Beer Trends for 2021 | SevenFifty Daily

Photo: Solemn Oath’s Community Dome Forest

In our plague year, the novel coronavirus left no facet of life immune from its ravaging impacts, especially beer. Facing taproom closures and shuttered bars, restaurants, and sports stadiums, breweries dumped draft beer down trench drains and shipped off IPAs and pilsners to distilleries that created sanitizer.

For breweries, an economically destabilizing spring led to a wellspring of creative adaptation. Breweries saw six feet apart not as an insurmountable gap, but rather an opportunity to find new ways to connect with customers and place cold beer in their hands, be it in a can, glass growler, or even a plastic jug.  

“It’s always been said that beer is recession proof, and now we’ve proven that it’s pandemic proof,” says Randy Bandy, the sales director for Indeed Brewing Company, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. “It was obviously a really tough year for breweries with the lack of on-premise and drastic market shift to package, but the good long-term news is this: Wherever people were shopping, they were still buying a lot of beer.”

For SevenFifty Daily, I looked at six trends that will continue to shape the beer industry in 2021.