America’s brewery boom may be having its downsides, too
It was a startling announcement: As of Dec. 1, 2015, the Brewers Association had counted 4,144 breweries in the United States, the most ever operating simultaneously in the his- tory of the country. According to historians, the previous high-water mark of 4,131 was set in 1873.
The new number includes giant Budweiser, artisan Dogfish Head, and your neighborhood brewpub. Although beer industry observers have known this day was coming, the pace of growth was explosive: At the end of 2011, there were 2,033 breweries, or fewer than half as many as now. In 2005, there were only 1,447. And 25 years ago? The Brewers Association, a trade group for small and independent breweries, logged a mere 284 in 1990.
So this is a golden age for beer lovers. It is easier than ever to find a great IPA (the most popular craft beer style in America), stout or session ale at a bar or liquor store. Previously ignored styles such as gose and Berliner weisse have become trendy, while brewers have a free hand to experiment with Belgian IPAs or saisons packed with unusual herbs.
On the other hand, the expanding market — at least two breweries open every day — has created a new set of problems for brewers. New arrivals, riding the craft beer wave, are finding it difficult to stand out. And it’s not as if bars have doubled the number of their taps in the past five years. So not only do the new breweries need to squeeze past their rivals even to make it in front of consumers, but they might need to convince bars that they’re more deserving of a chance than better-known beers from Lagunitas or Great Lakes.
Graham MacDonald, the co-founder of Washington’s new Handsome Beer, estimates that his beers have been sold at around 140 bars, restaurants and stores in the District and Maryland since last fall. Even so, he describes the process of getting into those establishments as “a bit of a challenge.”
“There's been a huge influx of breweries who've come to market in the last year,” he says. “Only two or three years ago . . . it was easy to go in and say, ‘Here’s a new IPA, here's a new pale ale, here’s a new stout.’ But now it’s not just the other new guys who are making the same thing; it’s all the other established breweries.”
The sentiment is the same on the other side of the bar. “Picking the draft list has become exponentially harder than it was two or three years ago,” says Jace Gonnerman, beer director for the District’s Meridian Pint, Brookland Pint and Smoke and Barrel. “You have to balance styles, but how many spots do I have for national breweries? What local breweries do I want to focus on?
“Every time a local brewery opens making really, really high-quality beer, it pushes a national brewery off. We keep a good mix of national breweries on, because people are looking for that. But you have to say no to people way more than you say yes.”
Even when they are given a chance, some small brewers have expressed frustration with the way beer bars order products. Instead of buying three kegs of a new beer and running through them all, as it might have done when local beers were a novelty, a bar tends to buy a keg and, once it’s empty, fill the draft line with a competitor’s product, and then another one, and so on, before rotating back to the first brewery’s beer weeks or months later.
Dave Delaplaine of Roofers Union in Adams Morgan, which regularly swaps beers on and off 16 of its 22 draft lines, defends the practice. “That’s what the culture of the beer world is: In order to have really fun beers, these crazy one-offs, you have to change a lot,” he says. “Breweries are approaching it as an art and want to try new things. I’d take that any day.”