Brew Trends to Look Out for in 2023
Good, comforting, refreshing brews, including increasingly sought-after craft brews/distilleries, will never go out of style.
In addition, the recent years of uncertainty, chaos, and loss have impacted this segment significantly, changing lifestyles, boosting health concerns, and increasing food and beverage nostalgia.
This retrospective aspect has boosted interest in traditional, high-quality lagers and artisanal products, with craft beers helping to address growing health and sustainability directions and the strongly emerging demand for low or no-alcohol beers, the latter allowing relaxing day drinking on the weekends and during sports, lower calorie enjoyment, and safer driving.
In addition, consumers appear to be moving away from hoppy, heavy products towards lighter options.
So, look out for crisp style lagers, including cask ale, paler pilsners and helles, refreshing kölsch, and subtler Polotmavy and tmavé lagers. According to Drizly data, light lager sales are up two percentage points year-on-year from 2020 to 20211.
India Pale Ales (IPAs)
IPAs are perennial, always on tap, and endlessly top-selling, with some polarization between moderate, familiarly drinkable alcohol by volume (ABV) versus more novel and bold flavor experiences.
Moreover, while preference was about brightness and color, consumers now also look for IPAs and craft brews/distilleries offering softer, fruitier, juicier flavors and appealing aromas. Likely to trend into 2023 are “smoothie sours” – fruited sours that are juicy but without the bite of a genuine sour beer2.
However, innovative brewers should ensure mass appeal for product longevity.
Reliable Taste and Buzz Without the Alcohol
The global pandemic, increasing health concerns, the sober-curious movement, and the emergence of sobercations have helped fuel demand for no or low-alcohol beer options without flavor and mouthfeel compromise.
According to Drizly, while still small, the category growth is significant, having increased by 41% year on year3.
Where the segment began with around five craft non-alcoholic products in 2017, the market has grown to approximately 50 players with numerous beer styles, highlighting the strengthening popularity of this segment. It’s not only teetotalers consuming the category; use extends to occasional alcohol drinkers and reducers.
In addition, while non-alcoholic options of yesteryear may have fallen short on taste, newer brewing methods and advances have given the category a boost, yielding higher quality, better textured, and tasting beers.
Seasonal Flavor Opportunities
With holidays and beer fests always happening, craft /distilleries and mainstream seasonal beer flavors remain a bullet-proof consumer preference.
For example, producing Octoberfest, Pumpkin, and Iron Hill Brewery’s Reindeer’s Revenge lagers offers consumers fuller-bodied, higher-ABV options to celebrate. In addition, these novelty brews help provide the season’s nostalgic tastes and emotional benefits, including flavors such as apple cider, pumpkin pie, caramel, cinnamon, pine, and nuts.
Your warm and welcoming seasonal brews can help see consumers through winter with lighter and more refreshing options, such as shandies, keeping them cool and satisfied through the summer.
Beer: An Urgent Need for Creative Innovation
Even with an estimated 9,247 craft brewers in the U.S.4, It’s not all good news, with spirits sales catching up with beer.
At the same time, according to Union’s Steve Lewis, “we’re in the thick of a beer renaissance.”
Hence, the need for urgent research and development in the beer category will drive creative development over the few years, with innovations such as low-cal craft and gluten-free beer predicted.
Also in the pipeline are strategic collaborations, exciting and novel beer and food combinations – think nut, pickle, or even donut beers, and spirits-crossover beers – think vodka sour or margarita beers.
Creating these innovations while respecting increasing consumer health demands will rely on intense, natural flavor, aroma, and mouthfeel ingredients, such as those from Advanced Biotech.
Rely on Advanced Biotech for Mouthwatering Beer Innovations
Advanced Biotech produces an extensive range of natural, pure, and EU-certified flavor and aroma molecules, ideal for creating cozily familiar or intriguingly unique full-bodied alcoholic, light, low, or non-alcoholic beer products.
Please contact us to sample our hops and alcohol flavor-enhancing oleoresins, natural aromatics, distillates, and cooling and refreshing Koolada.
1 https://bevalcinsights.com/
2 https://beveragedynamics.com/2022/10/24/the-top-beer-trends-for-2022-23/
3 https://bevalcinsights.com/
4 https://learn.uvm.edu/blog/blog-business/top-10-key-takeaways-from-the-2022-craft-brewers-conference