However, the state of alcohol purchasing says something larger about the American consumer. We’re seeing folks once again organize into two camps – haves and have nots.
Consumer demand for singular “sub-premium” beers is rising at the same time as high-end mezcal.
This has been accelerating since the 2008 "crisis" and got way worst the past few years. There is no middle, there's either premium to cater to the (mostly) white collar class who are now comparatively rich, and there's crap for the working class, who are now super poor.
Maybe I'm an outlier but the more high end beer/alcohol I buy, the more sub-premium beer I buy as well. That is buying more sub-premium means I've gotten richer.
I'll have a nice mezcal with a shitty bud light or whatever afterwards. If I don't have a high end drink then that's when I'll have something middle of the road like a local affordable craft or something and since it's affordable I don't need to buy a sub-premium beer to finish off the night.
Could it be people have just discovered better alcohol and are drinking that for the taste and then the budget stuff for the buzz? The masses may have discovered it's kind of an optimal strategy.
it was all free to the guests. the passage was in response to how good the miracle wine was to have tasted. it was the end of the night when they were running out of wine, so the expectation would be that they had already long finished off the good stuff. but here they are bringing out the best wine at the end of the shindig.
I was watching a Robert Kiyosaki talk with some podcast recently where he mentioned investing in Wagyu beef ranches I think. And he said something to the effect that the poor will stop buying hamburger, but the rich will suck the additional costs because they essentially are not stoic enough to go without was the vibe of his claim. So pretty much the division of essential and non-essential curves differently for different classes is how it sounds.
I don't have enough money to be investing in Wagyu beef ranches but I agree with that (especially if they really get cell based meat going, but even without just based on regs and consumer behavior RE animal cruelty). Eventually it'll be just premium meats vs... tbd (plant replacements, bugs, cell based meat off an assembly line)
The conclusion makes sense though I'm not sure it being a question of a kind of stoicism. From personal experience, if you have money, costs go up, and you get angry you're spending more, but you can afford it so you suck it up and pay (ironically, a bit stoic).
If you literally don't have the money, you have no choice but to change your behavior, so you go without.
Funny you brought up Kiyosaki (Rich Dad, Poor Dad author) since one of the lessons in the book was - the rich (wealth accumulators) are smart enough to not spend their money on luxuries such as expensive new cars, and presumably high-end craft beers.
Obviously this is wildly anecdotal and a laughably tiny sample size, but I have found myself moving back towards a few favorite cheap beers over the last few years. I just got kinda sick of heavy stouts and hop-bomb IPAs, and have found myself enjoying cheap watery pilsners more. I drink a lot of PBR completely unironically, and my favorite local "craft" beer is "Hilltop Lager" - which is sold in red and white tall cans clearly designed to ape the PBR look and feel a little bit.
I don't know that this is a counterpoint to TFA really, but I wonder if some degree of folks just getting sick of the craft beer craze could be a confounding factor.
If you grind your teeth/clench your jaw during sleep, consider trying a bite guard.
No more headaches for me.
(I got one when I had a couple nasty headaches during a period I didn't drink for a few months. I knew from my dentist I ground my teeth but that was what pushed me over the edge.)
It's popular for some reason for IPAs to have high alcohol (like 7% or higher), but there's been a recent trend in IPAs (and other styles) for "session" beers that have more normal ~5% levels. I know it's just a few percent, but I find two or three pints of a lower alcohol beer leave me feeling much better than the higher ones.
This is where I'm at. Pale Ales or Session IPA's both have lower calorie and lower ABV. Toppling Goliath's Psuedo Sue is fantastic. It's not cheap though.
The higher abv is because it allows the beer to obtain more hop flavor (not just bitterness) along with malt flavor. A classic American session IPA[1] will always (of course with few exceptions) be more bitter than a standard IPA and a double will be less bitter than a standard. However as you go up in abv you are able to get a lot more hop flavor in to bitterness. Only so much hop oil can isomerize without enough abv backbone.
[1] not hazys, bruts, east coast, cold or and other sub style. Just talking classic American IPA as made popular in the early 2000'
I’ve always like PBR & MGD (when I’m feeling more premium) and really dislike IPAs. It’s really nice to see local small brewers finally making their way into pilsners and lagers. I’ve had some really good ones that remind me of the Leinenkugel’s of yesteryear.
In the Phoenix area Huss and The Shop are knocking it out of the park with their lagers. Spotted Cow is still the best; even though it’s an ale, it drinks like a lager.
Similar place. I find over time I find I appreciate the lighter euro-lagers or pilsners most, and periodically some belgian non-trappist ales and german beers. Ales are heavier so I don't usually go for them, and "craft" beers generally disappointing.
Have shifted more to wine, but owing to being conscious of my health, I buy infrequently.
I got older so hangovers hurt more but there is definitely an over saturation of beers, brands, and bottles. I'm still loyal to some semi-premium brands when I can find them - but so many smaller breweries put out millions of different brands/flavors/types and I can't be bothered to make space in my brain to remember them (and I'm not interested in Untappd or similar to remind me of how bad my drinking habit is).
> I wonder if some degree of folks just getting sick of the craft beer craze could be a confounding factor.
Yup. I'm a (former) home brewer. I have quite a few friends who are current or former home brewers, too. We're all basically done with the craft beer trends at this point, preferring classic styles that are in the <= 5% ABV range.
If you had assets during the pandemic you got many good gifts, some once in a lifetime (those 1.95% mortgages).
If you didn't have assets, you got a check for $2000.
It really cannot be overstated enough the wealth divide that pandemic QE created. The way things are you have to inflate assets by $100 for $1 to make it down to poverty level hands.
> If you had assets during the pandemic you got many good gifts, some once in a lifetime (those 1.95% mortgages).
Exactly. Real estate doubled, tripled. Stock prices skyrocketed. Established stocks like Apple triple during the pandemic. It's mindboggling. That's after 12 years of continuous growth after the 2008 recession. Going off of assets, the past 15 years has been the greatest economic boom in human history.
I used to (like, 5 years ago) find a lot of $7 and $8 bombers that were pretty great, or $9 6-packs that were damn solid.
From my perspective it's not so much that I stopped buying mid-tier beer, as that it vanished and isn't there to buy anymore. Now I look at a $12 4-pack of beer that's not even that good and wonder if I should put the money toward a very-nice scotch instead....
I still buy from a few brands that I know well and that do deliver good quality at non-crazy prices, but there just aren't as many "yeah, sure, at that price I'll give it a shot" beers on the shelf. At least locally.
I've had this same experience. Every time I go to my local specialty beer shops, it's nothing but 4-packs that _start_ at $16. I've never even heard of most of them, and a large portion are just the really over-done trendy IPAs that every brand new brewery seems eager to produce. Maybe 20% or less of their offerings are what I'd call a solid mid-range 6-pack of beer.
Local markets vary, but I regularly see ~$1/bottle as a promotion price for "mid-tier" (aka premium) beers, or to give examples of brands: Corona, Stella, etc. (I'm not talking about stuff like PBR here). These mid-tier's can be had for $11.99 12-pack, 12 fl oz. The non-promotion price is closer to $18. Both the promotional price and not-on-sale price began noticeably ticking upwards in January. I haven't bothered with crafts unless I can get it on tap when I'm out. Paying craft prices for at-home enjoyment isn't the right value proposition for me.
This is just not true. The real wages and wealth of those the the 10th to 98th percentiles of income have all grown since the period prior to the financial crisis. The real wages of those in the 10th-20th percentile have grown the most.
Do you have a preferred source for this? I went down a rabbit-hole of googling and trying to evaluate how reliable the sources were and got pretty lost. I found several articles claiming to use data from the US Federal Reserve with conflicting interpretations.
What are you making that saves money? When I half-assed got into it (hasn't everyone, at least once?) it became obvious fast that even if I scaled up enough (including significant capital investment) that it wasn't more expensive than equivalently-good commercial beer, it'd only take a failed batch every two or three years to wipe out the savings, even valuing my time at $0/hr.
I've considered getting back into it to make mead and maybe cider, but mostly just because mead's expensive (here) and really good cider is usually imported and marked up like 4x what it would be back where it came from, which is usually England or northern France (back there, it's cheap—though I do doubt I can match theirs without turning it into a high-time-commitment hobby, since the method is part of what makes theirs so good, plus I'd have to find a source of the right kinds of apples), but the economics for beer didn't even come close to working out. Fruit and honey can also be fermented without some of the steps & equipment you need for beer, which helps a ton.
I just always have 5 gal of apple wine going. Apple juice, sugar, and EC118 are cheap and produce something that tastes good. Just throw it in a carboy with air lock and in 2 weeks you are done.
This is how me and my underage roommates did it in college :-) It was super cheap after the initial investment. Pretty sure we used a home depot bucket lol.
Depending where you buy your beer ingredients a very basic 5 gallon batch of 5.2%ABV blonde/pale ale (10lbs 2 row, 2oz of hops, dry yeast), would be around $0.55/12oz pour for someone in the us (priced from morebeer). Of course $0/hr for labor. It would be very easy to lower those costs 20%+ buying a slightly more bulk amount, or buying the grain from your local brewery. On the equipment side you can go all out and get a setup for $1-2k or go super basic for a few hundred dollars.
Wine is even cheaper and easier. Most wine kits come out to be around $3/per bottle. And only need about $100 in equipment.
I found it made more sense to brew 10 years ago. Back then craft brew wasn't as easy to find, so if I wanted something particular I'd have better luck making my own and sharing it with friends. Now I can go down to Whole Foods and have more options than I can fathom.
Cost-wise it just doesn't make much sense. A batch might be somewhat favorable in price for ingredients if you do all-grain, but if you factor in equipment cost and time cleaning up...
It depends on scale and stuff. Really fancy equipment can be a drag on any economy.
I have a 6 gallon stock pot for primary fermentation, or a large mash of beer ($30ish). I use a smaller kitchen pot for most of my batches of beer (1-2 gallons is a usual size for me). I use my grandparents old 3 gallon carboys and bottle capper. I also bought a used glass carboy 5gal for $20. Used beer bottles can be found for nothing through local Facebook groups and friends. I use screwtop wine bottles to save on cork costs. Gallon jugs are about $5 (you can also use these as carboys). So a low tech setup that can do 5gal batches can run less than $100. My initial setup was the stock pot ($30) and a 4pk of 1gal jugs ($20), and ballons ($2) for airlocks. That can give you enough room to make 3 gallons. A 5gal bucket and some strainer bags can be helpful depending on the recipes ($20ish).
Depending on the fruit wine I want to make, I can make it for between $3 and $15 per gallon at 18% ABV. Even for for beer, which admittedly can involve more equipment, I can make a case of NE IPA for about $16. That's probably about a third of the cost in the store.
The only additional beer equipment I have is a capper and a grain mill. The only reason I have the mill is that it was free. You can order your grain pre-milled.
And yes, I make mead, which as you said is where the real savings can come in. I also use my own honey so it's super cheap.
My wife got me one of those diy kits from northernbrewer for Christmas. I was able to produce almost 5 gallons of a perfectly drinkable IPA at 6-6.5%ABV with it. Five gallons is a LOT of beer. There isn't much labor to speak of, maybe 4 hrs total. You just have to be patient and wait, it took about 4 weeks for my batch to be ready.
I haven't worked it down to the penny but the initial kit is about $150 (which comes with a recipe kit) and then around $40-50 for additional recipe kits. On the other hand, my favorite beer, Manhatten Project Beer Co's Half Life, is pushing $12 for a 6 pack.
EDIT: if i just wanted to be inebriated though i'd probably just get THC gummies. That would be easiest and likely the most inebriation per unit money.
I've been tracking my costs for ~13 years. The cost here includes all equipment and ingredients over that time, including all of the unnecessary stuff that I bought for fun, like pH meters and titration gear.
It obviously matters what you brew and what you brew with. This is mostly pale ales and stouts. They certainly haven't all been great, but I've never dumped a batch, so there's no waste to account for.
There's weed/gummies, but also liquor and wine. And, with all the negatives around alcohol become more and more known, I think people just drink less. If someone is going to have 1 drink, they are probably more likely to have it be something better.
Weed is also much cheaper than beer in many states. I'm an almost daily smoker and a years supply costs me less than $300. Meanwhile when I was drinking more I would easily spend $100 a month on alcohol without even going to bars or restaurants. Makes a lot of sense to substitute in the face of budget tightening.
Let's see... my household gets roughly 3 cases of beer per month. Last price I paid was 16.52 for a case of Genny Light. All in, my beer costs around ~600 per year. Not to bad.
Idk what planet you're living on but every smoker I know spends closer to 300 a month on weed than 300 a year.
Unless youre smoking like a single puff on a 1 hitter once a day, or unless you are getting insane deals on ganj, this makes absolutely no sense to me.
100 in a month on alcohol seems about right if youre an alcoholic (or if you're buying your drinks at a bar)
The store near me sells 2 gram disposable vapes for $30 after taxes. Those last me two months or so if I'm only using them, so I could actually get my cost down more if I gave up flower. My alcohol costs were admittedly a lot of $3 a can craft beer which definitely adds up fast.
Tolerances vary wildly when it comes to weed. I know people who need literally 10x my "I want to be very high" dose to get sorta-high. Weed's expensive for them, but very cheap for me. I probably spend $400ish per year on it and have some almost daily (and our weed prices are nearly double what states with better markets are—ours was deliberately designed to allow political insiders to rent-seek).
> 100 in a month on alcohol seems about right if youre an alcoholic (or if you're buying your drinks at a bar)
You can hit $100/month fast without having that high an intake or buying like you're royalty. Good sipping liquor's hard to come by under $50/750ml, so, 50ml/day and you're probably over $100/month. The wine market's real hit-or-miss (and mostly miss) under $15/bottle (in the US) and a lot of what one might wish to experience, flavor-wise, barely exists at all under $20/bottle. Good beer has been moving toward four-packs priced well in the teens of dollars, single 12-ouncers at $3-7, and $15+ bombers, over the last few years.
Of course if you just want to get hammered and don't care what it tastes like, $100 will get you really far, that's true.
I'm happy that there's someone out there who isn't particularly experienced with alcoholism, genuinely, but your figures are very, very off
$100 a month on alcohol is like, 5-6 low tier cases of beer. That's just 5-6 beers a day. That's alcoholism to be sure, but the degeneracy goes way, way further.
If you work at a liquor store, you'll see the grandma who comes in 3x a week to buy a cheap plastic handle of vodka. Or the guy who buys a 12 pack and two shooters, every single day. Or the new mom who goes from buying 2 bottles of wine a week to 10.
In my town craft 4 packs of beer cost 15 dollars, or about 4 dollars a beer. I have 1 a night, which easily brings my cost over 100 a month. I don’t consider myself an alcoholic.
Liquor gets me drunker, faster, and usually with less calories. Beer and wine also have flavor profiles that, while broad, are still fairly specific. Liquor, OTOH, has a whole lot of options -- amaros, liqueurs, etc.
I never really liked the taste of beer all that much, but it's what everyone else drank, so it's what I drank.
I think that, over time, "people who don't like the taste of beer" are finding they are a silent majority. As more alcohol-but-not-beer options come to market, they keep buying those. I like Kombucha more than beer, now add slightly more alcohol and you have a suitable replacement.
Now imagine this process repeated across every imaginable beverage category that can be sold in stores, and the beer decline is easily explained.
How are alcohol and weed alternatives to each other at all?
Maybe every now and then you hear about people who don't smoke weed anymore because it makes them anxious or people who don't drink anymore because they "hate alcoholics", but I think they're firmly in the minority.
If you want something mood-altering more than you want the flavor, how's it not? I know a lot of people who've shifted toward weed while reducing alcohol consumption (or even cut it out all-but entirely!) for health reasons—almost no empty calories (IDK maybe a low-two-digit count for gummies, tops, if you use edibles?), far less damage to your body (especially with edibles), usually way fewer problems with hang-overs, and sleep is significantly less-disrupted. A whole lot of what used to be 6-8 beer hang-outs for us have become 3-4 beer (plus weed) hang-outs.
I could be in a bubble there, sure, but if so I bet it's a pretty big bubble. I'm sure some people prefer an alcohol buzz to being a bit high, since they aren't exactly the same thing, but they're in the same ballpark, enough so that I expect plenty of people find them alternatives to one another.
> If you want something mood-altering more than you want the flavor, how's it not?
Ah I think you mean it as a social device, so sure.
> I'm sure some people prefer an alcohol buzz to being a bit high, since they aren't exactly the same thing
Have you ever frequented bars and/or known serious alcoholics? I'm not anti-booze, but that's a whole different world. They may smoke weed too but are completely different people without the booze.
It’s not a bubble. My extended social circle has transitioned to fewer alcohol + weed too. Not just for health… weed alters your mood in … well, nicer ways. People find silly things funny and can open up a bit more. Alcohols effects are great in mild quantities (buzzed) but after that it’s no fun, the hangovers suck and you just don’t have the same kind of experience.
> It’s yet another indicator of our bizarro economy, where frivolous goods like air fryers are cheap but staples like eggs and meat are increasingly unaffordable.
An air fryer is no more frivolous than a toaster. We use ours as our toaster, toaster oven, and convection oven. It's incredibly useful.
Perhaps "frivolous" is the wrong word. But the effect he discribes in the linked article is a backwards pricing relationship between necessities (food, rent, housing) and non-necessities (TVs, air-fryers, etc.). This is possibly an example of Giffen Goods in effect [1]. Where as the price of an inferior good increases (ex. bread), poorer families are forced to buy more of that product and forgo more expensive alternatives (ex. steak or TVs).
I'd think that was a function of supply and demand to a large extent, people can forgo non-necessities and therefore the demand drops and the price follows that. For necessities not so much.
> But the effect he discribes in the linked article is a backwards pricing relationship between necessities (food, rent, housing) and non-necessities (TVs, air-fryers, etc.).
That makes sense. But I also think there are simpler explanations, which is that smartphones and TVs are sectors where a lot of effort continues to go into automation and price reduction, and there are still lots of gains to be made there. Those products are also not fundamentally energy-input sensitive - if anything, newer production methods tend to use less energy than previous production methods.
Food production is extremely sensitive to energy and fertilizer prices, which have also gone up significantly. You have to keep a chicken at a particular temperature, or it won't lay eggs. And also, food has just been very cheap for a long time, so it was already at high risk of price increases.
TVs are cheaper because you can do targeted advertising against them. I worked on this stuff for a bit in its infancy. This increases margin sufficiently to drop prices on the device itself. It's a pretty huge improvement for QoL for most Americans.
Interesting. My experience with air fryers has been that it doesn't do anything in particular any better than other appliances and those other appliances are more capable than the air fryer.
Big weekend roast? Nope. Make more than just two slices of toast? Nope. Reheat leftovers (other than fried junk food) without drying it out? Nope.
This is me. High Life is now my go-to. I guess the hop-bombs and the trending flavor-blast-du-jour that craft beer descended into just wore me out. And $0.50/can vs $2.50/can sure doesn't hurt.
My two cents - a lot of "crappy" beers are honestly pretty good, and a lot of trendy Hazy SpaceDust Double IPAs or Coffee Imperial Stouts brewed in Bourbon Casks just suck.
A simple Hamm's, Miller High Life, Modelo Negra, or Coors Banquet is pretty tastey, inoffensive, and great bang for your buck.
Also, a lot of beer snobbyists have now transitioned into Bourbon (f** taters for making it impossible to get Buffalo Trace at an affordable price), so that's also playing a role
I almost commented solely about the headline, but resisted. Indeed, while the article title is correct, hyphenation usage is so spotty among regular people that the chance of misreading the title is too high.
> That explains why the “below premium” segment was the only one to see an increase in demand in January compared to January 2022, according to the National Beer Wholesalers Association’s Beer Purchasers’ Index.
Haha. My Chem major roommate and I used to do this in college while hosting house parties. We'd do 3 rounds of filtration using a Britta purifier with Popov Vodka and fill up a sanitized Ketel One bottle with the result.
Popov, Smirnoff, and Ketel One are all owned by Diaego PLC and due to Federal regulations, all vodka is almost basically the same - excluding filtration of course.
It is all watered down industrially produced ethanol. Tito's puts theirs through a pot-still but its still the same corn ethanol created by some giant factory in the mid-west. If you want to make your own pot still you can take the bottom shelf vodka, run it through the still then dilute it back to 70% with distilled/RO/DI water and get a Grey Goose bottle from the recycling and keep refilling it. No one will ever be the wiser.
Is there anything to worry about the vodka pulling out of the filter, e.g. chemicals? This sounds like an interesting experiment, my (probably ignorant) concern would be that running the vodka though a filter designed for water may do something bad to it. Is it completely harmless?
I don't think it really has anything to do with the economy. It is changing tastes. Craft beer imploded by moving more and more to just silver cans with pretty stickers. All being "Hazy juicy IPAs". Seltzers were a refreshing change on this, but they get boring after a while.
In countries other than the USA (IE UK) "alcopops" which are bottled mixed drinks have always been very popular. In the USA we have a mesh of state and taxation issues with selling a pure mixed drink in a bottle that they end up becoming "malt beverages" which are essentially crappy approximations.
The latest trend in Gen Z is "Borgs" where people have some cocktail concoction in a jug. Beer is out of favor with younger people and has been for a while. The seltzer crowd went straight to Borg.
Beer prices have also skyrocketed (as mentioned in the article) which has further pushed the younger generation away from beer. Craft beer is the most approachable in my opinion as there are many styles or variants that "don't taste like beer", at least for my friend group in college it was easiest to get people into beer with fruited sours or barrel aged stouts.
In a strange way beer is headed toward becoming an elitist beverage given the cost.
The analysis in this article that "crappy beer" demand is increasing is wrong. The chart says that "An index of 50+ in a segment means volumes in that segment are expanding and an index below 50 indicates that volumes in that segment are contracting." The below premium segment went from 38 to 48, so volumes are still contracting, just slower than before. The import segment is the only one with increasing volume.
We used to drink $5 suitcases of Black Label in college. So much Black Label. Black Label all the damn time. We’d also drink whiskey because who the hell can drunk on Black Label.
I always appreciated good quality English, German, Belgian, and local micro brew.
But something horrible happened. The corner store which used to have a few 500ml bottles of German beer, an Orval, and a Sam Smiths restocked into a wall of brightly colored IPAs and Seltzers.
All of these me toos are so unnecessary. If you are on the West Coast it is the annual run on Pliny the Younger. Find it on tap, enjoy it. If you miss it, just pick up a Pliny. Its the only IPA i’ll buy.
So beer should not cost double digits. Find your local deal and buy it. In San Francisco corner stores have Trumer for cheap. In Texas every HEB has Shiner.
Beer to me is better water. I don’t agonize of Citra hops. I just drink it.
It is curious that e.g. Augsburger beer disappeared from local shelves about 25 years ago, and that I haven't seen Ballantine XXX or IPA in a while. But I gather that they are still out there.
What happens when you underpay and under-invest in people from cradle to grave: they don't start families, they aren't happy, aren't employed, aren't buying things, and don't have much to celebrate. Instead, it's budget booze and handles of Gallo.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 190 ms ] threadI'll have a nice mezcal with a shitty bud light or whatever afterwards. If I don't have a high end drink then that's when I'll have something middle of the road like a local affordable craft or something and since it's affordable I don't need to buy a sub-premium beer to finish off the night.
Could it be people have just discovered better alcohol and are drinking that for the taste and then the budget stuff for the buzz? The masses may have discovered it's kind of an optimal strategy.
John 2:10
> “A host always serves the best wine first,” he said. “Then, when everyone has had a lot to drink, he brings out the less expensive wine..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRecWSp4VFg
Same with Natty Light btw - that's just Bud Light.
Then again, as others in this thread have pointed out; the market is rather saturated with gross $12 4-packs. I've been suckered by a few.
If you literally don't have the money, you have no choice but to change your behavior, so you go without.
I don't know that this is a counterpoint to TFA really, but I wonder if some degree of folks just getting sick of the craft beer craze could be a confounding factor.
No more headaches for me.
(I got one when I had a couple nasty headaches during a period I didn't drink for a few months. I knew from my dentist I ground my teeth but that was what pushed me over the edge.)
[1] not hazys, bruts, east coast, cold or and other sub style. Just talking classic American IPA as made popular in the early 2000'
In the Phoenix area Huss and The Shop are knocking it out of the park with their lagers. Spotted Cow is still the best; even though it’s an ale, it drinks like a lager.
Have shifted more to wine, but owing to being conscious of my health, I buy infrequently.
I got older so hangovers hurt more but there is definitely an over saturation of beers, brands, and bottles. I'm still loyal to some semi-premium brands when I can find them - but so many smaller breweries put out millions of different brands/flavors/types and I can't be bothered to make space in my brain to remember them (and I'm not interested in Untappd or similar to remind me of how bad my drinking habit is).
Yup. I'm a (former) home brewer. I have quite a few friends who are current or former home brewers, too. We're all basically done with the craft beer trends at this point, preferring classic styles that are in the <= 5% ABV range.
If you didn't have assets, you got a check for $2000.
It really cannot be overstated enough the wealth divide that pandemic QE created. The way things are you have to inflate assets by $100 for $1 to make it down to poverty level hands.
:s/\<created\>\.$/exacerbated./
The underlying causes go back further than Roger & Me.
I got that for doing absolutely nothing.
Exactly. Real estate doubled, tripled. Stock prices skyrocketed. Established stocks like Apple triple during the pandemic. It's mindboggling. That's after 12 years of continuous growth after the 2008 recession. Going off of assets, the past 15 years has been the greatest economic boom in human history.
From my perspective it's not so much that I stopped buying mid-tier beer, as that it vanished and isn't there to buy anymore. Now I look at a $12 4-pack of beer that's not even that good and wonder if I should put the money toward a very-nice scotch instead....
I still buy from a few brands that I know well and that do deliver good quality at non-crazy prices, but there just aren't as many "yeah, sure, at that price I'll give it a shot" beers on the shelf. At least locally.
Are they not mid tier?
(inexplicably less per can than the 12 pack right above it)
It’s just like everyone who knows a recession is just around the corner. Hard to support with evidence but it’s the vibe du jour.
I've considered getting back into it to make mead and maybe cider, but mostly just because mead's expensive (here) and really good cider is usually imported and marked up like 4x what it would be back where it came from, which is usually England or northern France (back there, it's cheap—though I do doubt I can match theirs without turning it into a high-time-commitment hobby, since the method is part of what makes theirs so good, plus I'd have to find a source of the right kinds of apples), but the economics for beer didn't even come close to working out. Fruit and honey can also be fermented without some of the steps & equipment you need for beer, which helps a ton.
Wine is even cheaper and easier. Most wine kits come out to be around $3/per bottle. And only need about $100 in equipment.
My very basic setup is less than $100.
My first wine setup was under $55, and could still be under $75 today.
Cost-wise it just doesn't make much sense. A batch might be somewhat favorable in price for ingredients if you do all-grain, but if you factor in equipment cost and time cleaning up...
I have a 6 gallon stock pot for primary fermentation, or a large mash of beer ($30ish). I use a smaller kitchen pot for most of my batches of beer (1-2 gallons is a usual size for me). I use my grandparents old 3 gallon carboys and bottle capper. I also bought a used glass carboy 5gal for $20. Used beer bottles can be found for nothing through local Facebook groups and friends. I use screwtop wine bottles to save on cork costs. Gallon jugs are about $5 (you can also use these as carboys). So a low tech setup that can do 5gal batches can run less than $100. My initial setup was the stock pot ($30) and a 4pk of 1gal jugs ($20), and ballons ($2) for airlocks. That can give you enough room to make 3 gallons. A 5gal bucket and some strainer bags can be helpful depending on the recipes ($20ish).
Depending on the fruit wine I want to make, I can make it for between $3 and $15 per gallon at 18% ABV. Even for for beer, which admittedly can involve more equipment, I can make a case of NE IPA for about $16. That's probably about a third of the cost in the store.
The only additional beer equipment I have is a capper and a grain mill. The only reason I have the mill is that it was free. You can order your grain pre-milled.
And yes, I make mead, which as you said is where the real savings can come in. I also use my own honey so it's super cheap.
I haven't worked it down to the penny but the initial kit is about $150 (which comes with a recipe kit) and then around $40-50 for additional recipe kits. On the other hand, my favorite beer, Manhatten Project Beer Co's Half Life, is pushing $12 for a 6 pack.
EDIT: if i just wanted to be inebriated though i'd probably just get THC gummies. That would be easiest and likely the most inebriation per unit money.
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Hm. Nope.
100 in a month on alcohol seems about right if youre an alcoholic (or if you're buying your drinks at a bar)
> 100 in a month on alcohol seems about right if youre an alcoholic (or if you're buying your drinks at a bar)
You can hit $100/month fast without having that high an intake or buying like you're royalty. Good sipping liquor's hard to come by under $50/750ml, so, 50ml/day and you're probably over $100/month. The wine market's real hit-or-miss (and mostly miss) under $15/bottle (in the US) and a lot of what one might wish to experience, flavor-wise, barely exists at all under $20/bottle. Good beer has been moving toward four-packs priced well in the teens of dollars, single 12-ouncers at $3-7, and $15+ bombers, over the last few years.
Of course if you just want to get hammered and don't care what it tastes like, $100 will get you really far, that's true.
$100 a month on alcohol is like, 5-6 low tier cases of beer. That's just 5-6 beers a day. That's alcoholism to be sure, but the degeneracy goes way, way further.
If you work at a liquor store, you'll see the grandma who comes in 3x a week to buy a cheap plastic handle of vodka. Or the guy who buys a 12 pack and two shooters, every single day. Or the new mom who goes from buying 2 bottles of wine a week to 10.
I probably spend around 100 a month and I would be clinically considered an alcoholic.
I think that, over time, "people who don't like the taste of beer" are finding they are a silent majority. As more alcohol-but-not-beer options come to market, they keep buying those. I like Kombucha more than beer, now add slightly more alcohol and you have a suitable replacement.
Now imagine this process repeated across every imaginable beverage category that can be sold in stores, and the beer decline is easily explained.
Maybe every now and then you hear about people who don't smoke weed anymore because it makes them anxious or people who don't drink anymore because they "hate alcoholics", but I think they're firmly in the minority.
I could be in a bubble there, sure, but if so I bet it's a pretty big bubble. I'm sure some people prefer an alcohol buzz to being a bit high, since they aren't exactly the same thing, but they're in the same ballpark, enough so that I expect plenty of people find them alternatives to one another.
Ah I think you mean it as a social device, so sure.
> I'm sure some people prefer an alcohol buzz to being a bit high, since they aren't exactly the same thing
Have you ever frequented bars and/or known serious alcoholics? I'm not anti-booze, but that's a whole different world. They may smoke weed too but are completely different people without the booze.
An air fryer is no more frivolous than a toaster. We use ours as our toaster, toaster oven, and convection oven. It's incredibly useful.
Price change over 2022 [2]
> Smartphones, 23.4% cheaper.
> Televisions, 17.9% cheaper.
> Bread, 16.2% more expensive.
> Eggs, 59.6% more expensive.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good [2] https://www.freightwaves.com/news/bizarro-inflation-is-makin...
That makes sense. But I also think there are simpler explanations, which is that smartphones and TVs are sectors where a lot of effort continues to go into automation and price reduction, and there are still lots of gains to be made there. Those products are also not fundamentally energy-input sensitive - if anything, newer production methods tend to use less energy than previous production methods.
Food production is extremely sensitive to energy and fertilizer prices, which have also gone up significantly. You have to keep a chicken at a particular temperature, or it won't lay eggs. And also, food has just been very cheap for a long time, so it was already at high risk of price increases.
Big weekend roast? Nope. Make more than just two slices of toast? Nope. Reheat leftovers (other than fried junk food) without drying it out? Nope.
https://youtu.be/FXonFrCViJw
He has lots of good air fryer recipes.
Everything is fine. People are just celebrating more: sales of the champagne of beers is increasing.
A simple Hamm's, Miller High Life, Modelo Negra, or Coors Banquet is pretty tastey, inoffensive, and great bang for your buck.
Also, a lot of beer snobbyists have now transitioned into Bourbon (f** taters for making it impossible to get Buffalo Trace at an affordable price), so that's also playing a role
Compound adjectives are not great in article titles.
> That explains why the “below premium” segment was the only one to see an increase in demand in January compared to January 2022, according to the National Beer Wholesalers Association’s Beer Purchasers’ Index.
Popov, Smirnoff, and Ketel One are all owned by Diaego PLC and due to Federal regulations, all vodka is almost basically the same - excluding filtration of course.
In countries other than the USA (IE UK) "alcopops" which are bottled mixed drinks have always been very popular. In the USA we have a mesh of state and taxation issues with selling a pure mixed drink in a bottle that they end up becoming "malt beverages" which are essentially crappy approximations.
The latest trend in Gen Z is "Borgs" where people have some cocktail concoction in a jug. Beer is out of favor with younger people and has been for a while. The seltzer crowd went straight to Borg.
In a strange way beer is headed toward becoming an elitist beverage given the cost.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/611714/marijuana-use-dur...
I always appreciated good quality English, German, Belgian, and local micro brew.
But something horrible happened. The corner store which used to have a few 500ml bottles of German beer, an Orval, and a Sam Smiths restocked into a wall of brightly colored IPAs and Seltzers.
All of these me toos are so unnecessary. If you are on the West Coast it is the annual run on Pliny the Younger. Find it on tap, enjoy it. If you miss it, just pick up a Pliny. Its the only IPA i’ll buy.
So beer should not cost double digits. Find your local deal and buy it. In San Francisco corner stores have Trumer for cheap. In Texas every HEB has Shiner.
Beer to me is better water. I don’t agonize of Citra hops. I just drink it.