Shortly before a federal judge placed Uncle Nearest, Inc. into receivership last month, he offered a frank assessment of the business acumen of the liquor firm’s husband-and-wife co-founders Fawn and Keith Weaver. “It looks like you’re out over your skis,” said the Hon. Charles E. Atchley. As far as euphemisms go, it was a pretty generous way to describe over $100 million in defaulted loans. But the point is salient, and widely applicable within the world of beverage alcohol. Even apparently savvy people who’ve enjoyed success in other disciplines can quickly find themselves out of their depth when they don’t know what they’re doing.
And so. On Monday, The New York Times published an op-ed by a writer named Mark Robichaux entitled “How to Save Beer.” It’s an ambitious headline, one that implies intellectual rigor and demands attention. The contemporary beer industry could certainly use some saving, after all. By the next day, though, the Gray Lady had revised the piece’s title from deliverance to doomerism: “Wacky Names and Silly Labels Are Killing Craft Beer.” Writers don’t typically choose their own headlines. But the switch offers a hint as to the substance of the piece itself. Robichaux’s argument is facile, ill-informed, and obtuse. It’s little more than a smear on the beleaguered craft-brewing industry in The Times’s opinion section, arguably the most valuable editorial space in the English-speaking world. Still, there is an important lesson there about saving beer, if you read between the lines. So let’s.
There are very few people who truly understand the American brewing industry who don’t make a living in or around it. Or did, before they retired. I’ve been on this beat for a decade and a half, and I’m still not even sure I understand it. Thanks to the chaos of defederalized regulation, it remains to some extent a byzantine world of good old boys, bad old laws, and nearly limitless nuance even today. I say that to say this: Whenever somebody makes a bold proclamation about the industry, I ask to see some I.D. Robichaux is a journalist: He used to be a reporter at The Wall Street Journal and wrote a business book about the rise of cable television in 2002. But he has no apparent experience covering the business of beer, and in his piece he claims no substantive connection to it apart from being Just Some Guy who likes the liquid and has some thoughts. Which is fine! Lots of people blog about beer. Some of them are very good at it! Virtually none of them are granted column inches to just kinda explore the space on The Times’s dime. If there’s not a rule against that at 620 Eighth Avenue, there should be. Robichaux’s stinker may turn out to be the exception that proves its necessity.
The piece doesn’t immediately collapse under the weight of cliché and conceit. Robichaux actually does a decent job summing up some of the structural and cyclical challenges facing the beer industry, referencing Gen Z’s relatively small size compared to previous generations, historically low self-reported drinking rates, post-pandemic channel shifting, and total-beverage competition. Nothing groundbreaking, and no real engagement with the industry’s manifest logistical and statutory complications, but nothing outright wrong, either. In the sixth paragraph, though, the piece shifts from presenting problems to offering solutions. Things quickly get out of hand.
“There are a few simple steps the craft beer industry can take to immediately address its downturn,” writes Robichaux. “For starters, it must abandon the I.P.A. arms race. Craft beer’s obsession with hops has gone too far, as what started as a rebellion against bland lagers has spiraled into a bitter, boozy blur.” What, man? The I.P.A. arms race?! By any reasonable estimation, craft brewing’s escalating hop wars petered out at least a decade ago as rounder, juicier hazy India Pale Ales hit their stride. This is an irrelevant frame of criticism verging on a category error. And while there’s nothing wrong with making the normative statement that there are too many IPAs in the American beer aisle for your personal preference, that’s not a New York Times op-ed from 2025 — it’s a throwaway blog post from 2014. (I should know; I wrote it.) More importantly, as a business recommendation, it’s stone-cold stupid.
Off-premise scan data in multi-outlet grocery, mass retail, and convenience stores tracked by market research firm Circana through the first week of September indicate that the IPA style accounts for just under half of all craft beer sold by volume, and just over half by dollars. Half of all craft beer! Robichaux has cause and effect almost exactly backwards here, much like he does later in the piece when railing against 16-ounce cans. Brewers don’t make IPAs because they’re “obsess[ed]” with them, they make them because that’s what sells. America’s small independent brewers can’t hand-wave away 50 percent of their revenue on a whim! But thanks to the majesty of the Times’s Opinion page, where data is optional and vibes reign supreme, Robichaux can, and did.
Things do not improve from here. A gripe about higher alcohol-by-volume beers might have been compelling, had our author tried to square his complaint with the demonstrable fact that drinkers clearly want and will pay for stronger beers. Nothing doing. Instead, Robichaux bizarrely sneers at the 18 percent ABV of Dogfish Head’s 120 Minute IPA, a beer that was introduced in 2003 and represents today’s median craft offering about as well as the Voodoo Ranger skeleton represents the median craft drinker. Per data shared by the Brewers Association’s chief economist Matt Gacioch in a polite but piqued response to Robichaux, just over a quarter of craft volume topped 7 percent ABV, and under 1 percent topped 10 percent ABV. It’s either sloppy or shady to make high ABVs a load-bearing line of attack on the market writ large.
Either way, it’s part of a pattern. “Brewers chasing complexity are losing the people who just want something cold, crisp and repeatable,” Robichaux continues, shadow-boxing against a craft-brewing vanguard that hasn’t existed in years. “I love a good I.P.A., but bring back the pilsner, the amber, the pale ale, or reinvent the lager, as many have.” As before: Sales data are very clear that this is not a scalable approach to rebalancing a portfolio. And on a technical level, IPAs actually tend to be less complex than some of these styles. But even steelmanning Robichaux’s argument can’t fix his broken logic. If “many have” “reinvent[ed] the lager” — a ludicrously difficult assignment, by the way, given the original style’s half-millennium head start — then brewers are making “something cold, crisp and repeatable.” In fact, that’s one of the only growth opportunities in the segment! In Robichaux’s haste to do well-trod lager lamentation in the paper of record, he missed the more nuanced story — one that promotes the popularity of a style he’s half-assedly trying to promote in this very same paragraph. If brewers are guilty of “chasing complexity” at the expense of success, this lazy op-ed certainly isn’t.
The pity is, there are some good observations buried among this bleating, even if they’re obvious to industry insiders and intuitive to all but the most casual drinkers. “My beer aisle now looks like a vertical Comic Con merch table,” writes Robichaux, bemoaning the “quirky mascots, puns and inside jokes” with which craft brewers have “clutter[ed]” the modern beer aisle. “Design matters, yes, but clarity matters more.” I will stipulate, and I’d wager most brewers would, too. A lot of breweries have actually worked through comprehensive redesigns to address this real issue, with very mixed outcomes! Talking to even one of them might have brought some desperately needed dimension to this piece. (As an aside, never in 15 years of journalism have I had an easier time lining up sources than when I was reporting out the one and only story I’ve ever filed with The Times. People with something to promote love to talk to the biggest newspaper in the country.) But instead, Robichaux opts for more boomer-coded kvetching, cherry-picking three goofy beer names from three breweries that don’t even crack the Brewers Association’s Top 50 volume players to mock as representative of the segment writ large. C’mon, man.
The rest of the piece is replacement-level palaver about beer’s cultural significance, plus a kicker so treacly it’ll make your teeth hurt. Nothing substantive enough to address here. On balance, this is unserious pap masquerading as common-sense critique. Maybe that’s what you’d expect from the Opinion section whose recent record includes rote, ill-informed, and/or bad-faith booze takes on everything from Dry January, to the Bud Light fiasco, to alcohol’s carcinogenic properties and wine’s social import. And if “How to Save Beer” had been a random blog post, I certainly wouldn’t have wasted my editorial space fisking it. But for all its many ills, The Times remains massively influential, a fact I’ve been reminded of throughout the week as friends and family repeatedly send me Robichaux’s hackery. If that’s been happening to you, well, send this column in return, and tell ‘em there’s plenty more where that came from.
The stakes are much higher than that, though. The beer industry, and craft brewers within it — a distinction Robichaux barely grapples with — deserves plenty of criticism. That’s more or less Hop Take’s thesis. But incurious, reactionary commentary like his is worse than useless. These are empty calories that mislead readers and waste column inches that could have been spent on productive, informed analysis. Punching down at craft brewers trying to survive under the guise of trying to help them, while ignoring those firms actually moving the segment forward because they complicate your narrative is intellectually dishonest. Which is a shame, because craft brewing does have problems. Robichaux was even able to identify some of them; he just mistook his own preferences with those of the American drinking public and eschewed reporting when coming up with his “solutions.” If “the craft beer boom got ahead of itself,” as he claims, then his half-baked bid to play its savior certainly did.
Here lies the inadvertent lesson of “How to Save Beer.” Anybody bold enough to make these claims in The New York Times needs their I.D. checked. Chances are, they don’t know what they’re doing. The segment’s salvation, if it ever comes, will not come courtesy of mainstream media. As ever, craft brewers will have to save themselves.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
Due to a schedule conflict I wasn’t able to make it to the National Beer Wholesalers Association’s annual conference in Las Vegas this week. But as it happens, I still made an appearance there anyway. Sort of. On Monday morning, colleagues in the crowd began sending me photos of the big screen in the Augustus Ballroom at Caesar’s Palace, onto which president/chief executive Craig Purser had projected some choice quotes from my column about the trade group’s undeniable prowess at securing its member’s interests in Congress and beyond. “I don’t think he meant this to be a compliment,” he said of my line about how hard distributors had worked to codify their long-targeted, set-to-expire tax cuts in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” this summer. For the record, I did not, but I respect both the NBWA’s fearsome political organization and Purser’s clever redirect on my criticism. My ass: gotten.
📈 Ups…
Congrats to all the medal winners at this year’s Great American Beer Festival… Target is taking the THC plunge, adding SKUs in 10 locations in home-market/hemp-infused stronghold Minnesota… Boston Beer Co.’s new (old) chief exec Jim Koch was touting the German concept of “gemütlichkeit” at GABF, which I unironically think the industry needs more of… Congrats to Hop Take for taking home two first-place prizes at the North American Guild of Beer Writers’ annual awards, and to VinePair for winning Publisher of the Year…
📉 …and downs
Maine Beer Co. owner Dan Kleban suspended his Senate campaign and immediately endorsed Chuck Schumer’s handpicked candidate, the state’s 77-year-old governor… Constellation Brands did technically beat projections with its Q2 results last week, but only because it had already revised them down twice… Both malt- and spirits-based seltzers were down 4–5 percent in dollars for the trailing 12 weeks’ worth of Circana scans, while spirits-based canned cocktails soared 40 percent…
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