I am told the beer scene was completely different in the 1980s. Most places offered Budweiser or Miller. If you were lucky, you could get a Heineken, Sam Adams, or a Guinness.

Today, you can get a better selection at a train station. At Chicago’s Union Station you can get at least 10 craft beers, and you can even carry the bottle on the train to ride in style.

The number of breweries in America has exploded. According to the Brewers Association, there were less than 200 breweries about 30 years ago. Now there are over 3,400 breweries, and growing.

But there’s another trend that merits attention. Beer has long been considered a cheap and watery drink to buy in volume and chug while playing beer pong. Why would anyone pay $50 for a bottle of beer when you can get 100 cans for the same price?

Craft brewers hope to change the image, and in many ways, they are turning beer into wine. Today we pair wine with fine dining and sip it during an art exhibition. So it might surprise you to learn that wine was not always considered a sophisticated drink. For most of history, drinking wine was a chore, a necessity to imbibe to avoid contaminated water.

People still drink cheap wine to get intoxicated. But if good wine can become a luxury drink, so can good beer. And ultimately if people perceive beer differently, then they might be willing to pay hundreds for a nice bottle.

This post is a case study about the strategic ways craft beer is emulating wine culture.

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"All will be well if you use your mind for your decisions, and mind only your decisions." Since 2007, I have devoted my life to sharing the joy of game theory and mathematics. MindYourDecisions now has over 1,000 free articles with no ads thanks to community support! Help out and get early access to posts with a pledge on Patreon. .

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1. Pairing With Food



image by 5chw4r7z. CC BY-SA 2.0

Why are people willing to pay $100 for a bottle of wine they’ve never tried? There’s a lot of game theory to this!

Most people do not have discerning tastes in wine. However, they are willing to spend on a nice bottle if they can be assured the bottle is actually good. If a restaurant tells them to buy an expensive bottle, they would be naturally suspicious. But if a credible expert can recommend the bottle, that changes the game.

Wine has partly solved the problem with the role of a sommelier. This is an expert who helps develop wine lists and also advises customers on the best wines to pair with their food. Earning the sommelier certification is difficult and requires tests like being able to tell the year and region for a wine from a blind tasting.

Economically, the sommelier is a strategic move to re-assure customers that (1) the wine list is up to par, (2) that an expert has personally recommended a choice, and (3) more expensive wines have some reason for their price, like exclusivity.

With the number of craft beers exploding, there is a market for experts in beer. Unlike wine, there is no single distinction for a beer sommelier. In America there is a cicerone distinction which certifies expertise in beer and requires similar knowledge of beer styles from blind tastings.

Even though beer sommeliers are not popular yet, restaurants have been pushing towards pairing beers with food. When people spend $50 on a dinner, they are more likely to buy a $10 glass of beer. If an expert certified the drink list and recommended a particular bottle, perhaps people would be to spend $50 or $100 on a bottle of beer too.

2. Barrel-Aged Beer

If you can age wine in barrels, you can age beer in barrels. One of the striking trends in beer turning into wine is imitating the physical production.

The pictured beers are variants of Bourbon County Stout from Goose Island, a Chicago brewery. These beers were all limited production, aged in bourbon barrels to give a distinctive smoky flavor, and sold in 650 mL bomber bottles that are close in size to the standard 750 mL of a wine bottle. Two more wine-like characteristics are an alcohol content around 12% and a retail price around $15-$20. The green label was a special one-off production that was priced around $50. Bourbon County Stout variations are so popular, however, you are unlikely to find them in stores.

The beers are truly innovative in their flavors. The two most popular varieties are the orange label, a coffee variation, and a white label, a vanilla variation. The leftmost dark red label is a backyard rye aged with fresh mulberries, marionberries, and boysenberries. The blue label is proprietor’s aged with cassia bark (like cinnamon), cocoa nibs, panela and coconut Water. The darker red label is bramble rye, aged with raspberries and blackberries. The green label is the rare variation, and it was aged in Pappy Van Winkle bourbon barrels.

But craft beer is not only capitalizing on different styles like wine. It is also marketing that yearly batches have different tastes.

3. Beer Vintage

Dark Lord is a beer from 3 Floyds Brewery in Munster, Indiana. You cannot buy it in stores. You have to get a ticket and then physically visit the brewery the day of the titular beer festival (admission was $40 this year and tickets sold out in seconds). The ticket gives you the right to purchase a 4 bottle allotment of Dark Lord for around $15 a bottle.

On site, you get a lottery ticket. If you are fortunate to reveal a “lucky ticket” (ala Willy Wonka), then you can buy the most limited production variations like Vanilla Bean Dark Lord, which is aged in bourbon barrels and infused with vanilla beans.

The Dark Lord bottle is sealed with wax, and every year they use a different color of wax. In this way, Dark Lord is like a wine that has a new vintage every year. And just like people age wine bottles, there is a trend to age beer.

Beer aficionados sometimes have “vertical” tastings where they compare different years of the same beer.

On rare occasion, you can enjoy “vertical” tastings in at special beer events. What this means is brewers have taken note that people enjoy this, so they are saving kegs of highly demanded beers to sell a year or a few years later.

4. Beer Cellars



image by David Woo. CC BY-ND 2.0

So if you’re buying barrel-aged beers and saving up vintages you like, where exactly are you going to store all of them? In a beer cellar of course!

People can spend a lot of money on wine cellars to keep the temperature and humidity in a specified range. Beer cellars are usually more like extra space in a dark area of a basement or a cool closet.

For now, beer cellars are typically something a single guy accidentally ends up with after buying too much beer. I can see the craft beer industry working to raise the status of beer cellars so they are more respectable like wine cellars.

5. Beer Futures

Have you ever tried a wine in its barrel, a year before it’s bottled? Some wineries offer a chance to buy the wine in this early stage in what is called a wine future. You pay for the wine when you taste it in the barrel, at a stated price, and then you collect it when it’s bottled a year or so later. The wine future is a gamble because no one is certain how the wine will ultimately taste. The appeal is you can lock in a cheap price if the wine turns out to be good. Wineries enjoy the cash flow and the hedge against a falling price if the wine does not mature as expected.

Breweries are taking note and implementing similar beer futures. You pay an early deposit on a beer, before it is bottled, and you are guaranteed delivery. Since beer production is more predictable–there are no yearly grape variations to worry about–the idea is less about gambling on a beer and more about locking in a price and purchase quantity for a beer in high demand that will sell out in stores.

But how will you know which beers are good to buy?

6. Beer Ratings and Awards

A simplistic view is that wine ratings help the average person pick a bottle of wine off the shelf in a supermarket. A more cynical view is that wine ratings help the bottle of wine sell itself to people. In either case, wine ratings are a way for higher quality wines to distinguish themselves, a textbook case of the economic theory of signaling.

It’s not just important that a wine is good. Everyone has to know that the wine is good for the wine’s reputation to mean anything.

Beer ratings serve a similar purpose and will be more important to educate customers on why a $50 bottle is worth it.

Currently most beer ratings are community driven with people voting on which beers they like. You can check out ratings on beeradvocate, which is my personal choice. There are other sites like ratebeer or Untappd.

There are also beer awards that are similar to wine awards, and sometimes beers will market they are award winning (most notably, Pabst Blue Ribbon is so named for an award from the 1893 World Expo in Chicago).

It’s An American Thing, For Now

This article is largely American-centric with trends at breweries including Goose Island, 3 Floyds, Dogfish Head, Boston Beer Company (Sam Adams), Stone Brewing, Russian River, Founders Brewing, Firestone Walker, and a bunch of other breweries.

I don’t want to overstate how new the trend is, however, or say it’s only American. It is true that barrel-aged were common before Prohibition, as beer was stored in barrels. Also, there are many European beers that can be aged, including the Trappist monastery beers of Chimay, Rochefort, or Westvleteren Brewery.

But things like the German purity law, that limit how beer is made, have put a cramp on innovation. So when the American Stone Brewery planned to open in Berlin, that is a sign of the times.

Enjoy Your Beer-Wine

It will take time for attitudes to shift. I have had numerous experiences where people simply disregard beer because of its long history of being cheap. So for now, it’s important to be strategic in what you serve.

Remember, almost no product is good on its merits alone. A great product has the common knowledge that everyone knows it’s great, everyone knows that everyone knows it’s great, and so on.

For example, if you open up a bottle of Blue Label, everyone knows it’s a luxury good and will show gratitude. That’s because Johnnie Walker has taken great lengths to market the $200 bottle scotch as a luxury good. If you open up a $50 bottle of beer–which is equally expensive on a per-drink basis–you might get people who say “oh I’m not into beer.” They probably will not remember the name of the beer or feel the same way. Craft breweries are not at the same level of great scotch or wine yet.

But there is no need to focus on this deficiency. Look at the pint glass tulip glass as half-full: there are so many more craft beer options as a whole compared to 20 years ago. It’s hard to complain.

So keep an eye as beer turns more into wine. Cheers to the craft beer revolution and the growing market for a good brew.