Craft brews are popping up everywhere. It seems every other bar I go to has multiple craft brew selections. Beer (craft brews at least) seems more popular than ever.
And yet this graph is talking about the big reduction in beer drinking?
Craft brews make up a TINY percentage of overall beer sales in the US. Having more of them doesn’t really have a major impact on overall beer sales.
http://www.hopunion.com/assets/file/State%20of%20the%20Beer%20Industry%20-%20Dan%20Wandel.pdf
Take a look at sales by brand - the top craft beer isn’t even in the top 15 beer brands, and compared to the top 3 it’s just noise.
So the percentage of Americans who drink beer more than wine or liquor is declining, but does that mean that raw sales of beer are declining?
Beer sales are on the decline in 2013 - MSN
That chart seems misleading… If people drink more beer now than people did in 1992, and A LOT more wine than they did before, it’d turn out the same… that chart doesn’t say they are drinking less beer, just that they now prefer wine.
I wonder how much of this is better wine selection. When I was a college student in the mid-90s, it seemed grocery stores would only stock pricy wines or jug/box wines. And the wine in convenience stores seemed to be only of the Thunderbird variety. These days you can find good wines in the $10 range, even at corner stores.
Has decent wine been getting cheaper? You can get a drinkable, if not impressive, wine for under $10, roughly equivalent to the price of a craft brew 6 pack. A bottle of Two Buck Chuck is cheaper than a 6 pack of Bud Light, even if it’s not $2 anymore.
After shopping in my local supermarket (Tesco) and buying a dozen bottles of quite drinkable SA Merlot for less than £5 each (25% discount offer) I was discussing the same point with my wife. When you consider that £2.00 of this is duty, and £1.00 is VAT (tax) it makes you think.
We came to the conclusion that its not so much ‘decent’ wine getting cheaper, but cheap wine getting better. A subtle distinction but more optimistic.
In the UK, beer volumes are well down. Pubs are closing at a rate of twenty-six a week, compared with 18 a week only a few months ago, according to the Campaign for Real Ale. As in the US, Micro-breweries are spring up all over the place. This is partly due to a tax advantage, and partly to a growing movement to all things local.
Also, the people that now drink craft beers are not people that used to drink wine or liquor, they are people that used to drink major-brewery beers. So the rise in craft beers would have no impact on that chart. However, many of the people that now drink wine are ones that drank beer or cocktails back when wine selections were more limited and more expensive. So the rise of the decent grocery store wine would have an impact.
Two things I notice.
The questions is ‘what do you dring most often.’ So it looks like more people drink wine ‘most often’ now. Doesn’t tell us that they drink more or less of anything.
Also, the price of beer has risen quite a bit over the last few years. Why, I don’t know, but it makes me buy wine ‘more often’ and beer ‘less often.’
You’re confusing two things- overall beer consumption of all types, which is what the articles/graphs are talking about, and the percentages of that overall beer consumption by type, which would be craft vs macrobrewery.
What I see when I look at the graphs from the article is that the consumption of spirits has been fairly flat, but that beer has lost share to wine over time.
What I’d like to see is a graph showing those same percentages by gender; I think I read some articles saying that women’s drinking has gone way up in recent years, and if so, then the greater overall percentage of wine makes sense.
It’s not like people who drink craft beers used to be Puritans. Changing brands won’t increase total sales.
Also misleading. There are 1000s of craft brews, and each tends to have regional appeal. Craft beers have something like 5 - 10% of the market share now, but even if that grows to 50%, I doubt you’d see many on a top 20 list.
Here’s my view as a relative non-drinker:
Wine drinkers have always been a pain in the ass when it comes to listening to them prattle on about their beverage.
This is a relatively new phenomenon for beer drinkers. Which makes beer drinking the minor leagues of assholish beverage prattling. So now that the burgeoning craft beer industry has made many beer drinkers realize they enjoy combining drinking with competive assholish beverage prattling, they move on to the major leagues once getting their bearings in the minor leagues.
ETA: Sorry for the smartass response. I thought this was in the Cafe.
I was taking a broader view - using anything produced by a non-major brewer. The top Specialty brands are nearly all national brands, and some are even owned by the major players. The true craft beers are much smaller. Now these are supermarket sales, which might not represent the smaller players very well.
Beer brands Dollar Sales
BUD LIGHT $646,935,232
COORS LIGHT $343,137,472
MILLER LITE $306,128,928
BUDWEISER $257,350,736
CORONA EXTRA $194,944,080
NATURAL LIGHT $120,321,608
MICHELOB ULTRA LIGHT $118,260,608
HEINEKEN $117,828,112
BUSCH LIGHT $99,358,304
MILLER HIGH LIFE $79,640,456
BUSCH $68,074,024
CORONA LIGHT $65,175,792
BUD LIGHT PLATINUM LAGER $58,265,844
KEYSTONE LIGHT $57,855,968
MODELO ESPECIAL $55,423,892
Specialty Brands
BLUE MOON BELGIAN WHITE ALE $47,373,716
SHOCK TOP BELGIAN WHITE ALE $22,162,886
LEINENKUGEL SEASONAL $20,220,654
BLUE MOON SEASONAL $15,306,478
LANDSHARK LAGER $11,646,493
BLUE MOON VARIETY PACK $10,827,266
SHOCK TOP RASPBERRY WHEAT … $5,232,515
SHOCK TOP SEASONAL $3,759,075
LEINENKUGEL SUNSET WHEAT $3,683,437
LEINENKUGEL VARIETY PACK $3,557,228
REDBRIDGE $3,109,329
WILD BLUE $2,554,471
LEINENKUGEL HONEY WEISS $2,242,397
LEINENKUGEL BERRY WEISS $2,207,731
SHOCK TOP VARIETY PACK $1,942,352
All data from the link in post #2.
Anecdotally, I just want to say that I don’t find this surprising in any way. I started drinking in the 90’s and preferred wine for about the first ten years. The brands of beer I was exposed to growing up - Coors, Bud, Corona and Heineken - are crap. I wouldn’t wish those beers on my neighbor’s dogs. But that’s all anybody I knew was drinking, and I just thought I preferred wine and stuck with that until I finally started to discover the world of darker beers and craft brews. Now I drink wine maybe twice a year and my motto is to never trust a beer you can see through.
So I’m hopeful that the rise of craft beers may turn this trend around eventually, but I don’t expect any change overnight.
I don’t think this can explain it. The notes on the Gallup link say that the total number of drinkers has remained steady at 60%. It says that the frequency of drinking is up, but the preference ratings are based on people who drink alcohol - it’s not weighted by the amount they drink.
In fact, only 35% of the people said they drank in the last 24 hours, and another 29% in the last week - so 36% of drinkers overall (29% of beer drinkers and 37% of wine drinkers) do so less often than once a week. Given this, I’d be hesitant to tie the results of this poll to any kind of market expectations - an industry can be very successful catering to just 35% of the market.
There is a graph showing the percentages by gender, if you scroll down on the second link.
The percentage of women drinking is increasing. I quick google found a few articles, including this one from WSJ
More drastic than the trend broken out by gender is the trend by younger drinkers away from beer as the preferred drink, which shows a decline by 18 to 29-year-old which shows a 30 point drop from 1992-93 to 2012-13.
Sales of Budweiser and Anheuser-Bush-InBev’s numerous variants have been declining year-on-year since 1988. They’ve stayed profitable by jacking up prices.
That explains Pinot Grigio! (I always picture a drunken mouse puppet when I hear that name. I must be very old.)
Look, I’m doing my best, but for God’s sake I’m only one man.