Craft Beer’s Hottest Trend Is a Style That’s as Mass as Can Be
Easy-drinking American-style lagers are having a moment.
By Tony Rehagen
June 9, 2023
In 2017, Florian Kuplent and his colleagues at Urban Chestnut Brewing Co. decided to do something outlandish: They brewed a better Budweiser.
The upstart St. Louis brewery had already spent six years persuading an audience of craft beer fanatics to put down their hoppy IPAs and try Urban Chestnut’s easy-drinking German-style lagers. They’d already sold locals on low-alcohol, unfiltered zwickels and floral and crispy Pilsners. (For the uninitiated, Pilsners are actually a style of lager that originated in the Czech city of Plzen.)
But to do an American-style lager, a sweet, pale beer whose mass-market appeal is extra bubbles and a marked lack of bitterness—and, many would say, taste? It seemed a rebuke to the self-seriousness of craft beer.
“We make beers we want to drink,” says Kuplent, who’d been a staff brewmaster at Anheuser-Busch InBev SA’s St. Louis brewery for more than seven years. “I had worked for the ‘big guy,’ and I was passionate that there was a lot more room for flavor and nuance in that style than people may think.”
Turns out, he was on to something. At Denver’s Great American Beer Festival in 2016, mere months before Kuplent untapped his Urban Underdog American lager (4.2% alcohol by volume, with slight citrus notes), there were 121 submissions for American-style lagers. Last year’s festival had 520 entries across four American-style subcategories, all elbowing for acclaim at what’s become the Oscars of brewing. Craft beer’s hottest trend is a style of beer that’s as mass as can be.
Urban Underdog has become a Midwest bestseller for Kuplent. It’s the same story across the US, with brewers pouring their skill and resources into making crisper, sweeter, lighter beers: at Odell Brewing Co. in Fort Collins, Colorado, with its crushable 12-packs of Lagerado (5% ABV) and at Creature Comforts Brewing Co. in Athens, Georgia—and soon Los Angeles—with its popular Classic City lager (4.2% ABV). Reasons include cost, market stagnation, health-consciousness and, perhaps, a bitter dose of IPA fatigue.
“Since the industry has slowed”—overall beer production was unchanged from 2021 to 2022—“brewers have a little more capacity to play with,” says Bart Watson, chief economist for the Brewers Association.
In ales, the yeast ferments at the top of the brew; but in lagers it ferments at the bottom, requiring cooler temperatures, longer tank times and more attention from the brewer. That time trade-off comes with an economic incentive: The average price of hops, beer’s bittering agent, has gone up from $4.38 a pound in 2015 to $6.10 seven years later, a 39% increase. Lagers use less hops.
At Exhibit “A” Brewing Co. in Framingham, Massachusetts, head brewer and co-owner Matthew Steinberg uses 2 pounds to 4 pounds of hops per barrel (at a cost of about $20 to $60) to brew IPAs, but for a lager he adds only a quarter pound to, in rare cases, a pound per barrel ($2 to $15).
“It’s an opportunity to sell a beer that costs less,” he says of his Everyday American lager (5% ABV), made in a style “that may be just as exciting to some people and show our versatility and creativity.”
And with sales of craft lager down—by 8.1% year over year for the week ending May 20, according to consumer insights firm NIQ—brewers have reason to level their ambitions (and upturned noses) at the biggest part of the American beer market: lighter lagers. The boom, says Watson, is happening in taprooms and behind the stats, with smaller brewers grabbing market share from national “craft” heavyweights that overindex on in-store sales, such as Boston Beer Co., which brews Sam Adams Boston lager, and Spoetzl Brewery’s Shiner bock.
The style is super sessionable, or easy drinking, too. In terms of taste and calories, American lagers are lighter and less alcoholic. (IPAs often register above 7% ABV.) Thus, bars tend to sell more pints to a single customer than higher-gravity ales or even fuller-bodied European-style lagers such as dunkels.
An added benefit: the chance to turn the tastes of Bud-guzzling holdouts on to more interesting brews.
“How did craft beer grow in the first place? By attracting people who wanted more flavor from their beer,” says Hagen Dost, brewer and co-owner of Chicago’s Dovetail Brewery, which specializes in the old-world styles from which today’s lighter lagers sprung. “Craft beer has reached as many people who like extreme bitterness as we can,” he says. “I love a good IPA. But if craft beer wants to grow, it needs to speak to the regular beer drinker and show them that beer can have more to it.”
