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If you’ve been reading us this week, you may have already checked out our fearless Craft Beer Predictions for 2014 – Part I & Part II. And now, in an effort to totally hedge our bets, we thought we should maybe get a little more adventuresome with what we think might happen in the craft beer world this year.
Hey, we get that all these predictions are long shots – but if any of them do happen…we’re going to look like f**king geniuses!
1. The 2015 GABF Won’t Sell Out – After years of being one of craft beer’s most anticipated and in-demand events, festival fatigue will set in and ticket sales for the Great American Beer Festival will grind to a halt! In a desperate effort to generate some kind of interest, the Brewers Association will stoop to Facebook page giveaways and Groupon programs in hopes of bailing this disastrous situation out.
2. Consumers Will Finally Abandon The IPA – After years in the spotlight, America’s most beloved beer style, the IPA, will fall out of favor and be acknowledged as the cliché it has become. Sensing its plummeting coolness, craft beer fans will abandon the once-popular IPA in droves for newly anointed and now fashionable styles like Hefeweizens and Brown Ales.
3. Russian River’s Pliny the Younger Release Meets with a Collective Yawn – In yet another sign of IPA burnout, Russian River will release their once-vaunted Imperial IPA only to be met with massive consumer indifference. Panicked bar owners desperate to move the pricy brew will resort to tactics like “Pliny the Younger Wet T-shirt Contests” in hopes of turning things around- but to no avail.
4. Stone Buys The Universal Music Group – In late spring, Stone Brewing will make a long-rumored play and acquire the Universal Music Group – the largest music corporation in the world and home to a family of labels including Interscope Records and Capital/EMI. Stone’s Greg Koch and Steve Wagner will quickly assume power alongside Universal’s current CEO, a clearly blindsided and perplexed Lucian Grainge. Both companies will quickly realign as craft beer quite literally becomes “the new rock and roll” and terms like a “new release” take on potent new meanings. Artists like Eminem and Beck become frequent guests at Stone tap-takeovers and Greg Koch will re-release an earlier band project he recorded for Electra.
5. Time Warner Purchases American Craft Beer LLC – In a strategic move to own an important piece of craft beer’s lucrative publishing sector, New York-based multinational media giant Time Warner (TWI) will purchase AmericanCraftBeer.com. ACB’s Founder & Editor-In-Chief, Tom Bobak, will immediately move to a private Caribbean island and start smoking pot again.
