Here is a chart of the latest style trends broken out by the top six selling styles, based on seventeen-month’s worth of sales as of May 18, 2008, courtesy of DBBB, the Domestic Brewers Bottled Brands. They publish the book, “The Essential Reference of Domestic Brewers and Their Bottled Brands” and have a website, which offers monthly online updates of the book.
The chart is based on IRI Data showing sales of beer from January 2007 through May 18th of this year by beer style. IRI is short for Information Resources, Inc., a company that surveys sales of beer (and everything else) from over 15,000 retailers (mostly groceries) in the U.S. As a result, their data is invariably skewed toward the national and regional brands since it doesn’t take into account direct sales and sales from small mom & pop stores. I used to get IRI data from almost every medium to large brewer who called on me when I was the beer buyer for BevMo. And while it’s not as accurate for craft beer in specific, it does give you a general idea of certain trends, especially when you follow it over a period of time.
Why do you think Pale Ales rose so high and then fell so quickly? Did everyone stop making pales when they ran out of hops…seems strange you wouldn’t see it in the IPA.
Ignore that comment I got my lines crossed
What it great to watch on these charts are the Seasonals (the red line). Look at May 20, 2007 and the last plot May 18, 2008. There is nice growth and it tells me that the interest in different beer styles (which I see as coming mostly from the craft segment) is on the rise.