With Craft Beer Reeling, The Brewers Association Is Killing the Right Sacred Cow

“You know when you meet somebody on the street, you ask them ‘How are you doing today?’” Dan Carey, the co-founder of Wisconsin’s beloved New Glarus Brewing Co., told me on a 2024 episode of VinePair’s award-winning “Taplines” podcast. “At a Craft Brewers Conference, it [used to be] ‘How much are you up this year?’ It was a game to say, ‘Oh, we’re up 10 percent,’ ‘Well, we’re up 80 percent!’”

“Brewers don’t ask that anymore,” he added, chuckling wryly.

At next year’s Craft Brewers Conference (CBC), they’ll have one less day to avoid the forbidden question. Late last week, All About Beer’s John Holl reported that the Brewers Association (BA), which has produced the annual confab since the mid-’80s, had lopped a day off the schedule for CBC 2026 in Philadelphia. In early collateral and digital promotional assets, the event was slated to run April 20-23; now it will conclude April 22. As the oft-bowtied veteran beer journalist noted, the move follows other schedule pruning by the BA, including a stricken Sunday evening session at the 2025 Great American Beer Festival (currently underway in Denver as you’re reading this), and the mothballing of Homebrew Con in 2024. The trade group also canceled SAVOR, its annual beer-and-food-pairing event, back in 2022, ending a 14-year run. Still, CBC is the BA’s flagship event, and the craft brewing industry’s, too, by any reasonable estimation. Cutting down its run-of-show by a third is a significant step.

You could read this move as yet another retrenchment as the craft-brewing industry struggles to find its footing. Not your humble Hop Take columnist, though. I think BA’s decision to curtail CBC is clever, responsive, and even a bit brave. America’s small, independent brewers can’t afford hidebound traditions iN tHiS eCoNoMy. CBC’s protracted schedule is a smart sacred cow to slaughter. It’s a strong signal from the segment’s largest trade group — presided over since the top of this year by former chief economist Bart Watson — that craft brewing’s new reality demands new ways of doing business.

Or, I should say, craft brewing’s new-ish reality. By the pandemic, those boom years Carey was talking about had already begun to turn lean. Two years later, they’re leaner still. More breweries closed than opened in 2024. The volume of craft beer sold has declined for the past two years, and it was more or less flat the two prior. More than half of the aggregate brewing capacity across the country is slack, built to service growth that never materialized. The overall beer industry is having a rough go of it, and craft brewers — so recently the vanguard of the category — are getting the worst of it.

This writing has been on the taproom wall for awhile. But for the past few years, you could have missed it if your only impression of how things were going came from the exhibition floor of the CBC. In 2023 (attendance: ~12,000), I filed a dispatch from that event in Nashville, characterizing it as “largely a buoyant affair.” In 2024 (attendance: ~9,500), I found myself agreeing with a brewer who told me he “honestly thought there’d be more doom and gloom” at CBC’s first-ever visit to Sin City. “Beer and loathing in Las Vegas?” I wrote. “Not so much.” This April in Indianapolis (attendance: 8,000), there was more angst rippling through the CBC crowd, but nevertheless, “the conference vibe [was] considerably more upbeat than mainstream headlines would lead you to expect,” I thought at the time.

This mismatch between the vibe at CBC and the decidedly downcast performance data and accounts from craft brewery owners and workers I hear on the beat week in and out has been disorienting, to say the least. Self-selection probably plays a role: The people at CBC are associated with firms that are, by definition, “still investing in their businesses” (in the form of tickets, travel costs, lost productivity, etc.), as Isaac Arthur of CODO Design pointed out to me in Indy earlier this year. They tend to be a more optimistic bunch than the segment writ large. And CBC has always been as much a party as a professional excursion for the nation’s brewers. Seeing thousands of friends and colleagues for a week heavy on beer and light on emails tends to lift the spirits, no matter how rough stuff is getting back at the brewhouse — or how much the week costs.

Dialing back on attendees’ costs was one of the factors that led the BA to reduce the 2026 convention schedule. “We wanted to maximize the value while minimizing time,” says Ann Obenchain, the BA’s vice president of marketing and communications, in a phone interview with Hop Take. Feedback from members suggested key obstacles to attendance were “the time commitment and the financial commitment” of a standard CBC schedule, which has typically run Sunday through Wednesday on a week in the late spring. She hopes the tighter timeline will make it easier for more brewers to rationalize the outlay. Speaking of which: Earlier this week, the BA published its pricing for the coming year’s convention, debuting a simplifying ticketing structure for all-access passes that’s no longer tied to brewers’ annual barrelage, and $49 tickets for trade-show-only access through Feb. 2. “That’s a screamer of a deal for beverage producers,” says Obenchain.

(That ticket will run as expensive as $199 if purchased on-site in Philly, but a cursory check of archived CBC ticket information suggests even that is quite a steal. In 2023, for example, the same pass cost $459 on-site.)

I’ve checked in with brewers about the new schedule and its promise of lower costs. “I love this move,” says Steve Luke, head brewer and owner of Seattle’s Cloudburst Brewing, expressing excitement for the consolidated seminar program, and a shrug for the loss of a third trade-show day. Between the travel fatigue, social fatigue, and the hangovers, Day Three is “always kind of lame anyway” because it squeezes attendees “between the desire to go home, and the desire to get your money’s worth on that last half day of presentations,” agrees Bret Kollmann Baker, owner and brewer at Cincinnati’s Urban Artifact. “If you’re a presenter, being stuck presenting on that last half day feels like an unintentional insult.”

Scott Metzger, president and chief operating officer at Craft ‘Ohana, was stuck presenting on the last half day of CBC 2024 in Vegas, and gave a terrific, tough-love presentation that ought to have been received by a much more packed house. He’s not insulted by it — “conference goers’ brains must have been too full for any additional seminar-ing, or perhaps the siren call of Willy Wonka slot machines could no longer be resisted,” he jokes — but he sees the merit in tightening things up. “I think it’s a welcome move that attendees and vendors will appreciate,” and “an indication of where the industry” is right now, he says.

Craft brewing isn’t the only industry in that place. “This year I’ve seen more conferences shorten their run and compress content,” says Sean Lilly Wilson, founder and “chief executive optimist” at Fullsteam Brewing in Durham, N.C. (and elsewhere now, too.) “There’s a fine line where efficiency turns into diminishing returns [but] I don’t see that being an issue for the BA or the Craft Brewers Conference.”

He’s not wrong that the conference-planning norms are shifting, but it’s not just this year, either. By the end of last decade, the downward trend in conference attendance was clear to anybody with eyes to see. Figures from trade-show expert Heywood Sanders reported late last month by the Los Angeles Olympic boondoggle blog Torched indicate that big trade conferences have been dwindling across the board basically since the 2008 recession. Las Vegas’s convention center, for example, topped out at 1.7 million attendees in 2006; by 2019 it was down to 1.3 million; 2024, 1.1 million. The data from the rest of the Big Four (Chicago’s McCormick Place, Orlando’s Orange County Convention Center, and Atlanta’s Georgia World Congress) are similar.

In other words, this is certainly not a sector-specific challenge. Cutting one day from the program isn’t going to solve it, either. But in addition to the reduced schedule and new pricing, Obenchain tells Hop Take that Lacey Gautier, hired as the BA’s vice president of meetings and events in 2024, is leading the charge to “turn the old and dead conference model” on its head with a more “open format” and other new features. “I cannot wait for you to hear who our keynote [speaker] is going to be,” she adds. She declined to say more than that the star guest was from the hospitality industry.

I know it’s probably not Fawn Weaver. The co-founder of Uncle Nearest Distillery, which is currently in a court-ordered receivership for defaulting on over $100 million in loans, already did the keynote at CBC 2024. But a columnist can dream, right? (I just have a few questions for her!)

🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now

From the heightened tensions between the U.S. and Mexico thanks to Trump’s trade war, to the brutal reign of terror his shock troops are carrying out against Hispanic communities domestically, to the fact Michelob Ultra finally and convincingly claimed Bud Light’s one-time throne, this has not been Constellation Brands’ year. The firm’s second-quarter earnings report, issued earlier this week, tells the tale of Modelo, Inc.’s tough 2025 so far, with the three-month frame showing year-over-year declines of 12 percent in operating income and 7.5 in shipments. Those readings are markedly worse than Q1, meaning as MAGA accelerated to full-blown authoritarianism over the summer, Constellation’s plunge into the red accelerated, too.

📈 Ups…

Tilray Brands disclosed it’s holding HODLing $1 million in Bitcoin, eyeing Solana and Ethereum, and considering “tokenizing stock,” sure why not, should be fun… Congrats to Jake Kirsch on the promotion to Anheuser-Busch InBev’s new beyond-beer lead… New Belgium Brewery, maker of eleventy bajillion Voodoo Ranger varietals, is finally trying to find the guy who did this (overwhelmed the hell out of the craft beer consumer)… Another craft-beer collective emerges, this time in Iowa as SingleSpeed Brewing acquires Backpocket Brewing…

📉 …and downs

Molson Coors’ marketing whiz Michelle St. Jacques is exiting the firm after its new CEO reorganized her role out of existence… The collapse of the Iron Hill Brewery brewpub chain has now entered its probably inevitable Chapter 7 bankruptcy phase… BrewDog posted its fifth straight year of losses and announced plans to lay off an undisclosed number of workers, imagine that… Ohio’s governor issued an emergency order banning all “intoxicating hemp” products for the next 90 days… After cornering the Tetra Pakked riot punch market, BeatBox is setting its sights on the chelada segment with its upcoming Chillitas release in — gasp — cans…

The article With Craft Beer Reeling, The Brewers Association Is Killing the Right Sacred Cow appeared first on VinePair.