Each year, craft breweries across the nation roll out new limited release beers to entice beer drinkers through the seasons but few can tantalize fans with rebrews of recipes tried, true and back only by popular demand. Stone Brewing announces its line-up of Stone Fan Favorites, voted on by loyal fans of Stone’s prolific 25-year brewing history.
Big Drop Brewing Co., the world’s first craft brewery dedicated to non-alcoholic beer, is celebrating Dry January by launching its fourth NA brew in the U.S. – a new Coba Maya non-alcoholic Mexican-style brew. Coba Maya has a crisp, clean taste with a balanced malt punch on the palate and a gentle, spicy, herbal aroma. It’s ideal with a wedge of fresh lime and offers a delicious new NA option for any day of the week in January and beyond.
The National Beer Wholesalers Association (NBWA) recently released the Beer Purchasers’ Index (BPI) for December 2021. This December’s total index reading of 71 is the highest ever recorded for a December survey. Continued supply chain challenges combined with planned/expected price increases in 2022 are driving higher index readings as distributors and retailers seek to build their inventories heading into the new year.
Beer history is a fragile thing. So much of it has been lost to time because objects, artifacts, and recipes lacked a caretaker at a crucial time. Closings can happen quickly, and beer history is simply swept aside or discarded. Fast forward to today. Craft brewers are increasingly using their platforms – including beer labels, draught chalkboards, or stories told by staff – to remind their customers of beer’s ties to the past. Many modern craft brewers have chosen to restore and preserve the stories – and beers – of the brewers who have come before them.
To find the best new releases of the past year, we asked brewers, cicerones, writers, podcast hosts and other beer professionals to share their personal favorites. These are the 50 beers that debuted and dazzled in 2021.
The current state of affairs for shipping beer direct to consumers (DTC) is not that great. Breweries in the United States can only ship to nine states plus the District of Columbia, which equates to only 17% of the U.S. population. For comparison, U.S. wineries can ship to 47 states and 97% of the U.S. population. Beer DTC is still in a state of infancy, but the good news for breweries is there’s a tremendous amount of untapped opportunity.
The creativity of craft breweries is not limited to their beers. Each year Craft Brewing Business catalogues the inventive, fun, inspiring and possibly insane marketing ideas breweries promoted, and now that NFTs are a thing, craft beer marketing in 2021 entered new planes of reality. Here are the events, promotions and sales gimmicks that stood out to them this year.
The modification and improvement in the taste of craft beer will foster healthy growth of the market, according to a new report. The global craft beer market size stood at US$89.25 billion in 2019 & is projected to reach US$190.66 billion by the end of 2027, at a CAGR of 10.4% in the forecast period, according to data from Fortune Business Insights.
A host of small breweries have been finding themselves at the mercy of Instagram in particular since autumn, struggling against a rash of (hopefully) random technical woes, which in many cases have seen their posts taken down, and in some cases have seen beer industry businesses locked out of their accounts entirely. Many theories have since been proffered, but none fully explains why so many breweries continue to be affected.