India Pale Ale Is Still Synonymous With Craft Beer, and That’s a Problem

In 2014, I published a throwaway listicle at Thrillist about India Pale Ales. Specifically, why I hated them:

Why can’t I just enjoy it? Why does every single IPA make my gut bubble like a Jacuzzi full of soup? Every cicerone is my mortal enemy, every bar with rotating taps, my hop-hell. Oh, you disagree? Pound sand/shred me in the comments, because the reasons for my IPA hatred are completely unassailable.

You get the idea. This piece, basically just a grievance blog I threw together in my spare time, went pretty viral when it was published a dozen years ago. This was an odd moment in media, when legacy outlets still hadn’t gotten the hang of the digital commons and upstart publications could corner gobs of traffic with low-calorie takes calibrated to troll schlubs on Facebook. That era of the media business is emphatically gone, and that’s probably for the best. But in a somewhat shocking turn of events, the era of IPAs is still very much in force in the craft-brewing business, and all personal gripes aside, that is not for the best.

Earlier this month, the Brewers Association (BA) released its annual midyear report on the state of the segment. It’s the mixed bag you’ve come to expect if you’ve been tracking craft beer’s performance since the pandemic: Volume is down 4 percent year over year through the first six months of the year, but some 54 percent of respondents to the org’s survey are reporting growth. (The BA’s data-gathering operation is plenty fallible, as we learned earlier this year, so, y’know, grain of salt and all that. But it is still the best publicly available reporting on the segment, and furnishes an important directional marker.) It is good that more than half of the breweries responding to the BA are seeing growth; that figure stood at 49 percent last year. “While the findings point to continued pressure, several indicators suggest the contraction may be moderating,” wrote Matt Gacioch, the BA’s staff economist. Maybe!

There’s less mystery in trying to tease out what is driving the growth, especially at scale, and especially-especially in the package. It’s IPAs, man. As Beer Marketer’s Insights first noted last week, of the top 30 craft brands selling in multi-outlet grocery, mass retail, and convenience stores tracked by the market research firm Circana through July 12, only 11 of them are in the black year to date by dollars. All 11 are IPAs. In order of descending volume, they are:

Voodoo Ranger Imperial (up 7.3 percent in dollars and 5.3 percent in cases)
Voodoo Ranger Juice Force (+10.6 and +8.7 percent)
Sierra Nevada Hazy Little Thing (+8.3 and +6.4 percent)
Elysian Space Dust (+11.3 and +9.7 percent)
Lagunitas India Pale Ale (+2.1 and +1.4 percent)
Goose Island Tropical Beer Hug (+4.3 and +1.2 percent)
Cigar City Jai Alai (+6.5 and +2.5 percent)
Lagunitas A Little Sumpin’ Sumpin’ (+18.5 and +18.3 percent)
Wicked Weed Pernicious (+11.7 and +11.7 percent)
Georgetown Bodhizafa (+13.6 and +13.1 percent)
Voodoo Ranger G-Force Supercharged (which is already the 24th best-selling craft beer in the Circana-verse despite only being launched in February of this year.)

Two more beers are less than 1 percent in the red in YTD dollars: They are also IPAs.

“[C]raft sales remain a tale of IPAs vs all other in off-prem scans,” wrote BMI. No kidding.

There are caveats. The off-premise is not the total market, and craft beer has traditionally overindexed in both the on-premise generally and draft specifically. “Whereas beer overall has sold less than 50% draft by volume each year since 2017, craft has hovered around 80% draft at bars over the past decade,” the BA’s Gacioch wrote in a May 2026 blog post assessing on-premise trends. Non-IPA styles typically have a much better shot over the bar, particularly in a pint glass. (When was the last time you saw a 19.2-ounce stovepipe of pilsner in the convenience-store fridge? Exactly.) There’s some evidence that styles other than IPA are breaking through over the bar.

For example, of the top five styles by share tracked by the on-premise analytics platform BeerBoard, only “lager” and “wheat/hefeweisen” gained draft share during the four-week period from June 11-28, when the World Cup action was new/novel and hot/heavy. Craft brewers enjoyed some of that share growth. Still, the overall segment was down around 2 percent share by volume and 2.5 percent share by dollars, in no small part because IPA lost a share point in this slice of BeerBoard data. On-premise or off-premise, as goes IPA, so goes craft.

I don’t really hate IPAs all that much anymore. I don’t drink them that often, but I don’t have a problem with them. But I really think the craft-brewing industry does. Remember how that hack last year wrote that lazy op-ed for The New York Times titled “Wacky Names and Silly Labels Are Killing Craft Beer”? And we all made fun of it because it sucked and was stupid? Good fun, that. But as I wrote at the time, “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.” One of those kernels of truth is that IPAs — on which around half of all off-premise dollars are spent, per Circana — cannot continue to sustain this segment on their own.

It’s not just me, a known hater, saying this. The BA’s chief executive and president, Bart Watson, has been sounding that alarm for years. At the trade group’s annual Craft Brewers Conference in 2024, for example, he warned of a day when IPA may no longer stand for “Immediate Profits Ahead.” The Gray Lady’s anti-IPA rant was dumb and bad because it misunderstood cause and effect: “Brewers don’t make IPAs because they’re “obsess[ed]” with them, they make them because that’s what sells,” I wrote. They were selling way back in 2014, when I first outed myself as an IPA antagonist, and they are still selling now, as the latest scan data indicate. But the competition is a lot stiffer for fridge space than it was a dozen years ago. The American drinking public is no longer dazzled by the novelty of heavily hopped West Coast IPAs or even juicy New England IPAs. There are BuzzBallz to be guzzled and Surfsides to be slugged. The most stupid-simple, flavor-forward style craft beer had to offer is complicated in comparison with its competition.

This lengthy IPA reign is starting to feel like the end of history for the segment. Nearly a decade since the introduction of Voodoo Ranger and more than half a dozen years since the summer of White Claw, it has found no heir apparent. This is the real danger. It’s not that sales of the style might suddenly collapse, vaporizing half the segment’s revenue and dragging innumerable breweries under. It’s not that dimwits with pals at legacy media outlets occasionally whine about the style in poorly reasoned op-eds. It’s that the entire segment is stuck on IPAs, and couldn’t move past them even if it wanted to. It’s a hoppy hostage situation, basically. This is an odd moment in the craft-brewing business, and it’s been going on for quite some time.

🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now

It is of course well understood that Boston Beer Company is a “beer company” in name only, but its most recent earnings report really drove the point home. Of all the legacy craft brewery’s brands, not a single malt-based one was in the black for the second quarter of the year — not even Dogfish Head, which had been on a bit of a run thanks to the outsized (and frankly surprising) success of its Grateful Dead collaboration. Overall, depletions were down 6 percent for the quarter, despite growth from Angry Orchard and Sun Cruiser. Will BBC’s new vodka sports drink, Rally Dog, start another spirits-based rally?

📈 Ups…

Independent Michelob Ultra challenger Hero95 doubled its volume year-over-year on the back of a crazy conversion rate for sampling… Tilray Brands lost $105.2 million last year, which sounds bad until you remember it lost $2.2 billion the year before last… Samuel Adams is rolling out an apple-spice ale for fall, finally…

📉 …and downs

The liberal activist/brewery operator behind Minocqua Brewing Company announced Wisconsin officials are preparing to revoke the firm’s permit in an act of “heavy-handed” tax enforcement… New Associated Press analysis shows grocery prices have risen an astonishing 33 percent since 2019, its biggest seven-year leap in half a century… Anheuser-Busch InBev posted small declines in Q2 depletions and shipments in the U.S., even as Cutwater kept soaring…

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