Member content, so hopefully y’all are in the BA, but this is a really excellent article about mid year scan data trends from @BrewersStats https://twitter.com/brewersassoc/status/1200463238120529925?s=21

Couple takeaways for the “BUBBLE!” crowd, it is rough out there for well established brands.

The correct read of this is that all your volume comes from somewhere. The overall beer market is contracting and every beer you sell is one another brewery didn’t. Breweries need to be thinking about how they stack up with their peers.

(Side bar: if you are a brewery under five years old or under 5000 bbls, what are you doing trying to create a flagship?)

@beercruncher had an excellent post about how the success of seltzer in the market is an opening to talk to folks about different beer styles, which is a good take, and all the seltzer volume is basically coming directly out of light beer. http://www.beercrunchers.com/blog-20/my-hard-seltzer-is-half-full

I’m the first to call out folks for over generalizing about beer industry, but I sense significant naïveté around many breweries understanding of how they fit into this competitive landscape. I fear for folks who don’t think about it constantly.

On the flip side, I worry about the competition eroding our sense of community. I think the openness and friendliness of our industry (which is far from perfect) came out of the massive, macro-trend drive growth of the last decade and having to really compete is different.

That perception of “we all like each other” is valuable too, consumers like that our industry seems friendly and community oriented. There’s work left to do in living up to those values, and that’s made harder by the fact that we’re all competing for volume now.

I’m a huge believer that competition can bring out the best in folks, so hopefully slower growth drives folks to make better beer, expand their communities and take better care of their employees. None of that happens without active effort though.