That’s weird to learn given how many small breweries there are in my city all of a sudden.
I swear to fucking God if gen Z fucks up the local brewery thing I will burn down the building.
Yet even as overall volume consumption declined, the largest beer makers remain financially resilient thanks to prices that climbed alongside — or even surpassed — broader inflation, Steinman said. Beer drinkers also continued to shift toward more expensive beer brands, especially imports like Modelo Especial, which became the No. 1 beer in America in 2023.
So people aren’t willing to pay higher prices for worse product.
Here is the key sentence in the article.
…an acceleration in the long-term decline of so-called domestic-premium brands, which include Bud Light and rivals Miller Light and Coors Light…
So, are people drinking less beer or are they drinking less piss beer? Couldn’t be that people are having two Hazy Imperial IPA’s wiyh 8+ ABV instead of a six pack of Coors Light? I am taking this headline with a gran of salt.
Who the hell thinks those three are premium?
If that’s premium what isn’t premium? Steel reserve? That’s just malt Coors with different marketing. Micky’s? That’s just malt Miller with different marketing. 10 barrel? That bud light wearing 2010’s hipster clothes.
I think we’re giving these brand too much credit with the word premium.
Hey, hey, hey! Don’t disrespect Mickey’s.
I also wonder how liquor sales are as well.
My wife and I are obviously only one couple, so this is confirmation bias, but alcohol in general just isn’t as appealing anymore. With all this general stress we’ve been going through (struggling with inflation, insane work hours, insane work conditions) alcohol is causing more migraines, sucky morning-after-drinking symptoms, high calories, expensive prices, there’s just no good reason to drink as much as we used to. And it’s not like we drank that much earlier in our lives as well.
Tie this all together with marijuana availability which has none of these cons except for high taxes, then alcohol doesn’t sound as appealing anymore.
As someone who rarely drinks and fucking hates being around dumb drunk fucks.
Good.
Keep going, don’t stop, fuck alcohol.
David Nutt knew what was up. He argued alcohol and tobacco should be illegal and marijuana, LSD, and mushrooms should be legal, based on real-world harm (he also had the data to back it up). He got shitcanned for suggesting this.
Humanity needs to wake the fuck up to how fucking bad alcohol is for us as a species.
Lol people know how bad alcohol is.
Maybe you’ll understand when you’re a little bit older, bud.
I don’t know how young you think a guy who is referencing an obscure UK government official being sacked 14 years ago would be.
I mean, yeah, booze isn’t great for people. But it’s been a fairly important part of humanity since, like, the first city. According to wikipedia, humans have been making booze since the Neolithic period (10,000 BCE). Many, many, human cultures have some sort of relationship with it. Removing it would not be easy or well received.
There are a few theories that propose alcohol tolerance is baked into our DNA. Pre-humans that were able to breakdown alcohol were able to survive off of fermenting fruit when needed and not get so blackout drunk they became easy prey for something else. While that is just theory, the ability for us to process alcohol had to start somewhere.
I find it strange that a substance that helped us evolve is also a major sponsor of the Darwin Awards.
We’re much more health conscious these days. We’ve seen how alcohol can wreck your health and quality of life. There are more and more people that don’t drink alcohol at all. And so on.
Meanwhile my drinking has hit personal record highs this year. Yay depression.
Please, be careful with that, alcohol usually makes depression worse
Even if you don’t stop completely, and instead only drink socially as opposed to alone I think you’ll feel a lot better. I know I did! Plus, the feeling of waking up every day 100% sober with no hangover is better than all the drunken nights. Whatever you choose, good luck…
Stop making so many mediocre IPAs. Other styles do exist.
I drink IPAz when I only want to have 2 drinks instead of 10.
Turns out, that’s most of the time
US beer is shit anyway 🤷 Took them a good while to notice!
The US has some great craft beer. Some of (if not the) best in the world. Our beer that sells well is shit though, I agree. Out of the “popular” (which mostly just means cheap) beer, the imported ones are generally better.
For every beer yall don’t drink, I’m going to drink 3. 1 because I want a beer, 1 for the beer you passed on, and 1 to make the beer industry even more awesome.
I think beer is gross, personally, so this isn’t a post about me but reading the comments it is interesting to see beer drinkers here decide against it due to cost and wanting other choices. I have news for you guys there are cocktails and other great alcohols that cost as much as your 7 to 10 dollar beer and they taste fucking great.
You say “gross”, now that’s an intriguing choice of vocab…because it’s just a watery liquid, it doesn’t have a texture like snot or slime or similar typically “gross” things. I’m not saying you’re wrong in your dislike of it, the taste, smell, etc. but could you elaborate what you think is “gross” about it?
Beer tastes like carbonated ass with added bread flavouring. That specific enough for ya?
A 4 pack is $12. I’m just going to get a bottle of whisky instead.
beer shipments
That’s the problem. A lot of people are living in and around cities now. We buy beer at the brewery. Do these figures include 1st party sells? Distributors have always been a necessary evil and many states have laws saying you must go through a distributor for selling elsewhere, but many breweries are just doing taprooms now to not have to deal with that. I’d like to see those stats if they exist.
I do understand that many people are buying seltzers now, myself included.
It also doesn’t help that the craft beer scene turned into a competition to push the most over the top bitter IPAs possible. A lot of the appeal of craft beer went away for me when 3/4 of the taps became unremarkable IPAs. A good IPA is wonderful, but the vast majority of what you run into isn’t that.
It’s only marginally more interesting than when the landscape was dominated by lagers.
At least around me that has improved. Ten years ago it was just a dick-measuring contest about who could make the bitterest beer. Once you hit 90+ IBUs you’re not even pretending to make something good.
Since then, craft breweries here have course corrected. Most of them here are focusing on making a well- balanced IPA as their flagship, then experimenting with sours, stouts and saisons.
