Has there been one standout beer style that has sold more than others in 2015? If so, why do you think this is?
Caps and Taps: Safe and steady Pale Ale still dominates in the beers that people want to drink. It’s a style that is accessible to people new to craft beer and offers different flavours from the mass market beers.
Hop Hideout: I’d say Berliner Weisse has been the beer style of 2015 – from Buxton’s Far Skyline to their collaboration with Omnipollo Stolen Fruit; Evil Twin’s canned version – Nomader Weisse, to Siren’s multiple different hopped versions of Calypso, The Kernel’s London Sour and Mad Hatter’s Club Tropicana.
It kind of defined a starting shift in peoples’ palates here, I think, and opened up the idea that ‘refreshment factor’ could come from something other than a lager or a pale ale.
Who’d of thought this historic sour wheat beer originating from Germany would have become the most appealing style….? Maybe all the sunshine we had this year helped!
I reckon the increase in independent UK beer festivals such as the Independent Manchester Beer Con, London Craft Beer Festival and Leeds International all helped too – as they’ve enabled people to try lots of different styles of beer and from lots of different breweries, helping them discover beer.
If I’m honest though I would say day in day out and the most popular style for us are India Pale Ales – they’ve become the go to beer.
Hopology: We all seem to love IPA. People have realised it doesn’t have to come from California & that it’s something a lot of British brewers can do very well. Marble Dobber, Kernel IPA or Axe Edge from Buxton are great examples and are bottle conditioned/live which many from the US aren’t.
Cave Direct/Beer Merchants: American Pales and IPAs continue their march, and lager is always going to be the big volume style which is great.
But there’s also been expansion in all kinds of areas that surprises everyone but us! Sour beers have been doing really well and we’ve expanded our portfolio of Belgian lambic brewers as a result. At festivals, more modern sours have also done very well, we work with Lervig who product some fantastic variations of Berliner weiss which go down a storm.
The reasons are that people’s palates have expanded as they search for something new. Where beer used to only taste mildly of malt and water, drinkers now understand the range that beer offers and want to push those boundaries.
BeerHawk: Pale Ales, and particularly IPA, continues to be our biggest selling beer style. Across 2015, we’ve also started to see beers and breweries from both Italy and Spain getting more traction. There’s a really interesting craft beer scene developing in both of these markets, and the breweries seem to be doing a great job of putting a local twist on to global trends.
The Brew Testament: Our top selling beer is The Kernel Table Beer (50cl). I think this is attributed to a combination of a few things. Firstly, there’s no doubt that there is some solid brewing to back up this beer – it’s simply delicious.
Secondly, it’s been a standout leader in the production of ales with lower ABV without any compromise on flavour, and our customers recognise that. Finally, as a company we take food just as seriously as alcohol. The lower ABV and flavour profile makes this very much a “food beer” that customers can enjoy in an entirely different environment.