Is Craft Beer Facing an Identity Crisis?
Today, the Brewers Association (BA), the craft beer trade group representing over 4,000 breweries, released its first-ever list of “Fastest Growing Craft Breweries”。这个新的列表形成鲜明对比to the BA’s better known annual list, theTop 50 Craft Brewing Companiesby sales volume. The lists contain no overlap—which is kind of the point: Teasing out the fastest growing breweries offers exposure to smaller brewers. But though the new list underscores the growth seen by these small breweries, its release speaks to a larger issue: Discussing both small craft breweries and the largest craft breweries as one entity is trickier than ever.
Importantly, the BA’s largest craft brewers are still significantly smaller than the largest non-craft breweries. Yuengling, the biggest craft producer, made somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 million barrels last year. Meanwhile, Anheuser-Busch InBev produced closer 100 million barrels in North America alone. However, as the number of brewers in the U.S. has continued to balloon—nowwell over 6,000 breweries—the difference in output between a company like Yuengling and the majority of the Brewers Association’s membership presents an even larger discrepancy. Microbreweries, which produce less than 15,000 barrels per year, account for over 3,800 of the breweries in America. Percentage-wise, the tiny amount of beer each of these little guys makes compared to someone like Yuengling is even smaller than what Yuengling makes compared to A-B InBev.
Compounding the problem is that, as the BA readily admits, the majority of growth in the craft beer sector hascome from smaller breweries在整个精酿啤酒增长放缓的时候，总体上啤酒市场实际上也有所下降。结果，小型啤酒厂是啤酒界最亮的地方 - 看到增长，而许多中型的工艺啤酒厂have struggled。尽管如此，文学学士仍然对其较大的成员的利益占有看法，这些成员构成了全国200个左右的“区域酿酒厂”。
In some ways, the BA spent much of last year trying to unify the craft beer scene. The trade association has beenpushing its “Certified Independent Craft” logo, which has seen pretty strong usage across the board, and even launched its largest ever consumer-facing advertising campaign, dubbed “取回工艺。” But one of craft beers’ largest narratives has always been that craft is a growing industry that’s cutting into big beer’s bottom line. With this new list, the BA is once again turning to its smallest members to make that ongoing storyline as strong as possible.
So the question begins to arise: Does talking about all craft beer under one umbrella even makes sense anymore? “The Brewers Association has long spoken about the craft brewing market in a variety of ways,” Bart Watson, the BA’s chief economist, told us via email. “This new list is an opportunity to highlight some of the diverse growth stories in the tail, which has become a more important source of craft’s growth in recent years.”
However, at the same time, the idea of craft beer was originally established as a way to pit new independent breweries against the much larger old guard. If the craft beer industry itself has to discuss its breweries in a similar way, an identity crisis could be brewing.