Earlier this week, our Industry All-Access subscribers received in their email inbox this week’s subscriber-exclusive article that Kate reported, parsing the latest industry economic data but reading beyond the surface for a deeper look at what’s really going on. We’ve all read the hyperbolic clickbait articles out there about craft beer’s demise, and for the first time in almost twenty years, we saw a net decline in operating breweries in the United States last year. But at the same time, we’ve been hearing anecdotally from a number of brewers such as Neil Fisher of WeldWerks, in episode 400, that they were growing despite the significant headwinds. This cognitive dissonance got us thinking about how data purport to tell certain truths, but that “truth” is limited by the nature of how data are collected. Craft beer in the United States is both big and small, but our primary sources of data address only the biggest channels of the craft-beer business, leading to distortions in perception that could potentially have damaging effects for craft beer as a whole.
With that in mind, Kate sought out some answers to the questions we had—does this meta-narrative we’ve been reading have truth to it, does it accurately describe the reality that craft brewers are facing, do other data that suggest different or more varied truths, and what can we take away to build a fuller picture of the current state of craft beer?
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