Looking ahead

Opinion

3 Dec

Michael Donaldson has some tips on trends to watch in 2025 for New Zealand’s brewing industry...

Trying to work out where the craft beer world will turn next is always a fraught exercise. Craft beer drinkers, being naturally curious, are always willing to explore new avenues of taste – and that demand for the ever-new has driven craft culture over the past 15 years.

But as that audience matures, it becomes more set in its ways. And in a contracting beer market the trick is to find new ways to talk to the already- converted and refreshing ways to connect to newer consumers.

IPA is king
It’s got to the point now where brewers, bless them, can slap “IPA” on any hoppy beer and get away with it. The beer’s ABV has nothing to do with it, as non-alcoholic and session IPAs prove.

IPA is now a marketing term as much as a style guideline. It’s a way of sending a message to the customer that “this is a hoppy beer”. In an era where the beer market is condensing, there were two areas of growth in the past year: zeroes and IPA.

Part of the IPA growth comes from beers that once might have been labelled as Pale Ales or American Pale Ales now being branded as IPAs. The most obvious example of this costume change is Behemoth Brewing renaming their flagship Chur Pale Ale as Chur IPA. The ABV on that beer changed by 0.1% – I’m sure they’ll sell more now that’s an IPA!

So expect more and diverse additions to the IPA family.

“The trick is to find new ways to talk to the already-converted and refreshing ways to connect to newer consumers.”

The road is forked
The growth areas of non-alc and IPA talk to another trend: the bifurcation of the beer market along ABV lines. At one end, people are buying way more non-alcoholic beer. Part of the reason is the novelty of it – just four years ago there were no non-alcs made by Kiwi craft breweries and now there are dozens of them.

Another reason non-alcs are popular is that they taste amazing these days, as good as any low alcohol beer. The fact that Good George Virtual Reality Non- Alcoholic Pale Ale won the trophy at the New Zealand Beer Awards in the “No and Low” class (which included 2.5% beers) says everything.

There’s the lifestyle choice too: non- alcs fit into a modern societal focus on wellbeing and health. But beer drinkers still crave experience, so at the other end of the spectrum we’re seeing a lot of high ABV (8% and higher) 440ml cans. Double IPAs, imperial stouts, dessert sours... these are experiential beers that people can enjoy on the odd night at home.

The trend of a split between low and high ABV drinking looks set to continue.

Clarity is back
If there was one ‘style’ of beer that swam against the tide in 2024 it was Bright IPA. Now, Bright IPA is not really a style (hence the inverted commas above), it’s more an adjective used to describe a beer that is not hazy.

After six years of hazy IPAs ruling the tastebuds, a raft of breweries have made a conscious effort to win back lovers of clear beer.

Bright IPA is more than just brilliant clarity though, it’s about judicious use of modern hops to create a juicy yet crisp IPA with low bitterness, sweet tropical flavours and serious drinkability. But Bright IPA also talks to another coming trend...

Post-modern beer
When all is said and done, there’s only so much you can say about beer in terms of broad style descriptors: IPA, Lager, Dark, and Sour just about cover it for 98% of beer sold in New Zealand.

This is a broad analogy, but just as car models are slowly moving away from numbers, letters and made-up names, towards aspirational adjectives instead – Escape, Adventure, Rush, Swift etc – we might soon see the same with beer.

In some ways it’s already started with the much-hyped launch of Royalburn Station’s (by way of Garage Project) Swifty and the tagline: “refreshing beer”. Nothing else. Just “refreshing” and “beer”.

Expect more breweries to start moving in this direction, with beer names reflecting occasions, experiences and moods.