However, the state of alcohol purchasing says something larger about the American consumer. We’re seeing folks once again organize into two camps – haves and have nots.
Consumer demand for singular “sub-premium” beers is rising at the same time as high-end mezcal.
This has been accelerating since the 2008 "crisis" and got way worst the past few years. There is no middle, there's either premium to cater to the (mostly) white collar class who are now comparatively rich, and there's crap for the working class, who are now super poor.
I used to (like, 5 years ago) find a lot of $7 and $8 bombers that were pretty great, or $9 6-packs that were damn solid.
From my perspective it's not so much that I stopped buying mid-tier beer, as that it vanished and isn't there to buy anymore. Now I look at a $12 4-pack of beer that's not even that good and wonder if I should put the money toward a very-nice scotch instead....
I still buy from a few brands that I know well and that do deliver good quality at non-crazy prices, but there just aren't as many "yeah, sure, at that price I'll give it a shot" beers on the shelf. At least locally.
Obviously this is wildly anecdotal and a laughably tiny sample size, but I have found myself moving back towards a few favorite cheap beers over the last few years. I just got kinda sick of heavy stouts and hop-bomb IPAs, and have found myself enjoying cheap watery pilsners more. I drink a lot of PBR completely unironically, and my favorite local "craft" beer is "Hilltop Lager" - which is sold in red and white tall cans clearly designed to ape the PBR look and feel a little bit.
I don't know that this is a counterpoint to TFA really, but I wonder if some degree of folks just getting sick of the craft beer craze could be a confounding factor.
If you had assets during the pandemic you got many good gifts, some once in a lifetime (those 1.95% mortgages).
If you didn't have assets, you got a check for $2000.
It really cannot be overstated enough the wealth divide that pandemic QE created. The way things are you have to inflate assets by $100 for $1 to make it down to poverty level hands.
I was watching a Robert Kiyosaki talk with some podcast recently where he mentioned investing in Wagyu beef ranches I think. And he said something to the effect that the poor will stop buying hamburger, but the rich will suck the additional costs because they essentially are not stoic enough to go without was the vibe of his claim. So pretty much the division of essential and non-essential curves differently for different classes is how it sounds.
This is just not true. The real wages and wealth of those the the 10th to 98th percentiles of income have all grown since the period prior to the financial crisis. The real wages of those in the 10th-20th percentile have grown the most.
Maybe I'm an outlier but the more high end beer/alcohol I buy, the more sub-premium beer I buy as well. That is buying more sub-premium means I've gotten richer.
I'll have a nice mezcal with a shitty bud light or whatever afterwards. If I don't have a high end drink then that's when I'll have something middle of the road like a local affordable craft or something and since it's affordable I don't need to buy a sub-premium beer to finish off the night.
Could it be people have just discovered better alcohol and are drinking that for the taste and then the budget stuff for the buzz? The masses may have discovered it's kind of an optimal strategy.
My two cents - a lot of "crappy" beers are honestly pretty good, and a lot of trendy Hazy SpaceDust Double IPAs or Coffee Imperial Stouts brewed in Bourbon Casks just suck.
A simple Hamm's, Miller High Life, Modelo Negra, or Coors Banquet is pretty tastey, inoffensive, and great bang for your buck.
Also, a lot of beer snobbyists have now transitioned into Bourbon (f** taters for making it impossible to get Buffalo Trace at an affordable price), so that's also playing a role
> It’s yet another indicator of our bizarro economy, where frivolous goods like air fryers are cheap but staples like eggs and meat are increasingly unaffordable.
An air fryer is no more frivolous than a toaster. We use ours as our toaster, toaster oven, and convection oven. It's incredibly useful.
Perhaps "frivolous" is the wrong word. But the effect he discribes in the linked article is a backwards pricing relationship between necessities (food, rent, housing) and non-necessities (TVs, air-fryers, etc.). This is possibly an example of Giffen Goods in effect [1]. Where as the price of an inferior good increases (ex. bread), poorer families are forced to buy more of that product and forgo more expensive alternatives (ex. steak or TVs).
Interesting. My experience with air fryers has been that it doesn't do anything in particular any better than other appliances and those other appliances are more capable than the air fryer.
Big weekend roast? Nope. Make more than just two slices of toast? Nope. Reheat leftovers (other than fried junk food) without drying it out? Nope.
Weed is also much cheaper than beer in many states. I'm an almost daily smoker and a years supply costs me less than $300. Meanwhile when I was drinking more I would easily spend $100 a month on alcohol without even going to bars or restaurants. Makes a lot of sense to substitute in the face of budget tightening.
There's weed/gummies, but also liquor and wine. And, with all the negatives around alcohol become more and more known, I think people just drink less. If someone is going to have 1 drink, they are probably more likely to have it be something better.
How are alcohol and weed alternatives to each other at all?
Maybe every now and then you hear about people who don't smoke weed anymore because it makes them anxious or people who don't drink anymore because they "hate alcoholics", but I think they're firmly in the minority.
I don't think it really has anything to do with the economy. It is changing tastes. Craft beer imploded by moving more and more to just silver cans with pretty stickers. All being "Hazy juicy IPAs". Seltzers were a refreshing change on this, but they get boring after a while.
In countries other than the USA (IE UK) "alcopops" which are bottled mixed drinks have always been very popular. In the USA we have a mesh of state and taxation issues with selling a pure mixed drink in a bottle that they end up becoming "malt beverages" which are essentially crappy approximations.
The latest trend in Gen Z is "Borgs" where people have some cocktail concoction in a jug. Beer is out of favor with younger people and has been for a while. The seltzer crowd went straight to Borg.
Beer prices have also skyrocketed (as mentioned in the article) which has further pushed the younger generation away from beer. Craft beer is the most approachable in my opinion as there are many styles or variants that "don't taste like beer", at least for my friend group in college it was easiest to get people into beer with fruited sours or barrel aged stouts.
In a strange way beer is headed toward becoming an elitist beverage given the cost.
What happens when you underpay and under-invest in people from cradle to grave: they don't start families, they aren't happy, aren't employed, aren't buying things, and don't have much to celebrate. Instead, it's budget booze and handles of Gallo.
What are you making that saves money? When I half-assed got into it (hasn't everyone, at least once?) it became obvious fast that even if I scaled up enough (including significant capital investment) that it wasn't more expensive than equivalently-good commercial beer, it'd only take a failed batch every two or three years to wipe out the savings, even valuing my time at $0/hr.
I've considered getting back into it to make mead and maybe cider, but mostly just because mead's expensive (here) and really good cider is usually imported and marked up like 4x what it would be back where it came from, which is usually England or northern France (back there, it's cheap—though I do doubt I can match theirs without turning it into a high-time-commitment hobby, since the method is part of what makes theirs so good, plus I'd have to find a source of the right kinds of apples), but the economics for beer didn't even come close to working out. Fruit and honey can also be fermented without some of the steps & equipment you need for beer, which helps a ton.
We used to drink $5 suitcases of Black Label in college. So much Black Label. Black Label all the damn time. We’d also drink whiskey because who the hell can drunk on Black Label.
I always appreciated good quality English, German, Belgian, and local micro brew.
But something horrible happened. The corner store which used to have a few 500ml bottles of German beer, an Orval, and a Sam Smiths restocked into a wall of brightly colored IPAs and Seltzers.
All of these me toos are so unnecessary. If you are on the West Coast it is the annual run on Pliny the Younger. Find it on tap, enjoy it. If you miss it, just pick up a Pliny. Its the only IPA i’ll buy.
So beer should not cost double digits. Find your local deal and buy it. In San Francisco corner stores have Trumer for cheap. In Texas every HEB has Shiner.
Beer to me is better water. I don’t agonize of Citra hops. I just drink it.
The analysis in this article that "crappy beer" demand is increasing is wrong. The chart says that "An index of 50+ in a segment means volumes in that segment are expanding and an index below 50 indicates that volumes in that segment are contracting." The below premium segment went from 38 to 48, so volumes are still contracting, just slower than before. The import segment is the only one with increasing volume.
This is me. High Life is now my go-to. I guess the hop-bombs and the trending flavor-blast-du-jour that craft beer descended into just wore me out. And $0.50/can vs $2.50/can sure doesn't hurt.
It is curious that e.g. Augsburger beer disappeared from local shelves about 25 years ago, and that I haven't seen Ballantine XXX or IPA in a while. But I gather that they are still out there.
Haha. My Chem major roommate and I used to do this in college while hosting house parties. We'd do 3 rounds of filtration using a Britta purifier with Popov Vodka and fill up a sanitized Ketel One bottle with the result.
Popov, Smirnoff, and Ketel One are all owned by Diaego PLC and due to Federal regulations, all vodka is almost basically the same - excluding filtration of course.
[+] [-] version_five|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yamtaddle|3 years ago|reply
From my perspective it's not so much that I stopped buying mid-tier beer, as that it vanished and isn't there to buy anymore. Now I look at a $12 4-pack of beer that's not even that good and wonder if I should put the money toward a very-nice scotch instead....
I still buy from a few brands that I know well and that do deliver good quality at non-crazy prices, but there just aren't as many "yeah, sure, at that price I'll give it a shot" beers on the shelf. At least locally.
[+] [-] agentwiggles|3 years ago|reply
I don't know that this is a counterpoint to TFA really, but I wonder if some degree of folks just getting sick of the craft beer craze could be a confounding factor.
[+] [-] Workaccount2|3 years ago|reply
If you didn't have assets, you got a check for $2000.
It really cannot be overstated enough the wealth divide that pandemic QE created. The way things are you have to inflate assets by $100 for $1 to make it down to poverty level hands.
[+] [-] jxramos|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xadhominemx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notch898a|3 years ago|reply
I'll have a nice mezcal with a shitty bud light or whatever afterwards. If I don't have a high end drink then that's when I'll have something middle of the road like a local affordable craft or something and since it's affordable I don't need to buy a sub-premium beer to finish off the night.
Could it be people have just discovered better alcohol and are drinking that for the taste and then the budget stuff for the buzz? The masses may have discovered it's kind of an optimal strategy.
[+] [-] alephnerd|3 years ago|reply
A simple Hamm's, Miller High Life, Modelo Negra, or Coors Banquet is pretty tastey, inoffensive, and great bang for your buck.
Also, a lot of beer snobbyists have now transitioned into Bourbon (f** taters for making it impossible to get Buffalo Trace at an affordable price), so that's also playing a role
[+] [-] themanmaran|3 years ago|reply
Compound adjectives are not great in article titles.
[+] [-] danans|3 years ago|reply
An air fryer is no more frivolous than a toaster. We use ours as our toaster, toaster oven, and convection oven. It's incredibly useful.
[+] [-] themanmaran|3 years ago|reply
Price change over 2022 [2]
> Smartphones, 23.4% cheaper.
> Televisions, 17.9% cheaper.
> Bread, 16.2% more expensive.
> Eggs, 59.6% more expensive.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good [2] https://www.freightwaves.com/news/bizarro-inflation-is-makin...
[+] [-] sublinear|3 years ago|reply
Big weekend roast? Nope. Make more than just two slices of toast? Nope. Reheat leftovers (other than fried junk food) without drying it out? Nope.
[+] [-] yamtaddle|3 years ago|reply
Opens article
cmd-f weed, 0 results
cmd-f canna, 0 results
cmd-f marij, 0 results
Hm. Nope.
[+] [-] ryeights|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HDThoreaun|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matwood|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sublinear|3 years ago|reply
Maybe every now and then you hear about people who don't smoke weed anymore because it makes them anxious or people who don't drink anymore because they "hate alcoholics", but I think they're firmly in the minority.
[+] [-] specialp|3 years ago|reply
In countries other than the USA (IE UK) "alcopops" which are bottled mixed drinks have always been very popular. In the USA we have a mesh of state and taxation issues with selling a pure mixed drink in a bottle that they end up becoming "malt beverages" which are essentially crappy approximations.
The latest trend in Gen Z is "Borgs" where people have some cocktail concoction in a jug. Beer is out of favor with younger people and has been for a while. The seltzer crowd went straight to Borg.
[+] [-] gwill|3 years ago|reply
In a strange way beer is headed toward becoming an elitist beverage given the cost.
[+] [-] sacnoradhq|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giantg2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yamtaddle|3 years ago|reply
I've considered getting back into it to make mead and maybe cider, but mostly just because mead's expensive (here) and really good cider is usually imported and marked up like 4x what it would be back where it came from, which is usually England or northern France (back there, it's cheap—though I do doubt I can match theirs without turning it into a high-time-commitment hobby, since the method is part of what makes theirs so good, plus I'd have to find a source of the right kinds of apples), but the economics for beer didn't even come close to working out. Fruit and honey can also be fermented without some of the steps & equipment you need for beer, which helps a ton.
[+] [-] nunez|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisdhoover|3 years ago|reply
I always appreciated good quality English, German, Belgian, and local micro brew.
But something horrible happened. The corner store which used to have a few 500ml bottles of German beer, an Orval, and a Sam Smiths restocked into a wall of brightly colored IPAs and Seltzers.
All of these me toos are so unnecessary. If you are on the West Coast it is the annual run on Pliny the Younger. Find it on tap, enjoy it. If you miss it, just pick up a Pliny. Its the only IPA i’ll buy.
So beer should not cost double digits. Find your local deal and buy it. In San Francisco corner stores have Trumer for cheap. In Texas every HEB has Shiner.
Beer to me is better water. I don’t agonize of Citra hops. I just drink it.
[+] [-] DrSteveBrule|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kon-Peki|3 years ago|reply
Everything is fine. People are just celebrating more: sales of the champagne of beers is increasing.
[+] [-] tillinghast|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pwenzel|3 years ago|reply
https://www.statista.com/statistics/611714/marijuana-use-dur...
[+] [-] solarmist|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jun8|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cafard|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1970-01-01|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alephnerd|3 years ago|reply
Popov, Smirnoff, and Ketel One are all owned by Diaego PLC and due to Federal regulations, all vodka is almost basically the same - excluding filtration of course.
[+] [-] 1A--__--__--1A|3 years ago|reply