7 ms·

What crappy beer demand tells us about the economy

version_five 4y ago
The important part is at the end: 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.
- notch898a 4y ago
  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.
  - Domenic_S 4y ago
    It's a strategy that's endured thru the millennia: John 2:10 > “A host always serves the best wine first,” he said. “Then, when everyone has had a lot to drink, he brings out the less expensive wine..."
    - version_five 4y ago
      Good advice, but If I understood that passage they all just got a bunch of free wine though
      - dylan604 4y ago
        it was all free to the guests. the passage was in response to how good the miracle wine was to have tasted. it was the end of the night when they were running out of wine, so the expectation would be that they had already long finished off the good stuff. but here they are bringing out the best wine at the end of the shindig.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    when you see someone walking out of the store with a 30 pack of Keystone, you know they are not drinking for the taste.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      "Schaefer is the one beer to have when you're having more than one." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRecWSp4VFg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRecWSp4VFg
      - red-iron-pine 4y ago
        More than 6
      - paulmd 4y ago
        kirkland light: it's 11am somewhere! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHRNzj_G7Us https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHRNzj_G7Us
        sokoloff 4y ago
        “Available in 48 packs where you buy your paint!”
    - DontchaKnowit 4y ago
      I'd drink keystone over like half the garbage craft beers or like a budweiser any day
    - alephnerd 4y ago
      Ehn, it's just Coors Light in a separate can. And I can confirm that due to unscientific experiments of mine while in college. Same with Natty Light btw - that's just Bud Light.
      - dylan604 4y ago
        it's more about the fact there's 30
  - gwbas1c 4y ago
    I don't know about you, but I've always known "joe six-pack" to be pretty price conscious. Then again, as others in this thread have pointed out; the market is rather saturated with gross $12 4-packs. I've been suckered by a few.
- jxramos 4y ago
  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.
  - atlasunshrugged 4y ago
    I don't have enough money to be investing in Wagyu beef ranches but I agree with that (especially if they really get cell based meat going, but even without just based on regs and consumer behavior RE animal cruelty). Eventually it'll be just premium meats vs... tbd (plant replacements, bugs, cell based meat off an assembly line)
  - version_five 4y ago
    The conclusion makes sense though I'm not sure it being a question of a kind of stoicism. From personal experience, if you have money, costs go up, and you get angry you're spending more, but you can afford it so you suck it up and pay (ironically, a bit stoic). If you literally don't have the money, you have no choice but to change your behavior, so you go without.
  - jerlam 4y ago
    Funny you brought up Kiyosaki (Rich Dad, Poor Dad author) since one of the lessons in the book was - the rich (wealth accumulators) are smart enough to not spend their money on luxuries such as expensive new cars, and presumably high-end craft beers.
    - kmoser 4y ago
      If the rich aren't buying expensive new cars (e.g. Rolls Royce?), who is? Certainly not the rest of us.
      - imtringued 4y ago
- agentwiggles 4y ago
  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.
  - thedaveoflife 4y ago
    I like the taste of IPAs but can't stand the hangovers if i have more than one
    - maxerickson 4y ago
      If you grind your teeth/clench your jaw during sleep, consider trying a bite guard. No more headaches for me. (I got one when I had a couple nasty headaches during a period I didn't drink for a few months. I knew from my dentist I ground my teeth but that was what pushed me over the edge.)
    - jhbadger 4y ago
      It's popular for some reason for IPAs to have high alcohol (like 7% or higher), but there's been a recent trend in IPAs (and other styles) for "session" beers that have more normal ~5% levels. I know it's just a few percent, but I find two or three pints of a lower alcohol beer leave me feeling much better than the higher ones.
      - boredtofears 4y ago
        This is where I'm at. Pale Ales or Session IPA's both have lower calorie and lower ABV. Toppling Goliath's Psuedo Sue is fantastic. It's not cheap though.
      - TrueSlacker0 4y ago
- Workaccount2 4y ago
  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 $1 to make it down to poverty level hands.
  - acuozzo 4y ago
    > It really cannot be overstated enough the wealth divide that pandemic QE created. :s/\<created\>\.$/exacerbated./ The underlying causes go back further than Roger & Me.
  - Gibbon1 4y ago
    Last two years the increase in equity in my house and my retirement savings exceeds my income over the last ten. I got that for doing absolutely nothing.
  - jollyllama 4y ago
    Some of us got neither
  - bailoon 4y ago
    > If you had assets during the pandemic you got many good gifts, some once in a lifetime (those 1.95% mortgages). Exactly. Real estate doubled, tripled. Stock prices skyrocketed. Established stocks like Apple triple during the pandemic. It's mindboggling. That's after 12 years of continuous growth after the 2008 recession. Going off of assets, the past 15 years has been the greatest economic boom in human history.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  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.
  - tvanantwerp 4y ago
    I've had this same experience. Every time I go to my local specialty beer shops, it's nothing but 4-packs that _start_ at $16. I've never even heard of most of them, and a large portion are just the really over-done trendy IPAs that every brand new brewery seems eager to produce. Maybe 20% or less of their offerings are what I'd call a solid mid-range 6-pack of beer.
  - 88913527 4y ago
    Local markets vary, but I regularly see ~$1/bottle as a promotion price for "mid-tier" (aka premium) beers, or to give examples of brands: Corona, Stella, etc. (I'm not talking about stuff like PBR here). These mid-tier's can be had for $11.99 12-pack, 12 fl oz. The non-promotion price is closer to $18. Both the promotional price and not-on-sale price began noticeably ticking upwards in January. I haven't bothered with crafts unless I can get it on tap when I'm out. Paying craft prices for at-home enjoyment isn't the right value proposition for me.
  - maxerickson 4y ago
    Bells and New Belgium six packs are $10-$12 here, a long with a bunch of similarly priced stuff from smaller regional breweries. Are they not mid tier?
    - stcroixx 4y ago
      There are more rare and expensive beers, but Bells is absolutely top tier quality for me.
- xadhominemx 4y ago
  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.
  - ccooffee 4y ago
    Do you have a preferred source for this? I went down a rabbit-hole of googling and trying to evaluate how reliable the sources were and got pretty lost. I found several articles claiming to use data from the US Federal Reserve with conflicting interpretations.
  - boc 4y ago
    Yeah but it feels true, which is almost good enough. It’s just like everyone who knows a recession is just around the corner. Hard to support with evidence but it’s the vibe du jour.
  - tenebrisalietum 4y ago
    Prices have also increased?
giantg2 4y ago
You'll know the economy is really bad when people brew their own. I make most of my own alcohol and it saves a lot of money.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  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.
  - chelmzy 4y ago
    I just always have 5 gal of apple wine going. Apple juice, sugar, and EC118 are cheap and produce something that tastes good. Just throw it in a carboy with air lock and in 2 weeks you are done.
    - adversaryIdiot 4y ago
      This is how me and my underage roommates did it in college :-) It was super cheap after the initial investment. Pretty sure we used a home depot bucket lol.
  - TrueSlacker0 4y ago
    Depending where you buy your beer ingredients a very basic 5 gallon batch of 5.2%ABV blonde/pale ale (10lbs 2 row, 2oz of hops, dry yeast), would be around $0.55/12oz pour for someone in the us (priced from morebeer). Of course $0/hr for labor. It would be very easy to lower those costs 20%+ buying a slightly more bulk amount, or buying the grain from your local brewery. On the equipment side you can go all out and get a setup for $1-2k or go super basic for a few hundred dollars. Wine is even cheaper and easier. Most wine kits come out to be around $3/per bottle. And only need about $100 in equipment.
1A--__--__--1A 4y ago
It's one of the cheaper form of relaxation after a hard days of work.
yamtaddle 4y ago
I mean... have they considered one possibility? Opens article cmd-f weed, 0 results cmd-f canna, 0 results cmd-f marij, 0 results Hm. Nope.
- matwood 4y ago
  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.
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  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 $100 a month on alcohol without even going to bars or restaurants. Makes a lot of sense to substitute in the face of budget tightening.
  - calvinmorrison 4y ago
    Let's see... my household gets roughly 3 cases of beer per month. Last price I paid was 16.52 for a case of Genny Light. All in, my beer costs around ~600 per year. Not to bad.
    - Retric 4y ago
      This is a little outdated but in 2019 a case is 15.20$ to 31.21$ from state to state, and cities can bump that even further. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/01/how-much-a-case-of-beer-costs-in-every-us-state.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/01/how-much-a-case-of-beer-cost...
      - calvinmorrison 4y ago
        For sure, I buy the cheapest case possible
  - 4y ago
danans 4y ago
> 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.
- themanmaran 4y ago
  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). 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good [2] https://www.freightwaves.com/news/bizarro-inflation-is-making-random-stuff-cheap-and-necessities-unaffordable https://www.freightwaves.com/news/bizarro-inflation-is-makin...
  - jxramos 4y ago
    I'd think that was a function of supply and demand to a large extent, people can forgo non-necessities and therefore the demand drops and the price follows that. For necessities not so much.
  - danans 4y ago
    > 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.). That makes sense. But I also think there are simpler explanations, which is that smartphones and TVs are sectors where a lot of effort continues to go into automation and price reduction, and there are still lots of gains to be made there. Those products are also not fundamentally energy-input sensitive - if anything, newer production methods tend to use less energy than previous production methods. Food production is extremely sensitive to energy and fertilizer prices, which have also gone up significantly. You have to keep a chicken at a particular temperature, or it won't lay eggs. And also, food has just been very cheap for a long time, so it was already at high risk of price increases.
Kon-Peki 4y ago
> sumptuous nectars like Miller High Life. Everything is fine. People are just celebrating more: sales of the champagne of beers is increasing.
- tillinghast 4y ago
  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.
alephnerd 4y ago
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
- themanmaran 4y ago
  The article is not referencing "demand for crappy beer", but rather "crappy demand for beer". Compound adjectives are not great in article titles.
  - alephnerd 4y ago
    Whoops my bad. I thought I saw crappy beer when I posted. Still stand by my sentiments thought.
  - joegahona 4y ago
    I almost commented solely about the headline, but resisted. Indeed, while the article title is correct, hyphenation usage is so spotty among regular people that the chance of misreading the title is too high.
  - timerol 4y ago
    It's kinda both. From the article: > That explains why the “below premium” segment was the only one to see an increase in demand in January compared to January 2022, according to the National Beer Wholesalers Association’s Beer Purchasers’ Index.
1970-01-01 4y ago
You can reuse charcoal water filters to remove impurities in cheap booze like bottom shelf vodka and gin.
- alephnerd 4y ago
  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.
  - Eisenstein 4y ago
    It is all watered down industrially produced ethanol. Tito's puts theirs through a pot-still but its still the same corn ethanol created by some giant factory in the mid-west. If you want to make your own pot still you can take the bottom shelf vodka, run it through the still then dilute it back to 70% with distilled/RO/DI water and get a Grey Goose bottle from the recycling and keep refilling it. No one will ever be the wiser.
  - version_five 4y ago
    Is there anything to worry about the vodka pulling out of the filter, e.g. chemicals? This sounds like an interesting experiment, my (probably ignorant) concern would be that running the vodka though a filter designed for water may do something bad to it. Is it completely harmless?
    - alephnerd 4y ago
      My Chem major buddy said it was fine, but I'm not an accurate judge of that as someone who studied CS and PoliSci.
    - 1970-01-01 4y ago
      Removing impurities makes it slightly less bad for your body.
specialp 4y ago
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.
- gwill 4y ago
  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.
DrSteveBrule 4y ago
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.
pwenzel 4y ago
This is only conjecture, but could the increased legalization of cannabis in the United States lead to a change in alcohol sales? https://www.statista.com/statistics/611714/marijuana-use-during-past-year-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/611714/marijuana-use-dur...
- solarmist 4y ago
  From what I’ve heard it’s true to an alarming degree for the alcohol industry, but it’s such a new thing there isn’t an agreed upon response yet.
  - khmii 4y ago
    [dead]
Jun8 4y ago
Complement this article with the one on NYT about beer ads during the Super Bowl this weekend: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/10/business/media/beer-ads-super-bowl.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/10/business/media/beer-ads-s...
chrisdhoover 4y ago
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.
cafard 4y ago
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.
sacnoradhq 4y ago
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.

The important part is at the end: 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.

notch898a 4y ago
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.
- Domenic_S 4y ago
  It's a strategy that's endured thru the millennia: John 2:10 > “A host always serves the best wine first,” he said. “Then, when everyone has had a lot to drink, he brings out the less expensive wine..."
  - version_five 4y ago
    Good advice, but If I understood that passage they all just got a bunch of free wine though
    - dylan604 4y ago
      it was all free to the guests. the passage was in response to how good the miracle wine was to have tasted. it was the end of the night when they were running out of wine, so the expectation would be that they had already long finished off the good stuff. but here they are bringing out the best wine at the end of the shindig.
- dylan604 4y ago
  when you see someone walking out of the store with a 30 pack of Keystone, you know they are not drinking for the taste.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    "Schaefer is the one beer to have when you're having more than one." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRecWSp4VFg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRecWSp4VFg
    - red-iron-pine 4y ago
      More than 6
    - paulmd 4y ago
      kirkland light: it's 11am somewhere! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHRNzj_G7Us https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHRNzj_G7Us
      - sokoloff 4y ago
        “Available in 48 packs where you buy your paint!”
  - DontchaKnowit 4y ago
    I'd drink keystone over like half the garbage craft beers or like a budweiser any day
  - alephnerd 4y ago
    Ehn, it's just Coors Light in a separate can. And I can confirm that due to unscientific experiments of mine while in college. Same with Natty Light btw - that's just Bud Light.
    - dylan604 4y ago
      it's more about the fact there's 30
- gwbas1c 4y ago
  I don't know about you, but I've always known "joe six-pack" to be pretty price conscious. Then again, as others in this thread have pointed out; the market is rather saturated with gross $12 4-packs. I've been suckered by a few.
jxramos 4y ago
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.
- atlasunshrugged 4y ago
  I don't have enough money to be investing in Wagyu beef ranches but I agree with that (especially if they really get cell based meat going, but even without just based on regs and consumer behavior RE animal cruelty). Eventually it'll be just premium meats vs... tbd (plant replacements, bugs, cell based meat off an assembly line)
- version_five 4y ago
  The conclusion makes sense though I'm not sure it being a question of a kind of stoicism. From personal experience, if you have money, costs go up, and you get angry you're spending more, but you can afford it so you suck it up and pay (ironically, a bit stoic). If you literally don't have the money, you have no choice but to change your behavior, so you go without.
- jerlam 4y ago
  Funny you brought up Kiyosaki (Rich Dad, Poor Dad author) since one of the lessons in the book was - the rich (wealth accumulators) are smart enough to not spend their money on luxuries such as expensive new cars, and presumably high-end craft beers.
  - kmoser 4y ago
    If the rich aren't buying expensive new cars (e.g. Rolls Royce?), who is? Certainly not the rest of us.
    - imtringued 4y ago
agentwiggles 4y ago
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.
- thedaveoflife 4y ago
  I like the taste of IPAs but can't stand the hangovers if i have more than one
  - maxerickson 4y ago
    If you grind your teeth/clench your jaw during sleep, consider trying a bite guard. No more headaches for me. (I got one when I had a couple nasty headaches during a period I didn't drink for a few months. I knew from my dentist I ground my teeth but that was what pushed me over the edge.)
  - jhbadger 4y ago
    It's popular for some reason for IPAs to have high alcohol (like 7% or higher), but there's been a recent trend in IPAs (and other styles) for "session" beers that have more normal ~5% levels. I know it's just a few percent, but I find two or three pints of a lower alcohol beer leave me feeling much better than the higher ones.
    - boredtofears 4y ago
      This is where I'm at. Pale Ales or Session IPA's both have lower calorie and lower ABV. Toppling Goliath's Psuedo Sue is fantastic. It's not cheap though.
    - TrueSlacker0 4y ago
Workaccount2 4y ago
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 $1 to make it down to poverty level hands.
- acuozzo 4y ago
  > It really cannot be overstated enough the wealth divide that pandemic QE created. :s/\<created\>\.$/exacerbated./ The underlying causes go back further than Roger & Me.
- Gibbon1 4y ago
  Last two years the increase in equity in my house and my retirement savings exceeds my income over the last ten. I got that for doing absolutely nothing.
- jollyllama 4y ago
  Some of us got neither
- bailoon 4y ago
  > If you had assets during the pandemic you got many good gifts, some once in a lifetime (those 1.95% mortgages). Exactly. Real estate doubled, tripled. Stock prices skyrocketed. Established stocks like Apple triple during the pandemic. It's mindboggling. That's after 12 years of continuous growth after the 2008 recession. Going off of assets, the past 15 years has been the greatest economic boom in human history.
yamtaddle 4y ago
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.
- tvanantwerp 4y ago
  I've had this same experience. Every time I go to my local specialty beer shops, it's nothing but 4-packs that _start_ at $16. I've never even heard of most of them, and a large portion are just the really over-done trendy IPAs that every brand new brewery seems eager to produce. Maybe 20% or less of their offerings are what I'd call a solid mid-range 6-pack of beer.
- 88913527 4y ago
  Local markets vary, but I regularly see ~$1/bottle as a promotion price for "mid-tier" (aka premium) beers, or to give examples of brands: Corona, Stella, etc. (I'm not talking about stuff like PBR here). These mid-tier's can be had for $11.99 12-pack, 12 fl oz. The non-promotion price is closer to $18. Both the promotional price and not-on-sale price began noticeably ticking upwards in January. I haven't bothered with crafts unless I can get it on tap when I'm out. Paying craft prices for at-home enjoyment isn't the right value proposition for me.
- maxerickson 4y ago
  Bells and New Belgium six packs are $10-$12 here, a long with a bunch of similarly priced stuff from smaller regional breweries. Are they not mid tier?
  - stcroixx 4y ago
    There are more rare and expensive beers, but Bells is absolutely top tier quality for me.
xadhominemx 4y ago
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.
- ccooffee 4y ago
  Do you have a preferred source for this? I went down a rabbit-hole of googling and trying to evaluate how reliable the sources were and got pretty lost. I found several articles claiming to use data from the US Federal Reserve with conflicting interpretations.
- boc 4y ago
  Yeah but it feels true, which is almost good enough. It’s just like everyone who knows a recession is just around the corner. Hard to support with evidence but it’s the vibe du jour.
- tenebrisalietum 4y ago
  Prices have also increased?

giantg2 4y ago

You'll know the economy is really bad when people brew their own. I make most of my own alcohol and it saves a lot of money.

yamtaddle 4y ago
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.
- chelmzy 4y ago
  I just always have 5 gal of apple wine going. Apple juice, sugar, and EC118 are cheap and produce something that tastes good. Just throw it in a carboy with air lock and in 2 weeks you are done.
  - adversaryIdiot 4y ago
    This is how me and my underage roommates did it in college :-) It was super cheap after the initial investment. Pretty sure we used a home depot bucket lol.
- TrueSlacker0 4y ago
  Depending where you buy your beer ingredients a very basic 5 gallon batch of 5.2%ABV blonde/pale ale (10lbs 2 row, 2oz of hops, dry yeast), would be around $0.55/12oz pour for someone in the us (priced from morebeer). Of course $0/hr for labor. It would be very easy to lower those costs 20%+ buying a slightly more bulk amount, or buying the grain from your local brewery. On the equipment side you can go all out and get a setup for $1-2k or go super basic for a few hundred dollars. Wine is even cheaper and easier. Most wine kits come out to be around $3/per bottle. And only need about $100 in equipment.

1A--__--__--1A 4y ago

It's one of the cheaper form of relaxation after a hard days of work.

yamtaddle 4y ago

I mean... have they considered one possibility? Opens article cmd-f weed, 0 results cmd-f canna, 0 results cmd-f marij, 0 results Hm. Nope.

matwood 4y ago
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.
HDThoreaun 4y ago
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 $100 a month on alcohol without even going to bars or restaurants. Makes a lot of sense to substitute in the face of budget tightening.
- calvinmorrison 4y ago
  Let's see... my household gets roughly 3 cases of beer per month. Last price I paid was 16.52 for a case of Genny Light. All in, my beer costs around ~600 per year. Not to bad.
  - Retric 4y ago
    This is a little outdated but in 2019 a case is 15.20$ to 31.21$ from state to state, and cities can bump that even further. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/01/how-much-a-case-of-beer-costs-in-every-us-state.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/01/how-much-a-case-of-beer-cost...
    - calvinmorrison 4y ago
      For sure, I buy the cheapest case possible
- 4y ago

danans 4y ago

> 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.

themanmaran 4y ago
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). 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good [2] https://www.freightwaves.com/news/bizarro-inflation-is-making-random-stuff-cheap-and-necessities-unaffordable https://www.freightwaves.com/news/bizarro-inflation-is-makin...
- jxramos 4y ago
  I'd think that was a function of supply and demand to a large extent, people can forgo non-necessities and therefore the demand drops and the price follows that. For necessities not so much.
- danans 4y ago
  > 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.). That makes sense. But I also think there are simpler explanations, which is that smartphones and TVs are sectors where a lot of effort continues to go into automation and price reduction, and there are still lots of gains to be made there. Those products are also not fundamentally energy-input sensitive - if anything, newer production methods tend to use less energy than previous production methods. Food production is extremely sensitive to energy and fertilizer prices, which have also gone up significantly. You have to keep a chicken at a particular temperature, or it won't lay eggs. And also, food has just been very cheap for a long time, so it was already at high risk of price increases.

Kon-Peki 4y ago

> sumptuous nectars like Miller High Life. Everything is fine. People are just celebrating more: sales of the champagne of beers is increasing.

tillinghast 4y ago
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.

alephnerd 4y ago

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

themanmaran 4y ago
The article is not referencing "demand for crappy beer", but rather "crappy demand for beer". Compound adjectives are not great in article titles.
- alephnerd 4y ago
  Whoops my bad. I thought I saw crappy beer when I posted. Still stand by my sentiments thought.
- joegahona 4y ago
  I almost commented solely about the headline, but resisted. Indeed, while the article title is correct, hyphenation usage is so spotty among regular people that the chance of misreading the title is too high.
- timerol 4y ago
  It's kinda both. From the article: > That explains why the “below premium” segment was the only one to see an increase in demand in January compared to January 2022, according to the National Beer Wholesalers Association’s Beer Purchasers’ Index.

1970-01-01 4y ago

You can reuse charcoal water filters to remove impurities in cheap booze like bottom shelf vodka and gin.

alephnerd 4y ago
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.
- Eisenstein 4y ago
  It is all watered down industrially produced ethanol. Tito's puts theirs through a pot-still but its still the same corn ethanol created by some giant factory in the mid-west. If you want to make your own pot still you can take the bottom shelf vodka, run it through the still then dilute it back to 70% with distilled/RO/DI water and get a Grey Goose bottle from the recycling and keep refilling it. No one will ever be the wiser.
- version_five 4y ago
  Is there anything to worry about the vodka pulling out of the filter, e.g. chemicals? This sounds like an interesting experiment, my (probably ignorant) concern would be that running the vodka though a filter designed for water may do something bad to it. Is it completely harmless?
  - alephnerd 4y ago
    My Chem major buddy said it was fine, but I'm not an accurate judge of that as someone who studied CS and PoliSci.
  - 1970-01-01 4y ago
    Removing impurities makes it slightly less bad for your body.

specialp 4y ago

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.

gwill 4y ago
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.

DrSteveBrule 4y ago

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.

pwenzel 4y ago

This is only conjecture, but could the increased legalization of cannabis in the United States lead to a change in alcohol sales? https://www.statista.com/statistics/611714/marijuana-use-during-past-year-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/611714/marijuana-use-dur...

solarmist 4y ago
From what I’ve heard it’s true to an alarming degree for the alcohol industry, but it’s such a new thing there isn’t an agreed upon response yet.
- khmii 4y ago
  [dead]

Jun8 4y ago

Complement this article with the one on NYT about beer ads during the Super Bowl this weekend: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/10/business/media/beer-ads-super-bowl.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/10/business/media/beer-ads-s...

chrisdhoover 4y ago

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.

cafard 4y ago

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.

sacnoradhq 4y ago

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.