Beer Industry Trends to Watch for 2024 | SevenFifty Daily
Photo: Alternate Ending Beer Co.
Each year for SevenFifty Daily, I reach out to dozens of beer-industry professionals to create a trend-driven road map for the year ahead. Craft beer is no longer novel, but “this doesn’t mean the industry is in decline or going away,” says Trevor Nearburg, the founder of Beerburg Brewing in Austin, Texas. “It just means that we, as brewers, must get much more refined in our approach.”
To survive and thrive, breweries have been focusing on easygoing lagers with mass appeal, offering crowd-pleasing pizza and burgers at taprooms, and exploring producing wine, spirits, and THC beverages—now legally stocked at Total Wine in Minnesota.
“In 2024, craft will have to do what craft does best: adapt,” says Dennis Stack, the sales and marketing director at Lone Tree Brewing in Lone Tree, Colorado, which makes the Ufloric sparkling water with hops and hemp oil.
As the brewing industry navigates another 12 months of spirited competition and capricious consumer behavior, here's what's in store:
1) Taprooms will put a premium on hospitality on service
2) Breweries will get more creative with events.
3) Zero-carbonation alcoholic beverages will pop up, buoyed by the rise of hard tea
4) Increased brewery consolidation will help breweries save costs by sharing resources
5) Brand values will become selling points as important as the beer
6) Nonalcoholic options will increase in number and scope, from THC seltzers to NA beers and NA versions of boozy products—hello, White Claw 0% Alcohol
