The past year has been yet another challenging one for craft beer. Production continued to slow, costs went up, and thousands of breweries found themselves struggling to remain exciting to both older and newer generations.
Many of you find yourselves raising prices, slashing costs, developing RTDs, canning cocktails, seeking new distribution opportunities, and—essentially—taking shots at just about anything you can think of to remain relevant. As we settle in survival mode, widespread assumptions of growth are a vestige of a bygone era.
But survive you have. Despite doomsday rumblings and overall declines, still more breweries are opening than closing, industry jobs are increasing, and dollar sales are up. While breweries that focus on on-premise sales saw production slow in 2023—including, for the first time, taprooms as a group—and draft sales still struggled to rebound from the pandemic, over-the-bar sales opportunities remain vital to this survival.
As competition in the distribution field gets tougher—and costs climb even as drinkers reject price increases—on-premise sales of draft beer continue to offer the highest margins in craft. There’s a reason why three out of every four breweries in the United States are either brewpubs or have their own taprooms.
That’s the context for our challenge: How do we get more consumers to more consistently visit our locations for draft beer? Especially at a time when an ever-expanding array of beverage choices is competing for their attention?