Beer Boundaries
Experimentation, pushing the boundaries and changing perceptions; innovation was the driving force of the craft beer revolution, a movement that revolutionised the category, bringing new consumers and a multitude of new producers to it. But has the market now splintered itself into identity oblivion?
It goes like this. Beer, a drink with thousands of years’ worth of history, at one point, fell into a deep rut. Once an essential part of daily life, cask beer had become perceived as either old fashioned, warm, bland and the preserve of old men sat nursing it in pubs with yellow walls. Or else, in the case of lager, it was the bland, watery liquid that fired up football hooligans and domestic abusers, produced at scale by large multinationals. Neither was good. both marketed themselves to men only. And both were arguably devoid of passion, quality, and dynamism.
Then a curious thing happened. Young US brewers inspired by their travels across Europe returned with ideas of ways to update, reinterpret and re-craft classic styles, morphing them into something new, and crucially marketing them in unisex packaging that welcomed everyone in. The rest, as you know, is history, as the idea bubbled across the world to other key beer markets, who simultaneously both tore up, sometimes embraced, and rewrote the rule book. And ultimately influencing other categories to go ‘craft’ by emphasing the passion and the process behind them.?
Was it all a great success? Largely. Though after the initial rush to market by would-be brewers everywhere,?droves of early players were either bought up by the large companies they positioned themselves as the antithesis of in the first place, or else they folded, unable to run a viable business in a saturated market. And that was just the first wave.
An identity crisis?
Now, a good 15-20 years on from when the revolution started, where are we? Has it now burned itself out? Or even worse, is the craft beer movement suffering more than an identity crisis, but a complete lack of identity?
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