One of the brightest spots in the American brewing business is neither American, nor bright. In fact, it’s downright dark. Guinness — the regular old Irish dry stout that’s been flowing forth from St. James’s Gate for centuries — is having a moment on both sides of the Atlantic right now. I’m sure you’ve noticed. Hell, even The New York Times has noticed, albeit only recently. And while it’s true that “splitting the G” has lately captivated the TikTok crowds and thrust the venerable old brand into the cultural limelight, Guinness’s boom is anything but an algorithmic happy accident.
“Guinness has been beating this drum for decades,” says Bryan Roth, the director of insights for the market intelligence platform Sightlines. Now, Diageo’s stalwart stout is reaping dividends on long-accruing investments, and laying down lessons for the rest of the beer industry on how to beat the market malaise as it does.
The malaise is not irrecoverable, but it is real. Tax-paid data published by the Beer Institute (BI) shows the total U.S. beer supply declined 3.3 percent in 2024 compared to the prior year, and its counterpart, the Brewers Association (BA), clocked the craft segment’s own volume slide at something like 2 percent. Last year was, generally speaking, more of the same not-great news for American brewers.
Not so for the Irish: Brewbound’s analysis of the BI’s data from last year shows the country’s imports grew 11.6 percent in 2024. One look at Guinness’s topline numbers, and it’s clear why. Sales of its flagship Guinness Draught at multi-outlet grocery, mass retail, and convenience stores tracked by market research firm Circana through the end of last year were up 13.4 percent and 10.8 percent by dollars and volume, respectively. Data shared with Hop Take by BeerBoard shows Guinness Stout’s market share grew 12.5 percent last year, with a 4.5 percent boost across the on-premise sales platform’s national network of vendors.
Its parent company is struggling to figure out Casamigos, shore up its stock price, and reduce its projected $200 million annual exposure to the Trump administration’s currently suspended intra-North American tariffs, but Guinness is going bananas, up a whopping 17 percent in organic net sales for the six months through the end of 2024. It was the brand’s eighth straight fiscal half of double-digit growth. In this (beer) economy?! No wonder rumors swirled last month that Diageo might be trying to spin off its juggernaut beer brand, and no wonder the company quickly and unequivocally denied them. Guinness is one of its best things going right now.
Of course, it’s not the only import with momentum at the moment. Ever since the craft-beer boom hit the skids at the end of the last decade, the most exciting story in the American beer business has been the ascendancy of Mexican imports. (At least, as far as beer-flavored beer is concerned; you could make similar cases for soft-to-hard crossover beverages like Hard Mtn. Dew et al., or the triumph of Twisted Tea.) Their ascent is remarkable, and it got an outsized amount of attention in 2023 after Modelo Especial found itself in a dogfight with transphobe-besieged Bud Light. But the Mex-imports, long advertised in clear-glass bottles with lime wedges in their necks, have never had claim to America’s taplines the way its domestic American lager counterparts have. That’s why, depending on how you slice the data, Modelo still trails Anheuser-Busch InBev’s erstwhile flagship. It’s also why Guinness’s boom is a better trajectory to examine for wisdom on reversing the category’s most vexing and interrelated woes: the on-premise and draft.
“Guinness far over-indexes for on-premise,” Sightlines’ Roth tells Hop Take in a recent phone interview. Something like 40 percent of its sales happen in bars and restaurants, he points out, whereas for large craft brands, “if you’re cracking 15 percent on-premise, you should be throwing a party.” As we’ve discussed before, draft has fallen out of favor with the American drinking public for a bunch of reasons — some cyclical, some structural, some called Covid-19. “[R]estaurant sales have rebounded but draft beer remains confoundingly low,” noted the BA’s Bart Watson in a recent social media post about generational and pandemic-triggered shifts to at-home (and by definition, packaged) beer drinking.
This is a problem for the category for two reasons. Beer accounts for around 86 percent of on-premise sales by volume, according to CGA by Nielsen, and draft has always been a key point of differentiation for which wine and spirits have few analogs. If beer loses the on-premise, it loses an important brand-building channel, meaningful volume, and an historic competitive edge. As the National Beer Wholesalers Association’s chief economist Lester Jones said at the American Cider Association’s conference in Chicago earlier this month: “If you’re convinced that the at-home stuff, the off-premise scan data is the guide to your future, you’re just batshit crazy. You gotta embrace the whole data set and the whole market and think about everything together. Otherwise, you’re missing the story.”
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Guinness is that story. Its current success is the result of the sort of patient, holistic investment across the on- and off-premises that used to be the beer industry’s block and tackle. “The way that I’ve described this to people is, [Guinness] is a political movement,” says Roth. “It includes not just changing minds, but changing actual behaviors.” Its dominance in bars and restaurants has helped to influence consumers beyond their confines, too. That’s only grown more obvious as the beer aisle has grown more overwhelming. “Having a brand and its representatives who are just always talking to you and making sure that you’ve got what you need to move it on-premise, that starts to pay off” in supermarket and convenience store sales, says Roth. “It’s going to simplify that off-premise choice, because they just know what they can get, and it’s easy for them.”
This doesn’t happen overnight, or even close. When Sightlines clients ask him how they might match Guinness’s growth, he jokes that his first piece of advice is “exist for hundreds of years.” The brand has history, and the indelible advertising and packaging that comes with it. But that stuff does not a successful 21st-century beer brand guarantee, as Anchor Brewing, Leinenkugel’s, and so many other American legacy brewers can attest.
It’s also kind of the point, right? Guinness has been investing in its sales network, its distributor relationships, and its educational programs in the U.S. since long before Diageo even existed. Its current success is proof not that splitting the G is fun (it is) or that Gonster is good (it’s not) or even that TikTok is powerful (sure, fine), but that the fundamental logic of the American beer industry still holds.
It’s the same logic that longtime Heineken importer Leo Van Munching hammered into his son Philip in the ‘80s about the paramount importance of the Dutch import’s place “in the trade.” It’s the same logic that Keith Villa channeled in the ‘90s as he was going account to account teaching bartenders how to cut orange slices to garnish Blue Moon schooners. It’s the same logic that dictates craft beer’s overindex on draft to this day. Say it with me: Brands are built in the on-premise, businesses are built in the off-premise.
Guinness has done both, and reaffirmed that for all the malaise, draft beer is still special, and that investments in the ancient wisdom of American beer-selling still pays off. This country’s brewing industry has been obsessed with finding the next big thing since the Light Beer Wars turned the whole shebang upside down 50 years ago, and with few exceptions — Heineken! Blue Moon! The craft brewing movement! — they have mostly fizzled out. All the while, Guinness has been building to this boom. There’s a lesson in there for brewers willing to learn it.
The U.S. is amid what many scholars and historians from across the political spectrum have correctly labeled a series of Constitutional crises thanks to President Donald Trump and Actual President Elon Musk. Talk about a time for a beer, amirite?! Unfortunately, congressional Democrats — who cumulatively represent many, many more voters than the 77 million that delivered a MAGA victory this past November — seem to agree. On Wednesday, the nominal opposition party cut a deal with their Republican counterparts to rubber-stamp more nightmare nominees through the Senate, thus preserving an annual long-weekend junket to Munich. Apparently it’s a “cherished” opportunity for our big beautiful Senators to savor some Helles lager and cut loose. Enjoy the Augustiner, folks! We’ll just be here!
Athletic Brewing Co. signed a 100-venue deal with Live Nation concert venues, highlighting the fact that Live Nation owns entirely too many concert venues… Boston Beer Company is upping its executive pay a bit, which is nice, I guess… Congrats to new BA vice-president of membership Sarah Billiu on her new gig…
Draft beer sales were down 4.6 percent across BeerBoard’s network for the Super Bowl last Sunday… Tilray Brands has idled Revolver Brewing as a production facility, though its taproom will remain open… Molson Coors’ shipments were down 6.4 percent for 2024…
The article Guinness May Be Special, but the Blueprint for Its Boom Sure Isn’t appeared first on VinePair.