Informal observers is perhaps excused for considering we’re dwelling by way of the craft beer finish occasions. Nearly each main story in regards to the beer business within the final 5 years has been of the doom n’ gloom selection: a painful interval of bursting bubbles and diminished reputation, declining manufacturing, and main closures. Tales of the doom loop elevated in earnest by 2023, across the similar time the beer business itself started confronting the dimensions of the challenges forward. From lauded publications shutting right down to main cashed-up manufacturers falling into consolidation, the information has gone from dangerous to worse with no signal of stopping. Right here in 2026 the onslaught continues, because the implosion of Brewdog made worldwide headlines. You’d be forgiven for considering that an extinction-level occasion threatens the very survival of craft beer itself.
And but, on this Robespierre second of public executions and recriminations, I’ve discovered myself unexpectedly drawn again into the surviving nodes of craft beer tradition in America. A few of that is millennial nostalgia, and my very own intractable need to reengage with the issues I discovered cool in my 20s now that I’m very a lot not in my 20s. However after the hype has light, now that the discharge traces have died down and the hazy bros have moved on to trendier pastures, craft beer tradition in America appears to be like extra like the way it did 20 years in the past: rooms filled with fascinating and eccentric individuals, consuming stuff as a result of they prefer it and suppose it tastes good.
“General way more individuals are conscious as we speak of craft beer than 10 or 20 years in the past. And it’s important to depend that as a win.”
At any given second in America there’s an ambient consuming fad. Cosmos within the ’90s, PBR within the naughty aughties, temporary vogues for novelty cocktails just like the Espresso Martini or the Negroni Sbagliato, and the pure wine craze, now very a lot in decline.
Craft beer’s cultural suzerainty peaked someplace within the late 2010s with the explosive development of sub-trends just like the hazy IPA and the pastry stout. Breweries like Different Half, the seminal Brooklyn taphouse based in 2014, burst onto the scene with three-hour launch traces and frothy media protection. By 2017 they’d been declared “the official beer of finance bros,” a hilarious idea in 2026—as we speak’s finance bros care way more about what they’re sporting than who they’re consuming.
However Different Half has come out of the opposite facet of those cultural waves with a transparent head, and a path ahead. “I are typically optimistic about the place beer is heading,” says Sam Richardson, one of many co-founders. “That is removed from the primary time craft beer has had a dip. And I feel it’s beginning to lookup, and even inch barely ahead.” Richardson takes a refreshingly placid-casual longview of the scenario, one which takes under consideration the inevitable Sartrean arc of tendencies: from avant garde to mass adoption to mundanity and again once more.
Richardson and his compatriots at Different Half knew there was a shelf life to the road hype and hazy buzz, he tells me. “However general way more individuals are conscious as we speak of craft beer than 10 or 20 years in the past. And it’s important to depend that as a win.”
He has a degree. As soon as upon a time craft beer lovers longed for his or her chosen booze style to be taken significantly, to be given delight of place at high quality eating places and to be extra available. I feel it’s secure to say this has occurred in lots of, if not most mid-and-major conurbations throughout america: I can drink nice beer all over the place in locations like Portland and Brooklyn (no large shocker), but additionally in much less paroxysmally stylish locales. I lived in Pittsburgh for a misplaced yr within the early aughts, when it was nonetheless the dominion of Iron Metropolis; as we speak it’s a craft beer wonderland on par with any megalopolis, and an identical story might be advised in locations like Spokane and Grand Rapids, Wichita and Macon, Reno and Ronkonkoma. Craft beer exploded in reputation, and although the retraction was inevitable, the excessive water mark it left has basically modified how we drink in America in cities massive and small. In some ways, craft beer received.
“Now that issues have slowed down, it’s extra in regards to the communal side of beer tradition.”
The primary place I ever liked beer—the primary place I ever liked any beverage—was at a bottle store in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood referred to as Bottleworks. It’s been open since 1999; I used to be by way of the doorways a couple of years later, introduced alongside by dudes I met in school a couple of years older than me who had recruited me to play bass of their band. They thought craft beer was cool; it had by no means occurred to me that any type of alcohol may very well be cool within the first place past its intoxicant properties. Someplace within the digital ether, misplaced to the nice Myspace server glitch of 2019, there’s a photograph of me acting at a home present in maybe 2004 or 2005, with a bottle of Gulden Draak perched perilously atop my amplifier.
“5 – 6 years in the past the hype was simply loopy,” says Harrison Riddell, who helps run Bottleworks as we speak because the store’s supervisor and jack of all invoices. “It’s not almost as loopy now.” The road for brand spanking new beer releases not runs 300 deep, and customers are hardly ever restricted to the previous “1 per particular person” insurance policies that dominated the bubble period. However what stays is a tradition of beer drinkers that’s maybe slower and extra measured, but additionally conversely extra considerate and significant.
Bottleworks has a deep cellar, and its cabinets are usually stocked with cult stouts and classic barleywines from revered craft breweries (together with a number of dearly departed entities), alongside aged imported lambics and gueuzes from Belgium. The post-bubble milieu for beer drinkers is frankly extra discerning. “Individuals as we speak are far more keen to take a seat down and speak about beer,” Riddell tells me. “When gross sales went by way of the roof, we have been having bother maintaining with orders. Now that issues have slowed down, it’s extra in regards to the communal side of beer tradition. I feel that performs into survival, not only for the breweries however for us as a bottleshop.”
I write about each form of drink—cocktails and whiskey and rhum and Scotch and wine and mezcal and mineral water and N/A beer and espresso and so forth—however for no matter purpose, craft beer has jumped up and grabbed me unexpectedly once more right here in 2026. I’ve began going again into Bottleworks each time I’m in Seattle, and spending extra time within the nice surviving beer hubs wherever I journey: Toronado in San Francisco, Brouwerij Lane in Brooklyn, The Beer Temple in Chicago, and spots in Portland (the place I stay) like Beer Mongers, Belmont Station, and the mighty Horse Brass Pub, which has been a hub for the craft beer scene each home and worldwide for the reason that late Nineteen Seventies. I really like these locations, however I particularly love these locations now that the proverbial celebration bus has left, and the regulars can go searching, exhale, and return to having fun with their favourite spot now that every one the assholes are gone.
“I really get pleasure from craft beer way more now that it’s decidedly, avowedly not cool.”
It might be inaccurate, or on the very least disingenuous, to assert that these surviving hubs are one way or the other a font of craft beer’s reemerging cool. They appear to be usually patronized by individuals who don’t care remotely about whether or not or not what they’re consuming is cool within the first place, and look like immune (or a minimum of profoundly bored and disinterested) within the prevailing postmodern calls for of no matter passes for stylish in 2026. There’s normally a Sierra Nevada on draft, or a Russian River launch, or some bottled Orval in one of many coolers. God, is it refreshing—a mindfully guarded bulwark of style and care saved alight in our prevailing soulless more and more AI-dependent slop society. It’s the identical feeling I get once I go to true blue cocktail bars, the type of locations that blew up within the midst of the suspender-y “speakeasy” development (shh! hold your voice down!) and have saved at it now all the identical, because the cutting-edge work they pioneered has achieved extra widespread acceptance.
I feel the millennial nostalgia of all of it, the “after the gold rush” milieu wherein craft beer now operates, could sometime work profoundly in the direction of the style’s profit. A latest viral TikTok development facilities “millennial optimism,” a form of fetishing the final, last period in public life earlier than the monoculture collapsed, and all of us change into functionally perma-addicted to our telephones. The nice Ladies rewatch continues to development; I by no means watched it, however between the craft beer and the third wave espresso retailers, I lived a form of model in actual time.
Fifteen years later, craft beer has come out and in by way of the trying glass, and as we speak I really get pleasure from craft beer way more now that it’s decidedly, avowedly not cool. I don’t suppose that is simply because I want I have been 25 once more—a minimum of not utterly—and I’m excited for extra individuals to recollect what they could have left behind of their previous about what makes craft beer scrumptious and fascinating to start with, post-hype. “The nice dream isn’t to make a beer that panders to Gen Z,” says Different Half’s Richardson. “The nice dream is to maintain making nice beer for the subsequent technology to find. I’ve optimism. I feel individuals will come again round.”
