After the Craft Beer Gold Rush

Casual observers might be excused for thinking we’re living through the craft beer end times. Just about every major story about the beer industry in the last five years has been of the doom n’ gloom variety: a painful period of bursting bubbles and diminished popularity, declining production, and major closures. Tales of the doom loop increased in earnest by 2023, around the same time the beer industry itself began confronting the scale of the challenges ahead. From lauded publications shutting down to leading cashed-up brands falling into consolidation, the news has gone from bad to worse with no sign of stopping. Here in 2026 the onslaught continues, as the implosion of Brewdog made international headlines. You’d be forgiven for thinking that an extinction-level event threatens the very survival of craft beer itself.

And yet, in this Robespierre moment of public executions and recriminations, I’ve found myself unexpectedly drawn back into the surviving nodes of craft beer culture in America. Some of this is millennial nostalgia, and my own intractable desire to reengage with the things I found cool in my 20s now that I am very much no longer in my 20s. But after the hype has faded, now that the release lines have died down and the hazy bros have moved on to trendier pastures, craft beer culture in America looks more like how it did 20 years ago: rooms full of interesting and eccentric people, drinking stuff because they like it and think it tastes good.