One of the common dangers beer enthusiasts often fall prey to is taking the trends of The 1% Of True Craft Beer Believers—Once again, I count myself amongst this small group.—who are passionate and caring about the industry they love, and then extrapolating those trends to an entire, much broader set of consumers. Craft beer as a segment is still a minority—Brewers Association-defined "small and independent" volume only makes up a little less than 13% of all the beer sold in the U.S., and that includes continually bending a "craft" definition to keep the largest companies in the club. The vast majority of drinkers, despite many of our opinions, couldn’t care less about the beer they drink aside from whether or not it tastes good.

So when there's a declaration that something like American Stout is "endangered," it's a problematic claim to make. The style known for its adjunct-free roasted and chocolate flavors may not carry much interest among beer geeks, but to say the style has lost its place in the glass of beer drinkers—full stop—isn't merely a giant leap. It's patently false.

Paste magazine’s Jim Vorel recently posed the idea, noting that “‘regular’ stout has become a curiously endangered beer style over the course of the last decade. In fact, it’s all too easy to overlook just how rare ‘standard’ stouts have become. From their heyday as a staple beer style at seemingly every major craft brewery, to relative obscurity, there seem to be myriad factors behind the precipitous decline of non-adjunct stout.”

Speaking to GBH, Vorel says that he’s never been a fan of Pastry Stouts or other beers overly treated with spices or ingredients you’d find in your kitchen cabinet.

“Beer bars are really where you notice it the most, being in the mood for a standard Porter or a standard, non-adjunct Stout, and seeing nothing but vanilla,” Vorel says, leaning into a joke. “A coffee Stout could at this point be a non-adjunct stout because it only has coffee and should be dry.”

But regular Stout isn’t dying—it’s just facing the same kind of market challenges every other non-IPA style faces. In fact, when it comes to the actual sales data, the perceived end of a style might only seem likely to a small group of enthusiasts, not the public at-large.