John Tierney has put up an excellent and informative post today about the state of the American brewing market.
Short version: the biggest sellers are still the blandest water-beers (Bud Light as #1, Coors Light as #2); but those big sales are dropping fast; and meanwhile craft beers, of which Samuel Adams is by far the largest and Sierra Nevada #2, claim only a tiny sliver of the market but are the main category that's growing. You could view that tiny sliver -- 10 million cases a year for Sam Adams, versus 300 million (!) for Bud Light -- as discouraging. Or you could use the increase for craft beers -- Sam Adams up 11 percent last year, while Bud Light was down 1 percent -- to give you heart. Myself, I always prefer to see the growler as half full rather than half empty.
I mention this to highlight John's post for anyone who might have missed it, and also an excuse for some growler-half-full news I've meant to mention for months. Australia, which in most other ways has made itself into as astonishingly pleasurable food-and-drink paradise, has badly lagged in the beer department. Many Aussies are annoyed by the yokel image of their country conveyed by the Foster's "that's Australian for beer" commercials, although instead of yokel they would say "ocker." But weak and watery Foster's has been a fair representation of what the country's pubs generally* have had on offer.
pictures at this site.
[* Yes, yes, there have been exceptions. The Lord Nelson "Brewery Hotel" in Sydney, at right, is a place where I have spent an embarrassingly large percentage of my total time on Australian soil. Its Three Sheets Australian Pale Ale is my standard there. Plus, the MooBrew brewery in Tasmania, and some others -- including the James Squire brewpub in the Salamanca area of Hobart, Tasmania, shown below. It's just that, compared with omnipresent good wines and great food, Aussie brews have lagged.]
Until just now. The picture at the very top of this item shows an 11-beer range of craft beers from Hop Hog IPA, made by the newish Feral Brewing Company in Western Australia (at far left), to Stowaway IPA from the better-known James Squire Brewery in New South Wales (at right). I bought this assortment and lugged them home on a visit a few months ago to the wonderful Oak Barrel bottle shop in Sydney, below.
That "Aromatic Spelt Ale" in the middle of that 11-beer range turns out to be an acquired taste that I don't really want to acquire. The other 10 were very impressive and have removed the only quality-of-life reason not to live in Australia. A recent local ranking put Feral's Hop Hog at the top.
The local press is carrying beer specials (right), and in general it is a great time to be an Aussie or visitor in search of non-watery beer.
But let's bring it back to John's post, and to what Deb Fallows and I have been discovering as we have prowled through smaller-town America. What is finally happening in Australia, and what everyone knows to have been happening for years in Oregon and Michigan and Vermont, is happening all over the place in the U.S. We've seen our share of truck stops and roadside convenience stores in recent months, and the selection there explains how those million-case-per-day of Bud Light are being moved. But we've yet to be some place without its own startup brewery in the vicinity, or three or ten. Latest example: Georgia, source of the Terrapin brewery whose offering is shown below:
Each place we've visited, I've asked the young or more grizzled brewpub entrepreneurs how long this can go on. Indeed, it's conceivable that a world hops shortage could limit their growth -- or, on the more positive side, blunt some of the trend movement toward super-hopped, too-alcoholic brews. But many of the brewers have pointed out that their share of the total market is so small that they could plausibly keep growing, even if the beer market as a whole, swill and all, is declining. Useful comparison: the "enormous" 11% growth in Sam Adams sales for one year was a total increase of about 1 million cases. The "tiny" 1% fall in Bud Light sales was three times as large.
So if tastes shift -- and if hops remain -- there is room for the craft brewers. Thus I cheer them on.
