5 Beer Trends That We Can Keep in 2024

Now that we’ve had two weeks to recover from the previous month of comatose-inducing food and your aunt Sally asking you inappropriate questions about when you plan to bear children, we can take a moment and reflect on the year that has come and gone. 2023 continued the trend of pushing brewers to their absolute limits in an increasingly demanding customer feedback loop requiring more fizz, less alcohol, and more price-conscious beverages. You see, the customer is rarely right and not always happy when it comes to what a brewer should be brewing. After all, it is their job; they just make the beer. Here are five trends I saw in 2023 that I’d be happy to see stay around in 2024.

1. Cocktail Inspired Sours
   
   The Ready-To-Drink (RTD) market saw its first magnificent leap in popularity since the 90s in early 2022 (Yes, this includes Hard Seltzers). The IWSR cites that in 2023, the hype continued to grow, but only at 6% to a whopping 18.2bn market share. How have brewers responded to this bubbly bastard? The cornucopia of flavors being rapid-fire injected into lactic acid-based sour beers holds some contention; however, some breweries are taking a closer inspection and refining these sour ales to mimic very specific configurations closely resembling cocktails. You know what's better than having 4oz of your favorite moscow mule or negroni? Having a pint of it. Throw tiki into the mix and you’ve got breweries flexing their palettes on interpretations of Jungle Birds, Painkillers, Mai Tais, and more. Add in barrel aging and we’re stepping into a vector less traveled entirely. 
   
   
2. Non Adjunct Barrel-aged Beers
   
   Kentucky, the birthplace of bourbon, is commonly cited as having more barrels than humans that inhabit it. If the barrels could vote, do you think they would be Democrats or Republicans? Anyways, there has been a noted rise in the reuse of emptied spirit aging barrels for barrel-aged beers after some years of consumer decline. I blame the preceding decline in customer demand on a few factors, such as higher alcohol content, price, large format bottles, and brewers using the same cornucopia of flavors as their sour beers but under-delivering on those flavors in the finished product. The undisturbed maturation of a single beer in a barrel or even a blend of undisturbed beers in barrels, for me, is the superior product. This method involves patience and calculation but gains the added benefit of tannins from the barrel being expressed and a lack of the all-common gripe of the adjunct flavor, be it vanilla chocolate, cheesecake, or whatever “falling off” and no longer distinguishable in the beer. The nuance of using a specific barrel or lot of barrels can allow the brewery to craft a deeper story, constitute a spirit pairing, or even a joint venture. Scout and Scholar Brewing is doing the latter, which I’ll likely cover sometime later this year in their Infinity Barrel project.
   
   
3. Dry Hopped Lagers
   
   This one is so easy it could have easily been numbers 1-5 in this list. Nearly every beer drinker quests for the perfect absolute thirst-quenching desert island flow-like-the-rivers-of-Babylon Pilsner that can be enjoyed for its abundance and quality. Entering the ring, the best of both worlds, the Dry Hopped Lager, which can be admired by accomplishing all of the above with a touch of finesse. I appreciate the way a single hop can be featured in an otherwise clean neutral leaning flavor profile and it always scratches the itch for hop bitterness like that found in an IPA
   
   
4. 2 Packs and mixed six packs
   
   You have too much beer in the fridge. When are you going to drink this 6-pack from Maine that we picked up last summer on our hiking trip? I don't even have space for my diet cokes in the fridge - damnit, Andrew. We pay an awful lot of money to keep all this beer cold that you’re never going to drink, Susan. Yeah, well, I had to get a 4 pack of each because we were visiting, and I liked them all I tried a flight, and they were all good, but they don’t allow mix 4-packs or offer anything other than 4-packs I can’t even buy singles, but the bartender said I could get a case discount if I bought all six and oh also that bomber of coffee saison aged in a gin barrel great stuff yeah. Fin. 
   
   
5. Slow Pour Everything
   
   All hail the mighty side pull tap. This functional foam filler of a faucet can not-so-instantly transform your favorite lager beer into a whole new experience.  The side pull faucet allows the user to carefully control the flow rate of beer into your glass, creating large, thick, aromatic foamy heads and also increasing the smooth and creamy characteristics of the underlying product. This isnt about the foam mustache that you can give yourself, either. The full experience of fresh, unfiltered, unpasteurized beer poured from the proper faucet into well-rinsed glassware could very well be categorized as the pinnacle of enjoying craft beer. 

I’ve tried to keep open ears on feedback from breweries and consumers over the last year, but it’s more than likely I’ve missed a few of your favorite beer trends of 2023. Shout out below what you’d like to see continue into 2024.

 - David Satterly

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