PHILADELPHIA — As the economy struggles through a vibecession and the internet gets enshittified by vibecoding, the craft brewing industry has been grappling with an unfamiliar vibe of its own this week at its largest annual conference, too.
Is that… could it really be…?
It could be, and it was. Bona fide optimism was in the air during the 2026 Craft Brewers Conference, which concluded Wednesday evening in the City of Brotherly Love. Whether light is actually visible at the end of the tunnel… well, that depends on whom you asked, and where in the segment they are sitting. But if a proper comeback season cometh for craft beer, I suspect we’ll look back on the Brewers Association’s 42nd Craft Brewers Conference (CBC) in Philly as an equinox.
“My initial sense is that the vibe this year is very positive,” said Bart Watson, the president and chief executive of the Brewers Association, at a media breakfast Tuesday. It’s his job to say that, and to advocate for America’s ~9,600 small, independent brewers, which have been going through the ringer for much of the ’20s. But it was my initial sense, too, when I arrived at Love City Brewing Co. for a podcast recording hosted by Brewbound on the eve of CBC Sunday night and found it slammed. Having subsequently spoken to dozens of brewers and industry insiders over CBC’s newly abridged three-day stand in Philly, it’s also my lasting sense. And it’s certainly not my job to say that.
Nor is my mood the one that matters. To wit: This year’s CBC featured a keynote address from Will Guidara, the former co-owner of New York City’s fine-dining heavyweight Eleven Madison Park, who has since published the buzzy best-seller “Unreasonable Hospitality” and embraced a lucrative second act as a sort of Tony Robbins of restaurants. The restaurateur-turned-hospitality hypeman delivered ~45 minutes of remarks I found deeply corny, tossing off business-brained soundbites (e.g., “Raindrops make oceans,” “systematize graciousness”) and overly polished anecdotes of dubious utility to the median American craft brewery. But I’m not the intended audience for Guidara’s remarks, and over three days in Philly, I found exactly zero BA members with a bad word to say about the speech.
Good thing, too, because the booking was assuredly pricey. The BA declined to reveal how much they’d paid Guidara to take the stage Monday before he headed off to host his own $3,000-per-person conference at Nashville’s Four Seasons Hotel this week, citing the org’s policy and its agreement with him; his exclusive speakers bureau, VaynerSpeakers, told me the information was “confidential.” On its site, it lists his range at $75,000-$125,000 “based on factors like event date, location, and schedule.” After underwhelming keynotes like Uncle Nearest’s co-founder Fawn Weaver in 2024 (pre-receivership fiasco), and Trillium Brewing’s co-founders in 2025, though, perhaps Guidara’s “unreasonable” prosperity gospel was worth the beaucoup bucks.
Of course, good vibes alone do not move the wheels of industry, and there’s still plenty of rust on craft brewing’s bogies after some truly dismal post-pandemic years. In 2025, the BA measured the segment’s volume down another 5 percent from 2024, when it was down 4 percent. Some 481 closed, outpacing openings (300) for the second straight year. Underutilization, Watson said from the stage during his state-of-the-industry address Wednesday afternoon, continued to “haunt” the segment in 2025: The org estimated that nationwide, suppliers tapped 55 percent of America’s aggregate brewing capacity. That’s a slight improvement from last year, but still much lower than the 78-79 percent utilization rate in the overall food, beverage, and tobacco manufacturing sector last year, as measured by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
As Matt Roth, the chain account manager for Lawson’s Finest Liquids, put it in a presentation Wednesday with the BA’s economist Matt Gacioch, “Craft is tough right now, and there’s a lot of noise.” And the Vermont firm was up nearly 16 percent in the NIQ-tracked grocery channel last year. Even the victorious aren’t taking victory laps just yet.
Still, there are signs that the fever of craft brewing’s so-called “second shakeout” — an echo of the hangover the segment struggled through after the brown ale- and cheap debt-fueled bacchanal of the late ’90s — may soon break, if it hasn’t already. The BA offered an initial attendance projection of 7,000-8,000; the upper end of that range would put CBC 2026 more or less flat with the count last year in Indianapolis, rather than a continuation of the precipitous year-over-year slides the confab experienced earlier this decade. Some 1,644 breweries (-6.6 percent year-over-year) in 50 countries (+2 percent) entered 8,166 beers (-2.5 percent) in the conference’s tandem World Beer Cup competition for its 30th go-round, which took place amid the Trump administration’s dismal and damaging trade war.
After all the corporate horsetrading, “total beverage” pivots, and definitional carveouts of the past 15 years, the BA is not as precise a bellwether for the consumer-facing segment as it once was. But it’s true, as Watson said Tuesday, “when our members are struggling financially, we’re going to have more financial challenges.” It certainly has: In 2025, the BA’s revenues fell by 24.6 percent, outpacing its 22.4 percent reduction for its second straight year running at a deficit north of $2 million. As its members find their footing, the BA is trying to do likewise, so stopping the bleeding at CBC — one of its most important revenue-driving events — is both symbolically and strategically important. Early indicators suggest it’s already made progress on that triage in 2026. Desperation being a stinky cologne, I’d guess Watson and the BA’s board are breathing just a bit easier after this week.
Of course, there’s more than one way to lighten a mood. You can try cheering up the poopers at your party, or hope they head for the door. Survivorship bias dictates that the brewers that made it to CBC 2026 are likely to seem the most bullish; after all, if they weren’t, they may have stayed home to save money and manpower. At the risk of sounding indelicate here, I also suspect that the segment’s years of closures have helped cull the herd of both excess numbers and outsized negativity. A dying brewery can only die once, after all, and with outfits that were never built for this market getting pushed out of it, those that remain stand to benefit from more focus and less vicarious angst.
Still, there are some signs that conditions are improving as such. Off-premise scanner snapshots through the first quarter of 2026 have contained less red, and occasionally even smidges of black. Upstart independent outfits are bringing fresh energy and new ideas to a full-flavored beer segment that has desperately needed it. Brands like Garage Beer and Outlaw Light — brewed under contract with Founders Brewing, and by Tivoli Brewing, respectively — are suddenly doing serious volume in non-macro light lager. The fact that those firms are often positioned outside the craft-beer cohort at retail may present an organizing challenge for the BA, but Watson appeared nonplussed when Beer Business Daily’s Jordan Driggers raised the matter on Tuesday. “How consumers think about craft has long diverged from how we talk about our membership,” the BA honcho said with a shrug.
No less encouraging, older and more doctrinaire firms atop the volume charts are finally learning new tricks. Dogfish Head Brewery’s co-founder Sam Calagione was riding high in Philly on the strength of the Boston Beer Company subsidiary’s 2025 return to growth, powered in no small part by its improbably successful partnership with the Grateful Dead. “Twenty years ago, I was worried about becoming the ‘60 Minute’ brewery,” he told me at an event Dogfish Head hosted with Philly’s Second District Brewing Monday night. Calagione and company have the opposite issue these days: The iconic India Pale Ale has been overshadowed by younger, hotter Dogfish growth brands. A good problem to have, that.
Or take Deschutes Brewery, the first-wave pioneer from the Pacific Northwest. After shedding 11 percent of its volume in 2024, it came bounding back in 2025 with its truly terrific Costco collaboration, a better approach for its Fresh Squeezed brand family, and its slow-and-steady serviceable nonalcoholic line. The firm — founded way back in 1988 — took CBC as an opportunity to debut its new-ish Party Bomb line at a party with its hotshot marketing agency, Countermeasures, at Philly’s U-Bahn Tuesday night. The fruity, low-carbonation flavored malt beverage would have been anathema to the segment’s true believers even five years ago, and it certainly isn’t for your humble Hop Take columnist. But having argued for years that craft brewers must be willing to kill their egos and meet the American drinking public in Flavortown, I think it’s promising that such a dyed-in-the-wool firm as Deschutes is doing exactly that sort of experimentation. Let a thousand flowers bloom, let a thousand Party Bombs boom, says I.
Even in down years, there are good stories to tell about craft breweries. But whose job is it to tell them? For years, the segment soared on the wings of a credulous mainstream press; as its fortunes have shifted, that boom story has been replaced by one detailing the bust. The former wasn’t totally accurate then, the latter isn’t totally accurate now. But when the BA’s own data showed 39 percent of craft breweries reported growth last year, for example, only the most supine hacks wouldn’t ask about the other 61 percent.
I’m not surprised I didn’t hear any complaints in the trade that, say, The Atlantic’s gauzy 2018 treatment of craft beer was overly positive. (It was.) But I was surprised to hear Watson grouse this week that the “mass media” had honed in on what he described as the “rise/reckoning story of craft,” and downright shocked when he “lightly” suggested to a roomful of trade journalists that we might help “celebrate” the industry’s bright spots. “That’s what brewers want right now,” he said. “That’s what we hear from them a lot, ‘How can you tell [the media] the happy stories?’” The following day from the stage, he reframed the grievance for the benefit of CBC’s attendees: “The typical story that is being written about craft in the popular press today is not a happy one.”
For the record, brewers can always get in touch with me at [email protected], or via Signal at dinfontay.11, whether or not I met you this past week in Philly. But know that I make no promises about my coverage. Journalists who uncritically advanced the industry’s narrative during the salad days helped to steer it into the ditch from which it’s still clawing out. I am glad to report CBC’s vibes felt mostly good this year, and I wish craft brewers the best at sustaining them as they try to turn the corner. If it’s a motivational speaker they want, though, the best I can offer is the contact info for Will Guidara’s booker. That type of fluffing is way above my pay grade.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
Today’s normie drinker consistently indicates that flavor is their most important priority when choosing what to drink, and Busch Light Apple has been a bona fide phenomenon, so it’s perhaps no surprise that parent company Anheuser-Busch InBev appears poised to go back for another bite of the… pickle? That’s right: Longtime packaging blog MyBeerBuzz spotted recently approved labels for lemon, orange, and pickle varietals of the sub-premium supermarket workhorse. It’s about five years behind craft brewers who dabbled with brine-forward brews, but sure, I can see the appeal of a mass-market pickled pounder. Pabst Brewing Co. can certainly see it: earlier this month, it announced a special Pabst Blue Ribbon one-off with Grillo’s Pickles. Did everybody in Big Beer read the same trend forecast, or…?
📈 Ups…
Congrats to all the winners of this year’s World Beer Cup… Beer Marketer’s Insights estimated that Mark Anthony Group scored Finnish Long Drink for just $325 million, which, whoa… A new bipartisan bill introduced last week in the Senate would allow states to opt out of the looming federal ban on hemp-derived THC… Firestone Walker/Duvel USA bought Stone Brewery from Sapporo, which is probably best for the brand (its workers, TBD)…
📉 …and downs
Constellation Brands’ beer division eked out a smidge of growth last quarter (its first in the black after four in the red), but it’s forecasting another flat grind on net sales for 2026… BeatBox is now fully incorporated into the ABI portfolio, and already bigger than Bud Light Platinum or Stella Artois in total sales dollars, eesh… Trumer Brewery is rolling layoffs as Firestone Walker prepares to move production to its Paso Robles facility…
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