> The market is SUPER trendy, and breweries have the choice of either jumping on the bandwagon of the style-du-jour or being left by the wayside. Because there are so many breweries and they are so young, the overall quality is just okay with maybe one beer being notable and the rest being slightly sub par. Then you have this issue of investment firms and bigger conglomerates buying up successful microbrews and sucking the life out of them.
If there's hope, and it's hard to see sometimes, it's that most of the trends are at most regional. It's more rare than not that one of these trends jumps coasts, for instance. Many of these trends seem to be truly localized, or at least move in waves. (Anecdotally, by the time my West Coast friends were talking about hazy IPAs/New England IPAs, the trend had already come and gone in Kentucky.) From the level of "everybody in my city is drinking the same thing" perspective it feels the same, but from a high level it mostly means that no big corporation is themselves dominating the trends, almost all of them look to be following the trends, lagging them quite a bit, and/or entirely missing them. Goose Island, to follow your example, is no longer seen as an innovator even if folks don't know the why is that they are a brand arm of A-B InBev (the international conglomerate owners of Budweiser, etc), and no longer "local" despite how much they pretend to be.
The last nationally distributed beer I can recall trending as a fad is the one mentioned in this article, Magic Hat #9, and as the article itself points out, it is possible to take comfort that in building that success model Magic Hat more accidentally burnt national distribution bridges behind them than pave the way for more conglomerates to follow (or even the shell of themselves owned by a conglomerate to continue to succeed at that level), all the while paving behind them communities more likely build locally, trend regionally at best.
If there's hope, and it's hard to see sometimes, it's that most of the trends are at most regional. It's more rare than not that one of these trends jumps coasts, for instance. Many of these trends seem to be truly localized, or at least move in waves. (Anecdotally, by the time my West Coast friends were talking about hazy IPAs/New England IPAs, the trend had already come and gone in Kentucky.) From the level of "everybody in my city is drinking the same thing" perspective it feels the same, but from a high level it mostly means that no big corporation is themselves dominating the trends, almost all of them look to be following the trends, lagging them quite a bit, and/or entirely missing them. Goose Island, to follow your example, is no longer seen as an innovator even if folks don't know the why is that they are a brand arm of A-B InBev (the international conglomerate owners of Budweiser, etc), and no longer "local" despite how much they pretend to be.
The last nationally distributed beer I can recall trending as a fad is the one mentioned in this article, Magic Hat #9, and as the article itself points out, it is possible to take comfort that in building that success model Magic Hat more accidentally burnt national distribution bridges behind them than pave the way for more conglomerates to follow (or even the shell of themselves owned by a conglomerate to continue to succeed at that level), all the while paving behind them communities more likely build locally, trend regionally at best.