After the Craft Beer Gold Rush

April 03, 2026

Story: Jordan Michelman

art: Jarett Sitter

Now that the release lines have died down and the hazy bros have moved on, craft beer culture in America is different—but that’s not such a bad thing.

Casual observers might be excused for thinking we’re living through the craft beer end times. Just about every major story about the beer industry in the last five years has been of the doom n’ gloom variety: a painful period of bursting bubbles and diminished popularity, declining production, and major closures. Tales of the doom loop increased in earnest by 2023, around the same time the beer industry itself began confronting the scale of the challenges ahead. From lauded publications shutting down to leading cashed-up brands falling into consolidation, the news has gone from bad to worse with no sign of stopping. Here in 2026 the onslaught continues, as the implosion of Brewdog made international headlines. You’d be forgiven for thinking that an extinction-level event threatens the very survival of craft beer itself.

And yet, in this Robespierre moment of public executions and recriminations, I’ve found myself unexpectedly drawn back into the surviving nodes of craft beer culture in America. Some of this is millennial nostalgia, and my own intractable desire to reengage with the things I found cool in my 20s now that I am very much no longer in my 20s. But after the hype has faded, now that the release lines have died down and the hazy bros have moved on to trendier pastures, craft beer culture in America looks more like how it did 20 years ago: rooms full of interesting and eccentric people, drinking stuff because they like it and think it tastes good.

“Overall far more people are aware today of craft beer than 10 or 20 years ago. And you have to count that as a win.”

At any given moment in America there’s an ambient drinking fad. Cosmos in the ’90s, PBR in the naughty aughties, brief vogues for novelty cocktails like the Espresso Martini or the Negroni Sbagliato, and the natural wine craze, now very much in decline. 

Craft beer’s cultural suzerainty peaked somewhere in the late 2010s with the explosive growth of sub-trends like the hazy IPA and the pastry stout. Breweries like Other Half, the seminal Brooklyn taphouse founded in 2014, burst onto the scene with three-hour release lines and frothy media coverage. By 2017 they’d been declared “the official beer of finance bros,” a hilarious concept in 2026—today’s finance bros care far more about what they’re wearing than who they’re drinking.

But Other Half has come out of the other side of these cultural waves with a clear head, and a path forward. “I tend to be optimistic about where beer is heading,” says Sam Richardson, one of the co-founders. “This is far from the first time craft beer has had a dip. And I think it’s starting to look up, or even inch slightly forward.” Richardson takes a refreshingly placid-casual longview of the situation, one that takes into account the inevitable Sartrean arc of trends: from avant garde to mass adoption to mundanity and back again.                

Richardson and his compatriots at Other Half knew there was a shelf life to the line hype and hazy buzz, he tells me. “But overall far more people are aware today of craft beer than 10 or 20 years ago. And you have to count that as a win.” 

He has a point. Once upon a time craft beer lovers longed for their chosen booze genre to be taken seriously, to be given pride of place at quality restaurants and to be more readily available. I think it’s safe to say this has happened in many, if not most mid-and-major conurbations across the United States: I can drink great beer everywhere in places like Portland and Brooklyn (no big shocker), but also in less paroxysmally trendy locales. I lived in Pittsburgh for a lost year in the early aughts, when it was still the dominion of Iron City; today it is a craft beer wonderland on par with any megalopolis, and a similar story can be told in places like Spokane and Grand Rapids, Wichita and Macon, Reno and Ronkonkoma. Craft beer exploded in popularity, and though the retraction was inevitable, the high water mark it left has fundamentally changed how we drink in America in cities large and small. In many ways, craft beer won. 

“Now that things have slowed down, it’s more about the communal aspect of beer culture.”

The first place I ever loved beer—the first place I ever loved any beverage—was at a bottle shop in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood called Bottleworks. It’s been open since 1999; I was through the doors a few years later, brought along by dudes I met in college a few years older than me who had recruited me to play bass in their band. They thought craft beer was cool; it had never occurred to me that any form of alcohol could be cool in the first place beyond its intoxicant properties. Somewhere in the digital ether, lost to the great Myspace server glitch of 2019, there is a photo of me performing at a house show in perhaps 2004 or 2005, with a bottle of Gulden Draak perched perilously atop my amplifier. 

“Five or six years ago the hype was just crazy,” says Harrison Riddell, who helps run Bottleworks today as the shop’s manager and jack of all invoices. “It’s not nearly as crazy now.” The line for new beer releases no longer runs 300 deep, and consumers are rarely limited to the old “1 per person” policies that dominated the bubble era. But what remains is a culture of beer drinkers that’s perhaps slower and more measured, but also conversely more thoughtful and meaningful. 

Bottleworks has a deep cellar, and its shelves are regularly stocked with cult stouts and vintage barleywines from revered craft breweries (including several dearly departed entities), alongside aged imported lambics and gueuzes from Belgium. The post-bubble milieu for beer drinkers is frankly more discerning. “People today are much more willing to sit down and talk about beer,” Riddell tells me. “When sales went through the roof, we were having trouble keeping up with orders. Now that things have slowed down, it’s more about the communal aspect of beer culture. I think that plays into survival, not just for the breweries but for us as a bottleshop.” 

I write about every kind of drink—cocktails and whiskey and rhum and Scotch and wine and mezcal and mineral water and N/A beer and coffee and so on—but for whatever reason, craft beer has jumped up and grabbed me unexpectedly again here in 2026. I’ve started going back into Bottleworks every time I’m in Seattle, and spending more time in the great surviving beer hubs wherever I travel: Toronado in San Francisco, Brouwerij Lane in Brooklyn, The Beer Temple in Chicago, and spots in Portland (where I live) like Beer Mongers, Belmont Station, and the mighty Horse Brass Pub, which has been a hub for the craft beer scene both domestic and international since the late 1970s. I love these places, but I especially love these places now that the proverbial party bus has left, and the regulars can look around, exhale, and go back to enjoying their favorite spot now that all the assholes are gone.

“I actually enjoy craft beer far more now that it is decidedly, avowedly no longer cool.”

It would be inaccurate, or at the very least disingenuous, to claim that these surviving hubs are somehow a font of craft beer’s reemerging cool. They seem to be regularly patronized by people who do not care remotely about whether or not what they’re drinking is cool in the first place, and appear to be immune (or at least profoundly bored and disinterested) in the prevailing postmodern demands of whatever passes for trendy in 2026. There’s usually a Sierra Nevada on draft, or a Russian River release, or some bottled Orval in one of the coolers. God, is it refreshing—a mindfully guarded bulwark of taste and care kept alight in our prevailing soulless increasingly AI-dependent slop society. It’s the same feeling I get when I visit true blue cocktail bars, the sort of places that blew up in the midst of the suspender-y “speakeasy” trend (shh! keep your voice down!) and have kept at it now all the same, as the cutting-edge work they pioneered has achieved more widespread acceptance. 

I think the millennial nostalgia of it all, the “after the gold rush” milieu in which craft beer now operates, may someday work profoundly towards the genre’s benefit. A recent viral TikTok trend centers “millennial optimism,” a kind of fetishing the last, final era in public life before the monoculture collapsed, and we all become functionally perma-addicted to our phones. The great Girls rewatch continues to trend; I never watched it, but between the craft beer and the third wave coffee shops, I lived a kind of version in real time.

Fifteen years later, craft beer has come in and out through the looking glass, and today I actually enjoy craft beer far more now that it is decidedly, avowedly no longer cool. I don’t think this is just because I wish I were 25 again—at least not completely—and I’m excited for more people to remember what they may have left behind in their past about what makes craft beer delicious and interesting to begin with, post-hype. “The great dream isn’t to make a beer that panders to Gen Z,” says Other Half’s Richardson. “The great dream is to keep making great beer for the next generation to discover. I have optimism. I think people will come back around.” 

Drink with us.

April 03, 2026

Story: Jordan Michelman

art: Jarett Sitter

Now that the release lines have died down and the hazy bros have moved on, craft beer culture in America is different—but that’s not such a bad thing.

Casual observers might be excused for thinking we’re living through the craft beer end times. Just about every major story about the beer industry in the last five years has been of the doom n’ gloom variety: a painful period of bursting bubbles and diminished popularity, declining production, and major closures. Tales of the doom loop increased in earnest by 2023, around the same time the beer industry itself began confronting the scale of the challenges ahead. From lauded publications shutting down to leading cashed-up brands falling into consolidation, the news has gone from bad to worse with no sign of stopping. Here in 2026 the onslaught continues, as the implosion of Brewdog made international headlines. You’d be forgiven for thinking that an extinction-level event threatens the very survival of craft beer itself.

And yet, in this Robespierre moment of public executions and recriminations, I’ve found myself unexpectedly drawn back into the surviving nodes of craft beer culture in America. Some of this is millennial nostalgia, and my own intractable desire to reengage with the things I found cool in my 20s now that I am very much no longer in my 20s. But after the hype has faded, now that the release lines have died down and the hazy bros have moved on to trendier pastures, craft beer culture in America looks more like how it did 20 years ago: rooms full of interesting and eccentric people, drinking stuff because they like it and think it tastes good.

“Overall far more people are aware today of craft beer than 10 or 20 years ago. And you have to count that as a win.”

At any given moment in America there’s an ambient drinking fad. Cosmos in the ’90s, PBR in the naughty aughties, brief vogues for novelty cocktails like the Espresso Martini or the Negroni Sbagliato, and the natural wine craze, now very much in decline. 

Craft beer’s cultural suzerainty peaked somewhere in the late 2010s with the explosive growth of sub-trends like the hazy IPA and the pastry stout. Breweries like Other Half, the seminal Brooklyn taphouse founded in 2014, burst onto the scene with three-hour release lines and frothy media coverage. By 2017 they’d been declared “the official beer of finance bros,” a hilarious concept in 2026—today’s finance bros care far more about what they’re wearing than who they’re drinking.

But Other Half has come out of the other side of these cultural waves with a clear head, and a path forward. “I tend to be optimistic about where beer is heading,” says Sam Richardson, one of the co-founders. “This is far from the first time craft beer has had a dip. And I think it’s starting to look up, or even inch slightly forward.” Richardson takes a refreshingly placid-casual longview of the situation, one that takes into account the inevitable Sartrean arc of trends: from avant garde to mass adoption to mundanity and back again.                

Richardson and his compatriots at Other Half knew there was a shelf life to the line hype and hazy buzz, he tells me. “But overall far more people are aware today of craft beer than 10 or 20 years ago. And you have to count that as a win.” 

He has a point. Once upon a time craft beer lovers longed for their chosen booze genre to be taken seriously, to be given pride of place at quality restaurants and to be more readily available. I think it’s safe to say this has happened in many, if not most mid-and-major conurbations across the United States: I can drink great beer everywhere in places like Portland and Brooklyn (no big shocker), but also in less paroxysmally trendy locales. I lived in Pittsburgh for a lost year in the early aughts, when it was still the dominion of Iron City; today it is a craft beer wonderland on par with any megalopolis, and a similar story can be told in places like Spokane and Grand Rapids, Wichita and Macon, Reno and Ronkonkoma. Craft beer exploded in popularity, and though the retraction was inevitable, the high water mark it left has fundamentally changed how we drink in America in cities large and small. In many ways, craft beer won. 

“Now that things have slowed down, it’s more about the communal aspect of beer culture.”

The first place I ever loved beer—the first place I ever loved any beverage—was at a bottle shop in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood called Bottleworks. It’s been open since 1999; I was through the doors a few years later, brought along by dudes I met in college a few years older than me who had recruited me to play bass in their band. They thought craft beer was cool; it had never occurred to me that any form of alcohol could be cool in the first place beyond its intoxicant properties. Somewhere in the digital ether, lost to the great Myspace server glitch of 2019, there is a photo of me performing at a house show in perhaps 2004 or 2005, with a bottle of Gulden Draak perched perilously atop my amplifier. 

“Five or six years ago the hype was just crazy,” says Harrison Riddell, who helps run Bottleworks today as the shop’s manager and jack of all invoices. “It’s not nearly as crazy now.” The line for new beer releases no longer runs 300 deep, and consumers are rarely limited to the old “1 per person” policies that dominated the bubble era. But what remains is a culture of beer drinkers that’s perhaps slower and more measured, but also conversely more thoughtful and meaningful. 

Bottleworks has a deep cellar, and its shelves are regularly stocked with cult stouts and vintage barleywines from revered craft breweries (including several dearly departed entities), alongside aged imported lambics and gueuzes from Belgium. The post-bubble milieu for beer drinkers is frankly more discerning. “People today are much more willing to sit down and talk about beer,” Riddell tells me. “When sales went through the roof, we were having trouble keeping up with orders. Now that things have slowed down, it’s more about the communal aspect of beer culture. I think that plays into survival, not just for the breweries but for us as a bottleshop.” 

I write about every kind of drink—cocktails and whiskey and rhum and Scotch and wine and mezcal and mineral water and N/A beer and coffee and so on—but for whatever reason, craft beer has jumped up and grabbed me unexpectedly again here in 2026. I’ve started going back into Bottleworks every time I’m in Seattle, and spending more time in the great surviving beer hubs wherever I travel: Toronado in San Francisco, Brouwerij Lane in Brooklyn, The Beer Temple in Chicago, and spots in Portland (where I live) like Beer Mongers, Belmont Station, and the mighty Horse Brass Pub, which has been a hub for the craft beer scene both domestic and international since the late 1970s. I love these places, but I especially love these places now that the proverbial party bus has left, and the regulars can look around, exhale, and go back to enjoying their favorite spot now that all the assholes are gone.

“I actually enjoy craft beer far more now that it is decidedly, avowedly no longer cool.”

It would be inaccurate, or at the very least disingenuous, to claim that these surviving hubs are somehow a font of craft beer’s reemerging cool. They seem to be regularly patronized by people who do not care remotely about whether or not what they’re drinking is cool in the first place, and appear to be immune (or at least profoundly bored and disinterested) in the prevailing postmodern demands of whatever passes for trendy in 2026. There’s usually a Sierra Nevada on draft, or a Russian River release, or some bottled Orval in one of the coolers. God, is it refreshing—a mindfully guarded bulwark of taste and care kept alight in our prevailing soulless increasingly AI-dependent slop society. It’s the same feeling I get when I visit true blue cocktail bars, the sort of places that blew up in the midst of the suspender-y “speakeasy” trend (shh! keep your voice down!) and have kept at it now all the same, as the cutting-edge work they pioneered has achieved more widespread acceptance. 

I think the millennial nostalgia of it all, the “after the gold rush” milieu in which craft beer now operates, may someday work profoundly towards the genre’s benefit. A recent viral TikTok trend centers “millennial optimism,” a kind of fetishing the last, final era in public life before the monoculture collapsed, and we all become functionally perma-addicted to our phones. The great Girls rewatch continues to trend; I never watched it, but between the craft beer and the third wave coffee shops, I lived a kind of version in real time.

Fifteen years later, craft beer has come in and out through the looking glass, and today I actually enjoy craft beer far more now that it is decidedly, avowedly no longer cool. I don’t think this is just because I wish I were 25 again—at least not completely—and I’m excited for more people to remember what they may have left behind in their past about what makes craft beer delicious and interesting to begin with, post-hype. “The great dream isn’t to make a beer that panders to Gen Z,” says Other Half’s Richardson. “The great dream is to keep making great beer for the next generation to discover. I have optimism. I think people will come back around.” 

Drink with us.