Craft Beer Isn’t Dying. It’s Changing Shape
If you only looked at brewery-closing headlines, it would be easy to think craft beer is simply falling apart. There are definitely real problems out there. Breweries are closing. Costs are high. Consumers are drinking differently. People are going out less often in some places, and breweries that once could rely on steady taproom traffic or distribution are finding that model harder to maintain. But after talking through the latest beer news with Dave from Beer In Front on the October 3 Midwest Beer Show, I kept coming back to one thought: Craft beer may not be disappearing as much as it is changing shape. The Closures Are Real We talked about Black & Gray Brewing in Illinois, which announced it was closing after nearly eight years and described the decision as financially unavoidable. That is not an isolated kind of story anymore. There have been enough brewery closures over the past couple of years that we have to stop treating every one of them as a random failure. There is cle...
