What crappy beer demand tells us about the economy

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..."

when you see someone walking out of the store with a 30 pack of Keystone, you know they are not drinking for the taste.

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.

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)

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.

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.

I like the taste of IPAs but can't stand the hangovers if i have more than one

I’ve always like PBR & MGD (when I’m feeling more premium) and really dislike IPAs. It’s really nice to see local small brewers finally making their way into pilsners and lagers. I’ve had some really good ones that remind me of the Leinenkugel’s of yesteryear.

In the Phoenix area Huss and The Shop are knocking it out of the park with their lagers. Spotted Cow is still the best; even though it’s an ale, it drinks like a lager.

Similar place. I find over time I find I appreciate the lighter euro-lagers or pilsners most, and periodically some belgian non-trappist ales and german beers. Ales are heavier so I don't usually go for them, and "craft" beers generally disappointing.

Have shifted more to wine, but owing to being conscious of my health, I buy infrequently.

I'm in the same boat.

I got older so hangovers hurt more but there is definitely an over saturation of beers, brands, and bottles. I'm still loyal to some semi-premium brands when I can find them - but so many smaller breweries put out millions of different brands/flavors/types and I can't be bothered to make space in my brain to remember them (and I'm not interested in Untappd or similar to remind me of how bad my drinking habit is).

> I wonder if some degree of folks just getting sick of the craft beer craze could be a confounding factor.

Yup. I'm a (former) home brewer. I have quite a few friends who are current or former home brewers, too. We're all basically done with the craft beer trends at this point, preferring classic styles that are in the <= 5% ABV range.

> 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.

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.

Some of us got neither

> 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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Prices have also increased?

Whoops my bad. I thought I saw crappy beer when I posted. Still stand by my sentiments thought.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Perhaps the insight is that the average consumer is just reheating fried junk.

Check out the Pro Home Cooks YouTube Channel.

https://youtu.be/FXonFrCViJw

He has lots of good air fryer recipes.

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.

Idk what planet you're living on but every smoker I know spends closer to 300 a month on weed than 300 a year. Unless youre smoking like a single puff on a 1 hitter once a day, or unless you are getting insane deals on ganj, this makes absolutely no sense to me.

100 in a month on alcohol seems about right if youre an alcoholic (or if you're buying your drinks at a bar)

Liquor gets me drunker, faster, and usually with less calories. Beer and wine also have flavor profiles that, while broad, are still fairly specific. Liquor, OTOH, has a whole lot of options -- amaros, liqueurs, etc.

I never really liked the taste of beer all that much, but it's what everyone else drank, so it's what I drank.

I think that, over time, "people who don't like the taste of beer" are finding they are a silent majority. As more alcohol-but-not-beer options come to market, they keep buying those. I like Kombucha more than beer, now add slightly more alcohol and you have a suitable replacement.

Now imagine this process repeated across every imaginable beverage category that can be sold in stores, and the beer decline is easily explained.

If you want something mood-altering more than you want the flavor, how's it not? I know a lot of people who've shifted toward weed while reducing alcohol consumption (or even cut it out all-but entirely!) for health reasons—almost no empty calories (IDK maybe a low-two-digit count for gummies, tops, if you use edibles?), far less damage to your body (especially with edibles), usually way fewer problems with hang-overs, and sleep is significantly less-disrupted. A whole lot of what used to be 6-8 beer hang-outs for us have become 3-4 beer (plus weed) hang-outs.

I could be in a bubble there, sure, but if so I bet it's a pretty big bubble. I'm sure some people prefer an alcohol buzz to being a bit high, since they aren't exactly the same thing, but they're in the same ballpark, enough so that I expect plenty of people find them alternatives to one another.

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.

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.

I found it made more sense to brew 10 years ago. Back then craft brew wasn't as easy to find, so if I wanted something particular I'd have better luck making my own and sharing it with friends. Now I can go down to Whole Foods and have more options than I can fathom.

Cost-wise it just doesn't make much sense. A batch might be somewhat favorable in price for ingredients if you do all-grain, but if you factor in equipment cost and time cleaning up...

It depends on scale and stuff. Really fancy equipment can be a drag on any economy.

I have a 6 gallon stock pot for primary fermentation, or a large mash of beer ($30ish). I use a smaller kitchen pot for most of my batches of beer (1-2 gallons is a usual size for me). I use my grandparents old 3 gallon carboys and bottle capper. I also bought a used glass carboy 5gal for $20. Used beer bottles can be found for nothing through local Facebook groups and friends. I use screwtop wine bottles to save on cork costs. Gallon jugs are about $5 (you can also use these as carboys). So a low tech setup that can do 5gal batches can run less than $100. My initial setup was the stock pot ($30) and a 4pk of 1gal jugs ($20), and ballons ($2) for airlocks. That can give you enough room to make 3 gallons. A 5gal bucket and some strainer bags can be helpful depending on the recipes ($20ish).

Depending on the fruit wine I want to make, I can make it for between $3 and $15 per gallon at 18% ABV. Even for for beer, which admittedly can involve more equipment, I can make a case of NE IPA for about $16. That's probably about a third of the cost in the store.

The only additional beer equipment I have is a capper and a grain mill. The only reason I have the mill is that it was free. You can order your grain pre-milled.

And yes, I make mead, which as you said is where the real savings can come in. I also use my own honey so it's super cheap.

My wife got me one of those diy kits from northernbrewer for Christmas. I was able to produce almost 5 gallons of a perfectly drinkable IPA at 6-6.5%ABV with it. Five gallons is a LOT of beer. There isn't much labor to speak of, maybe 4 hrs total. You just have to be patient and wait, it took about 4 weeks for my batch to be ready.

I haven't worked it down to the penny but the initial kit is about $150 (which comes with a recipe kit) and then around $40-50 for additional recipe kits. On the other hand, my favorite beer, Manhatten Project Beer Co's Half Life, is pushing $12 for a 6 pack.

EDIT: if i just wanted to be inebriated though i'd probably just get THC gummies. That would be easiest and likely the most inebriation per unit money.

I've been tracking my costs for ~13 years. The cost here includes all equipment and ingredients over that time, including all of the unnecessary stuff that I bought for fun, like pH meters and titration gear.

  |-----------------+-------------------------------+--------|                                                                                                                                      
  |           Years |                               |  12.92 |                                                                                                                                      
  |          Liters |                               |  831.5 |                                                                                                                                      
  |         Bottles |                               |   2494 |                                                                                                                                      
  |      Cost (SEK) |                               |  35373 |                                                                                                                                      
  | Cost/year (SEK) |                               |   2738 |                                                                                                                                      
  |       SEK/liter |                               |  42.54 |                                                                                                                                      
  |      SEK/bottle |                               |  14.18 |                                                                                                                                      
  |      USD/bottle |                               |   1.38 |                                                                                                                                      
  |-----------------+-------------------------------+--------| 

It obviously matters what you brew and what you brew with. This is mostly pale ales and stouts. They certainly haven't all been great, but I've never dumped a batch, so there's no waste to account for.

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.

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?