Especially for our subscribers, please enjoy this expanded version of the Q&A that appears in our Fall 2026 issue of the Brewing Industry Guide.
CBB // You’ve mentioned to me that we are living in the golden age of beer. What do you mean by that?
HF // I always approached this part of my professional career as a hobby first, profession second, and I think I share that with a lot of brewers out there. There is no way for me to separate the enthusiast Henok from the professional-beer-maker-and-brewery-owner Henok, and I think seeing a snapshot moment of where we’re at right now would have been an absolute dream when we started out in terms of the plethora and incredible breadth and variety of beer that’s out there, the quality of the beer that’s out there, the variety of beer that’s out there, the different ethos, and directions and creative variety. I think it’s easy to forget that when you look at the macro numbers, and when you start overly emphasizing the volume of beer going down—this diverse category is being bundled into one big number. Sure, you could sift out the small craft brewery volumes and start dissecting and probably see trends that are on the decline. But I think we’re painfully aware, all of us, of the fact that there has been varied quality.
The market’s been forgiving for a long for a long time. Last decade, all boats were rising, and so I think with the gift of patience, the markets really tried to give us brewers a chance to learn fast, but also to make our mistakes. Looking back at almost 15 years of running Omnipollo, what we’re doing at this point in time is elite sport. We’ve come to a point where, as consumers, we’re wandering around drinking the best beer we’ve ever had. I haven’t had a bad beer in probably a year. That would not have happened 10 years ago or 15 years ago—I would have had a bad beer in a week. As a brewer and brewery owner, it’s an elite sport, but we’ve had 15 years to build that up. Is that fair to somebody who starts out now? Probably not. But you’re going into this knowing what the variety out there is, and I think being aware of that as you start a new brewery probably is the way to go because I see over and over again young ambitious brewers going from being homebrewers to becoming pros, taking a space that’s already been a brewery, but for one reason or another hasn’t stood the test of time, and blow incredible life into it, create magic.
That’s why I keep calling it the golden age of beer. First and foremost, as an enthusiast and as a drinker, but secondly, also as someone slightly more “senior,” if you will (it’s not a word I love to use)—looking into the new breweries that are starting up and all the equipment that’s out there that allows for an ambitious homebrewer to become an incredibly successful brewer on a commercial level, very fast based on the access of equipment and goods. Is there a dark side to that? Of course. But there’s also a lot of light. It’s slightly provocative to call it the golden age, but truthfully, I think most people would agree with me who were drinking craft beer say 15-20 years ago. There’s no way other way to look at it.
CBB // To develop your elite sport metaphor a little bit further, if we look at modern sprinting or modern professional cycling or the marathon record, the times of those elite athletes continues to drop, and things we didn’t think humanly possible are now possible through a combination of smarter training methods, through technology that has increasingly made things lighter, stronger, and more dynamic. What do you ascribe the performance leap to, in the world of beer, where we’ve not only increased the performance at the top end, but also brought up the floor of low performance?