Beer in the twenty-first century is a story of two opposite trends. On one side is extreme consolidation, with a few multinationals brewing a large share of the world’s beer. On the other is extraordinary variety, as craft brewers, new styles and a boom in alcohol-free options keep reshaping what people drink.
The age of the mega-brewer
Decades of mergers came to a head in 2016, when Anheuser-Busch InBev completed its takeover of SABMiller in a deal valued at around 100 billion US dollars. The combined company brews roughly a quarter of the world’s beer by volume, with brands from Budweiser and Stella Artois to Corona and many national lagers. Heineken, Carlsberg, China Resources Beer, Asahi and Kirin are other major players.
China has been the largest beer market by volume since the early 2000s, and its Snow brand is often reported as the best-selling beer brand on the planet. Growth has shifted toward Asia, Africa and Latin America, while consumption in many traditional markets in Europe and North America has flattened or declined.
The giants have also bought into craft. AB InBev acquired Goose Island in 2011, Heineken took over Lagunitas in stages between 2015 and 2017, and Constellation Brands paid about a billion dollars for Ballast Point in 2015, only to sell it a few years later. These deals fuelled a lasting debate about what “craft” really means.
The hazy IPA takes over
Among craft styles, the biggest story of recent years is the hazy or New England IPA. Instead of a bitter, clear beer, brewers aim for a soft, juicy, opaque one bursting with tropical and citrus hop aroma, often with oats or wheat for body and heavy late or “dry” hopping. The Alchemist’s Heady Topper, first brewed in Vermont in the early 2000s and canned from 2011, is widely credited as an early inspiration, along with New England breweries such as Hill Farmstead, Tree House and Trillium.
Once dismissed by some as a fad or a flaw, haze went mainstream. The Brewers Association added official hazy categories to its competition guidelines in 2018, and the Beer Judge Certification Program listed Hazy IPA as a style in its 2021 guidelines.
The non-alcoholic boom
At the same time, many drinkers, especially younger ones, are choosing to drink less or not at all. Non-alcoholic beer used to have a poor reputation, but better techniques have transformed it. These include gentle vacuum distillation and membrane filtration to remove alcohol, and special yeasts that make very little of it in the first place. Global brands such as Heineken 0.0, launched in 2017, and dedicated breweries such as Athletic Brewing, founded in the same year in Connecticut, have made alcohol-free beer one of the fastest-growing segments of the industry. In Germany, alcohol-free wheat beers have long been popular as sports drinks.
Why it matters
Today’s beer world is shaped by forces pulling in different directions: global scale and local character, tradition and fast-moving trends, the enjoyment of alcohol and the wish to moderate it. In the US and some other markets, brewery closures have lately begun to outpace openings, a sign of a maturing craft sector. Yet drinkers have more choice than at any time in history, and the range runs from a perfect Czech pilsner to a juicy hazy IPA to a flavourful zero-proof lager. The ten-thousand-year story of beer is still being written.