hundreds of different beers debut weekly, creating a scrum of session IPAs, spiced witbiers, and barrel-aged stouts scuffling for shelf space. For consumers, the situation is doubly confusing. How can you pick a pint on a 100-brew tap list? Moreover, beer shops are chockablock with pale this and imperial that, each one boasting a different hop pun. When buying beer, I can’t count how many times I’ve assisted overwhelmed shoppers, playing the benevolent Sherpa in the wilds of modern brewing."
Personally, I do think there will ceratinly be some thinning of the herd, especially with a market so saturated. No industry can have meteoric growth, without experiencing a contraction along the way. Lots of small craft brewers have opened to pump up those numbers noted above, and not all will (or should) survive. And when they go away, it will be a signal that that meteoric growth will be over, and we will see a plateauing, perhaps a reduction, in the number of craft brewers in the country. In the long run, perhaps that could be a good thing.
Of course the obvious solution to me is that craft beer lovers should not chase the whales (every Stone project, limited releases, etc) that get all the publicity, and concentrate a majority of their drinking to local and regional options.
If there is a bloodbath coming, then the best way to lessen its impact is to keep your best local/regional brewers in business by quaffing their product.
Now, to put my money where my mouth is, I have a bomber of Westbrook's Mexican Cake calling my name in the beer fridge...
