Rather than yet another column about the many things going poorly for the brewing industry lately, we’re going to focus on a beacon of hope today instead. Remember hope? It’s good stuff! Sure, the national numbers are gnarly and the vibe is giving “gallows,” but there are glimmers of light on the dark horizon for this struggling category yet. For example: 19.2-ounce cans. In these tough times for the beer industry, stovepipes are burning hot. As one veteran brewer put it, “It’s crazy what’s going on.” Crazy in a good way? In the craft brewing industry of 2024? It’s true. Let’s talk about why.
Known in industry jargon as the “stovepipe,” the 19.2-ounce package is relatively new to the mainstream mix of vessels in which Americans will buy off-premise beer. It wasn’t even that long ago that the hottest large-format container in the brewing industry was a 22-ounce glass bottle. (The bomber, people called it. Ah, memories.) But the past has passed, and the future is now, and in it, 19.2-ounce cans are posting eye-popping growth. Beer Marketer’s Insights reported earlier this week that the top 15 craft brand families selling in stovepipes “soar[ed]” during the trailing 13-week period, adding almost $21 million in sales tracked by Circana’s multi-outlet and convenience store scans. Zoom out, and the trend holds. On spreadsheets sorted by craft beer pack sizes, stovepipes are liable to be one of the few rows in the black on year-over-year growth. NielsenIQ scan data reviewed by Hop Take showed the container up more than 22 percent by volume for the 52 weeks through mid-July. Stovepipes had a big summer — performance all the stronger given the segment otherwise struggled through a rough case of the summertime blues.
“It’s crazy what’s going on” with 19.2-ounce cans, said New Realm Brewing Company’s Mitch Steele during his keynote speech this past week at the inaugural Virginia Brewers Conference in Richmond. Steele is no neophyte and has seen plenty of crazy in his decades on the job (including the inside of Anheuser-Busch’s craft brewing skunkworks operation in the ‘90s, which he and I discussed on a recent episode of Taplines. Comment, review, and subscribe, thank you very much.) He knows of what he speaks, in other words. And while he delivered plenty of tough truths from the dais about the current state of the industry, he made sure to give stovepipes some positive shine, too. They’ve been gleaming in New Realm’s portfolio. “The 19.2-ounce beers were not part of our plan,” he said, but since introducing the package in 2022, it’s “become a lot of incremental volume for us, a big success.”
This is no flash-in-the-pan can, man. Stovepipes have been steadily building up volume share in the craft beer aisle for the past half-decade as the market has matured and shifted. With the same size base as a 12- or 16-ounce can, the 19.2-ounce is easier and cheaper for craft brewers because they can fill it on their existing equipment, rather than make the upgrades necessary to run the stadium-sized 24-ounce can that macrobrewers have pushed for years. “Once you get [19.2-ounce cans] running, you’re filling a beer and a half in the time you were filling a beer,” Scott Ungermann, the former brewmaster of the formerly Sapporo-owned Anchor Brewing Co., told VinePair in 2018, on the launch of a Steam Beer stovepipe. The pack size has only gained ground since.
Analysis of Circana scans by Bryan Roth, the editor of the beverage-alcohol market-intelligence publication Sightlines, published this past June shows that the package clawed its way up to around 6 percent of the overall volume of off-premise craft beer sales in 2023 from just 0.06 percent share in 2019. “In 2024, chains like Whole Foods and Kroger are altering beer aisle layouts in order to better promote single-serve, large-format packages,” wrote Roth.
Those retailers are taking cues from the single most important off-premise channel for beer sales in these United States, one that avid readers of Hop Take know well. Depending on how you carve up the channels, the humble convenience store sells more beer than any other type of outlet, and as drinkers dialed back their pandemic-era pantry-stocking at the supermarket and reined in their spending in the face of recessionary indicators real and imagined, c-stores and stovepipes have emerged as a match made in beer-marketing heaven.
The appeal of the channel is right in the name, but the appeal of the vessel within the channel demands a little more unpacking. More than windshield wiper fluid or cigarettes or anything else on the shelves, convenience stores sell convenience. “Eighty percent of all items purchased at a convenience store are consumed within the hour,” Jeff Lenard, a spokesman for the National Association of Convenience Stores, told me earlier this year in an interview for this Sherwood News report about energy drinks. (Lots of overlap there.) C-store consumers, he said, are “looking for ‘speed of service.’ They want to be in and out of the store probably in four minutes, if not three minutes.”
This dynamic plays to stovepipes’ strengths, and particularly craft iterations. In the 19.2-ounce package, brands like Founders All Day, Bell’s Two-Hearted, and, of course, Voodoo Ranger are big and colorful, stoking curiosity and impulse purchasing during a 7-Eleven speedrun. Stocked as they always are in retailers’ coveted coolers (ideally on the even more coveted eye-level shelf), they promise quick refreshment and low commitment.
“It fits an occasion that the consumer has been looking for from the craft segment that we really haven’t been in before,” Marc Venegoni, vice president of sales at Ohio’s Rhinegeist Brewery, told Roth. “It also drives a lot of trial for that consumer, especially within craft space. Instead of committing to buying a 6-pack or a 12-pack or something, they can try something.”
The Cincinnati firm began selling its 7.2-percent ABV India Pale Ale, Truth, and a 6.5-percent ABV juicy version of the same, in February 2023. It’s just one of the dozens, maybe hundreds of breweries that have looked to the package — and the c-store channel — to offset losses in the on-premise from dwindling drinker interest in draft and encroachment from the High Noons and White Claws of the world, and other off-premise channels, where shelf sets are more closely managed and margin-curbing mix-packs rule with retailers and customers alike. According to Beer Marketer’s Insights, No-Li Brewhouse in Spokane, Wash., posted the 10th most growth in the last 13 weeks of Circana scans despite only selling in two states. The firm did more than half a million dollars in sales during the period.
Naturally, all this growth at the nexus of c-stores and stovepipes has attracted more competition — and not just from other craft brewers looking to try their hands at sparking Voodoo Ranger’s magic. No-Li knows this better than most. In April, it sued Tilray Brands alleging trademark infringement from Big Juicy Ballard, the larger company’s Redhook-badged imperial IPA (available in a stovepipe, of course). Molson Coors, freshly rid of its craft portfolio, apparently liked enough of what it saw from those brands’ 19.2-ounce dalliances to use the vessel for the upcoming launch of Blue Moon Extra, a new 8 percent ABV extension of the wheat ale announced at its annual distributors conference last week. The firm will also begin marketing higher-octane versions of Simply Spiked Hard Lemonade and Topo Chico Hard Seltzer in 24-ounce cans. It’s not a full slate of stovepipes, sure, but it’s a nod to the importance of the Kwik-E-Mart customer in this moment of grinding malt-based growth nevertheless.
The pack size is no panacea. It’s still hard to win placements, and to hold them. This is not an easy moment for the brewing industry. But stovepipes’ enduring growth and popularity with the American drinking public prove that people are still keen to drink beer, if brewers meet them where they are. (In this case, the c-store.) On the semantic tip — always important to your humble Hop Take columnist — the continued rise of the 19.2-ounce stovepipe has made the standard beer can look downright diminutive by comparison. If the trend holds, there may soon come a day when you can reliably order a 12-ounce Budweiser by asking your bartender for… wait for it… the Short King of Beers. Hope springs eternal, at least for this reporter.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
Former President and current convicted felon Donald Trump is taking another run at the White House. Like so many Republicans before him, he’s been struggling to find support among younger voters. Standing athwart history yelling “STOP” tends to poll poorly with kids who have to live with the compounding consequences of the status quo, after all. Trump’s running mate, 40-year-old Ohio Sen. JD Vance, was supposed to help with that, but he immediately started creeping everyone out before pivoting to naked racism, which may explain why the politician had the millennial YouTube edgelords and Happy Dad hard seltzer brand founders the NELK Boys make a cameo to endorse him on stage at his Las Vegas rally last week. Naturally, ringleader Kyle Forgeard used the bully’s bully pulpit to complain that as governor of Minnesota, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz introduced a 95 percent tax on Zyn, bros’ tobacco-free nicotine pouch brand of choice, in the state. (Walz did sign such a bill; it didn’t target Zyn specifically.) I continue to hate having been right about these chuds from the jump.
📈 Ups…
Colorado’s Prost Brewing is up 30 percent on its post-pandemic high for draft sales thanks to hardcore focus and fewer competitors… One-time hard kombucha darling JuneShine is now making regular kombucha too; sure, why not?… New York outfits Captain Lawrence Brewing and the Bronx Brewery are merging, which is better than the alternative…
📉 …and downs
Pennsylvania’s governor may be proud of opening the state’s gas stations and grocery stores to spirits-based canned cocktails, but its breweries probably aren’t… Boston Beer Co.’s co-founder Jim Koch admitted it’s been “harder than [he] thought” it’d be to stabilize Truly’s slide…
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