Want to Read the Tea Leaves of Beer's future? Look at ABV

Welcome dearest reader,

As you have likely pieced together, I’m more a fan of the low ABV stuff than the big ol’ Hwiskey Porters. I also read beer articles and industry pieces, and I’ve been encouraged by signs that my desire for lower ABV offerings aren’t unique to me, but the existence of IPAs and Hazy IPAs, and the growth in categories like Dessert Stouts makes me wonder why there’s a delay between what seems like growing demand for easy drinkers, and these high-calorie devils, so today we’ll walk through the state of session beers, and what I personally think the future holds for the various relevant trends in beer.

The Future is Crushable

If you head over to Beverage Daily, an English beverage industry site mainly focused on England and the EU, you’re likely to see multiple articles on low-ABV beers and Hard Seltzer. If you’ve been to any store that sells alcohol recently, that shouldn’t come as a shock, given the absolute flood of new Hard Seltzers on the market, even from craft breweries (like us!), and to a lesser extent Non-Alcoholic Beers like this fascinating Brooklyn example (it’s surprisingly good, but quite obviously not beer).

As those beverages capture an ever-growing slice of the beer pie (cue Homer Simpson gif), somebody has to lose ground, and better yet, some ancillary characters may yet be revived somewhat (as kettle souring did for the Gose), so who might that be? Are there any easy targets, and any styles ripe for resurrection?

The Death of the IPA

As referenced in the post two weeks ago in response to this insane simulacrum piece, one bizarre consequence of new drinkers experiencing Hazies as the preponderant IPA at the moment is that said new drinkers may never associate the term “IPA” with excessive bitterness (shots fired). This begs the question: is it appropriate to call such beers, and styles such as Milkshake IPAs, “IPAs?” Further, is there any long-term marketing advantage to calling somewhat hoppy, or creatively hopped (and non-bitter) beers “IPAs?” I suspect that we’re about to witness the gradual winding down of IPAs as both a style with an original (by which I mean, I think IPAs and Double IPAs will increasingly become a specialty product, leaving some breweries with just a Hazy), as well as a driver of sales, meaning breweries will be increasingly free to brew special and low-ABV beers, and yes, Seltzers, as opposed to having to keep at least one IPA on tap in order to avoid losing a significant chunk of sales. This may take decades, given the fact that we’re 30+ years into a craft beer scene dominated continuously by IPAs.

Potential Rising Stars and Looming Questions

As posited above, this hole in the market will have to be filled by something, and while the obvious candidates are low-ABV and NA Beers and Seltzers, what beers might take over, and are any categories or fields of beers at risk?

I think as distribution becomes such a flooded market, and thus by the principles of Econ 101, essentially unprofitable to small players, breweries and brewpubs (now that’s the future of craft brewing, in my opinion) will increasingly focus on generating profit from their taprooms, and secondary and tertiary taprooms, and this opens the door to styles that take a bit of skill and dedication to successfully serve. I am of course alluding to cask beers. You see, the problem with the cold is that it can mask subtleties, and, especially as the world pivots during COVID to an outdoor-heavy model, cold beer is about the last thing diners will be seeking in the coming Fall and Winter, in LA but especially in the east. 

Enter: cask beer, a method of serving that limits carbonation and coldness, allowing subtleties to shine through, which allows the hard-won, delicate character of low ABV beers to shine through. I can maybe see The King’s Taxes being decent at draft temp (though our 80 Shilling was decidedly the lesser of the two Shillings when it was on draft, partially as a result I suspect), but Session Gap, at less than 4%, might not survive the jump. So if you’re an east coast brewpub and you’re for some reason reading this, start working on a British Ale or two ASAP, and place an order for a few beer engines and a cask breather.

Similarly, I see sours as a potent direction, and this I think is uncontroversial given their growing market share. I just brewed a 3% Berliner Weisse, and its tartness contribute enough character that I could easily mistake it for a 4.5% beer, if it had a touch more body through the use of flaked barley, say.

Belgian beers seem very fragile, though, as they’re often quite high in ABV, and already fairly unpopular in the US (while you may be able to order the traditional versions at German taverns, how many Belgian-centric breweries do you recall visiting? Maybe one or two; not many).

Lagers are obviously hitting their stride in the US, in part, I suspect, due to the number of years that American breweries have now put into slowly improving their lagering skills; it really does appear to be a matter of slowly gaining the expertise, especially given the huge number of breweries who now regularly sell competent lagers (my bar is crazy high for lagers). And since there are a huge number of traditional lagers brewed at 12˚P (or 1.048 for ye brewers), which yields beer in the 4.x%s and low 5.x%s depending on attenuation (mostly), virtually all lager styles short of the Bocks and Baltic Porters are prime low ABV styles.

What does this mean for new breweries? Where should their focus be, as they develop recipes that may be on tap for years, perhaps decades? To my mind, I think there’s a ton of stock in deliberately brewing low-ABV beers, and fortunately, there’s plenty of documentation, like the rock solid book Session Beers, written by a brewer, Jennifer Talley, who brews primarily in a state with a maximum ABV (5% since 2019, 4% before), Utah. Many, many British and, despite their reputation for heady Scotch Ales, Scottish beers are by default lower ABV, as well as the German beers alluded to above like Gose, Munich Helles and Dunkel, and Pilsner (the Czech version being particularly low ABV, actually, at 4.4% or so). 

Were someone to hand me both seed money for a brewpub, as well as the offer of, say, $10,000,000 contingent on the brewery surviving without extra funding for five years, I’d probably go for a small brewpub with a ~5 BBL BIAC system, and Serving Tanks and/or a Cask System, specializing in traditional German and British styles, particularly cask-y beers like the German Amber Kellerbier, a malty Porter and Brown Ale, probably a mellow Gose, and likely a lower ABV German or Czech Pilsner, with maybe also a Golden Ale and a Bitter thrown in. A limit of perhaps six beers at a time, probably a guest line, and some sort of food option that’s simple to prepare yet filling. If the entire city of Kölsch can operate its bars with a single beer, I think a brewery with a few times that many could exist in the US. You need a Pilsner for people, maybe a Sour, but I think you could make a survivable profit off of these interesting beers, particularly as the market shifts away from the high-ABV stuff.

Confounding Factors

That had the tone of the end of the article, didn’t it? Don’t make me laugh, pal - two more sections. Hit that energy gel, and power through that last 7 miles. 

So, yes, the holes in the argument. I think, again, as argued in the simulacrum article, we’re seeing a psycho, funhouse mirror style orgy taking place in the craft beer world. Lucky Charms IPAs? That’s absolutely insane for two reasons: 1) it’s clearly meant to play on whimsy and nostalgia, but it actually and insidiously comes super close to just marketing to children like Vape Pen companies were known to until very recently, with the threat of heavy regulation and taxation, and; 2) it reads like a desperate, gasping move to sell IPAs to people who clearly don’t want IPAs. Say it with me: Hazy IPAs are wildly overpriced Screwdrivers, and once people (don’t...you can stop saying it with me, it was just that first part) realize that, what possible further gimmick could hop heads come up with to sell their specialist, niche product to the masses? Again, I think we’re going to see IPAs withdraw to their appropriate tiny niche; how many people actually enjoy that level of bitterness? Our bodies are wired to view bitterness as poison, and I haven’t checked recently, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Amaro Craze were waning in parallel.

So anyway, I’m getting a bit off topic - the point is that these funky nightmares, as well as legitimately interesting Dessert Stouts, are, to me, death throes of styles that will soon be relegated to niche-land (not to be confused with Nietzsche-World®), especially given the high prices they command and, I’ll let you in on an obvious secret, must charge given their insanely high production costs (psst: wanna make money in distribution? Find a way to make a popular version of expensive beers cheaply, i.e. kettle souring - Anderson Valley must have cashed in big time on that Gose, and I applaud them).

Finally, it’s a tiny movement for now, but I've seen a very few number of beers aimed at the pre-mixed cocktail market, which is growing, so if such competition were to be stoked, that would lead to a higher ABV push; again, this is a bare, if even perceptible, simmer, so the potential viability of this arms race remains to be seen given the wild economy of these cocktails, and the near-impossible recreation of Jack n’ Coke flavors in beer.

MacLeod’s Role in This

If you want to survive in a market that you can’t predict, it’s all about diversification. As such, and more a consequence of wanting to make a broad range of interesting and great beers than a bookish analysis of the market, we have all of the bases covered; while we're not actively working on new pure-IPA recipes, our core MacLeod brand is churning out lovely, personable low-ABV cask beers for people like me for whom that's all that's required in life, as well as the occasional barrel-aged big release, like our annuals (the Winter Warmer's coming up!) and a surprise we're aging in some Rhum JM barrels, but also in our just-above-moderate strength Hazies and perhaps a lactose-laced IPA variant you may be familiar with... ;)

Which is to say, I would personally love to see an explosion in affection for cask beers (which means we could make more of them!), but our portfolio is actually remarkably broad now that I think about it, so in short, we'll make whatever y'all ask us, through the market, to make. Blame Adam Smith for any of the above, if you’d like, but thank god that his Invisible Hand is pulling our Beer Engines.

Cheers,

Adrian “That Paddington Pale Mild is actually happening” Febre