USA: Dropping beer sales force top brewers to create new alternatives
Beer consumption has dropped by over 4% in the U.S. in the last year. The drinks falling popularity has forced some of Americas top brewers into a race to accommodate changing tastes just in time for one of beers biggest days of the year, Super Bowl Sunday, WCBI reported on January 30.
The decline should not come as a surprise to manufacturers; sales of traditional lagers have been going down for more than five years.
Some of the reasons were seeing some of the declines within those traditional lagers are consumer trends, Danelle Kosmal told CBS News Janet Shamlian at the Dupont Circle Hotels Doyle bar in Washington, D.C. Kosmal is vice president at the Nielsen Beverage Alcohol Practice.
Consumer trends around health and wellness, consumer trends around wanting a different and new experience, are all reasons for the shift, she said.
Products like craft beers from small brewers have become growing trends, as well as hard seltzers that promise health-conscious consumers fewer carbs and lower calories. In 2019, hard seltzer sales hit $1.5 billion.
Big beer brands are paying attention the U.S.s top five brewers are all experimenting with beer alternatives like hard seltzer and even non-alcoholic kombucha in an effort to keep up.
Even local town bars like Miners Saloon in Golden, Colorado are seeing younger drinkers reaching for ciders and seltzers these days.
We see people really experimenting with a lot of those different beers, said Aimee Valdez, who owns the Saloon. Were also seeing an uptick in seltzer business things like White Claw, whatnot. Weve brought that onto the menu just because we had people starting to ask for it.
Beer giant Coors, whose brand is so closely tied to Colorado that they chose to keep their brewery in Golden when they moved headquarters to Chicago, is spending millions to change up production.
Were in the early stages of planning out how exactly that will come to life here in Golden. But certainly were going to be looking across our network to see how we can adapt and how we make sure that were able to make the next canned wine, the next canned spirit and those type of products, Coors executive Adam Collins said.
Collins explained that expanding beyond beer is a necessity to stay in the game. For them, the expansion includes things beyond seltzers like canned cocktails and an interesting combination called hard coffee.
From what we saw, its really interesting in some of our research, was that people before they were going out at night might look for a coffee, maybe an espresso and a cocktail, right? he mused. Hard coffee meets a specific need for consumers. And what weve seen so far is its doing fantastic.
For dedicated beer drinkers, there is no cause for alarm. Coors will continue to invest in iconic brands that people know and love like Coors Light and Miller Light, Collins said. What it does mean, however, is that football fans across the country can expect a variety of alcoholic options to fit their tastes this Super Bowl Sunday, from the traditional to the quirky.
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