Millennials are Breaking Craft Beer

Millennials are ever on the minds of the small business owner. Coming off of Craft Brewers Conference 2018 gets started, I’ve been thinking about a subtle, unspoken, though possible unconscious theme emerging among attendees and speakers: Millennials are breaking craft beer.

I haven’t heard anyone say it quite so explicitly, but I don’t think it’s that hard to connect the dots. Flippant comments and grunts aside, there is a line of questioning and thinking that points to an anxiety that we maybe don’t know how to sell craft beer to the newest generation of legal-drinking-age consumers.

There are two primary features of The Millennial’s habits that seem to most flummox brewers: motivation and loyalty. We need to understand these trends, but we needn’t fear them. As Charlie Papazian reminded us on Wednesday morning in the general session: Relax. Don’t worry. Have a homebrew.

Then get to work.

Millennials Love Experiences

Consider the “Trends You Need to Know About” session presented by Jack Li of Datassential. He talked a lot about cocktails because cocktails apparently tend to lead the way in beverage trends. Cocktails these days are going two contradictory directions: taboo ingredients and superfood ingredients.

Add CBD oil or chia seeds to your recipe and you got yourself a hip new drink.

But notice how those ingredients are not really about themselves but about a larger meaning. Tobacco is something we’re supposed to avoid. Spirulina (algae) is not even an attractive taste, but it’s associated with crazy health benefits.

The other thing cocktails are doing is creating experiences, like having to break your Old Fashioned in the Rock out of a sphere of ice, or blowing into a spout to spin a little disc that actually mixes your drink in the glass.

These things are popular among The Millennials because this consumer group loves experiences, especially when they look good on Instagram.

Now, I get that business people are by nature conservative. It costs a lot of money to constantly innovate and change your business. But you should have heard the groans and scornful (slightly anxious) laughs as Li clicked through slide after slide showing trends toward tropical fruit, novelty, and “hard” but sweet beverages like soda, cider, and root beer.

The general tone was, “Oh lord, what is going on out there?”

Li closed with a chart about beverage preference by generation that drew a lot of scoffs and “pshaws.” (I have tried to recreate the gist of it below, but please note these are not real numbers.) The question asks what you look for in an alcoholic drink, then breaks own responses by generation. The differences are striking.

If you started your brewery, like most craft brewers, to make great tasting beer, this is a kind of shocking chart. As someone right on the cusp of Gen X and The Millennials, I was surprised to find myself right where those lines cross. I’ll be honest: this chart knows me.

Millennials Aren’t Loyal

Li’s data confirmed other trends we’ve been talking about for a while. Younger drinkers don’t make the same kinds of distinctions we’re used to from older generations. They don’t go out to drink beer or wine or spirits. They may drink any or all in the course of an evening.

They may not decide what they want until the order their food.

And they don’t really get loyal to anyone. They’re more likely to be loyal to a place. (Which will work in your favor for a while if yours is one of the first breweries in the area, but less so in a market like Chicago, Portland, San Diego, etc.) They’re more likely to be interested in sustainability, health and nutrition, and environmental impact.

That means they may choose the new B Corp distillery from downstate over your four-year-old brewery that is three doors down from the restaurant they’re in.

At the Wednesday morning general session, BA director Paul Gatza and economist Bart Watson reinforced this concern by noting, first, the promiscuity of young drinkers and, second, that the number of people drinking alcohol seems to be shrinking as interest in healthier options grows.

There’s Nothing “Broken” That Brewers Can’t Fix

So, the fickle Millennial is casually making drink choices across alcohol categories and even outside them. They want either really unhealthy or really healthy ingredients, and they want to blow through tubes or drink it upside down or some stupid thing like that.

With craft growth slowing at about 12% total market share, that can feel like the sky is falling or the bottom is dropping out or the other shoe is dropping or whatever.

I mean, this is beer, right? We’re not going to start getting all froofy and ultrahip, are we?

Guess what? Some of us probably are. Somewhere there is a brewer figuring out how to use that weird tube-glass to let consumers “blend” their own unique beer combination. Somewhere someone is playing with tobacco, charcoal, or seaweed to make an unusual IPA.

Some of those innovations will be super gimmicky and disappear after a couple months. Some will be really cool and spark new trends.

But it seems to me that the artisanal spirit of craft has always had an element of playing around with gimmicks to see which ones really improve the beer experience. We consider innovation so important it’s part of the BA’s definition of “tradition.”

We’ve Been Here Before, But Also We Haven’t

When the first craft breweries opened, the whole pitch was about creating big, new flavors that no one had ever tasted in a beer before. They were part of a generation of beer drinkers who didn’t want a beer just to take the edge off their lives of quiet desperation or to get a buzz during the ball game. They wanted their beer to taste good.

In other words, they were at the left edge of that chart above, and the previous generations of drinkers were at the right edge thinking, “What in the world are these kids doing to their beer?”

So, we’ve been here before, we were just at the other end of the curve.

Which is why we haven’t really been here before. An industry built on taste will not thrive if the new generation only values taste after three or four other priorities.

Remember Your Why

But Jack Li was just telling us what the numbers show. He wasn’t telling anyone how to run their brewery. It was the keynotes like Paul Saginaw and Deb Carey who were telling you how to run your brewery.

And what did they say?

Have a clear vision.

Know who you are. Know your values.

Give people something they can’t get somewhere else.

Be tenacious.

Do something that impacts people’s lives for the better, starting with your staff.

Pursue profit over percentages. Profits allow you to take care of your people.

This kind of advice falls under Simon Sinek’s “Start with why” philosophy. Your customers don’t just want a product, they want your passion, your vision, what your company stands for. Know why you’re running a brewery and it will clarify the how.

Be Authentically About Something

You know what The Millennial hates, after all? Being pandered to by someone who heard a statistic. Invite them into your story, though, and they’re interested in listening and learning.

What they’re looking for is not that different than what anyone is looking for: authenticity. What maybe makes them different than the Boomers and Xers is that they expect businesses to be authentic and have values. They never bought the “it’s just business” line.

Authenticity is not the same as casualness or amateurism. It’s not about being glib or ironic on your website or packaging or about an anti-corporate attitude or even about supporting the “right” cause. It’s more about being honest and courageous enough to say,

“This is what we are about. Some people won’t like it, and that’s fine. But we can’t not be about this.”

If your brewery is about something, then you can play around with gimmicks and faddish ingredients—or not—without losing sight of who you are. You can ask, “How can we help consumers experience our beer?” and the question will assume the importance of taste. (And no, you can’t just be about “making great beer.”)

“Experience” isn’t a bad word, after all. You think about the customer’s experience when you develop your recipes, when you choose glass or cans, when you design your label, when you design your tap room, when you plan an event, and so on.

 

So, seriously, let’s calm down about The Millennials and focus on understanding the core motivations behind our businesses and communicating them in real and creative ways.

Is that hard? Sure, sometimes. But as Charlie Papazian reminded us during the general session Wednesday morning: Relax. Don’t worry. Have a homebrew. The solution will probably emerge on the other side.

 

And if you don’t know where to start and want some help doing the soul-searching that often needs to happen to identify your brand’s core identity, reach out. I can help.

 

Image source: Max D | Stocksnap.io