On one of the more depressing sections of the calendar, it helps to throw yourself into something you love.

Here at MarketWatch’s beer bureau (based in Portland, Ore., natch), the relative bleakness of early January has thrown a gray pall over all the good we’ve seen within the past year. Since this column debuted in October, we’ve had the opportunity to look at how beer ties into sports, into small communities and into the big players in the global marketplace.

We’ve seen Chico, Calif.-based Sierra Nevada alter the craft beer business and the lives of some of its employees by opening a brewery in North Carolina, and we’ve seen Boston Beer Co. SAM, -0.23% and its Samuel Adams brand (as well as other brewers, including Escondido, Calif.-based Stone Brewing) help open the German beer market to U.S. craft beer.

But all it takes is a little negativity to skunk the whole batch. You can’t mention 10 Barrel Brewing in a taproom without the ensuing high-volume debate about craft independence versus brewery consolidation. You can’t discuss Boston Beer’s Jim Koch as a craft beer pioneer without choosing sides over his current relevance. As with just about any industry, the beer industry can be as utopian or hellish as your subconscious wills it to be that day. It just depends on how jolly a patron or how cynical a barfly you’re trying to be.

Unfortunately for the entire beer industry, that fluctuation in mood matters. The Brewers Association craft beer industry group’s 2014 numbers won’t be finalized until February, but the 17.2% production boost among brewers considered craft in 2013 (which excluded Yuengling, August Schell, Straub, Magic Hat, Pyramid, Widmer Brothers, Redhook and Kona, for various reasons) still occurred amid a 1.9% downturn in the overall U.S. beer industry. By the association’s count, we’re up to 3,200 licensed breweries in the U.S. after having only 1,650 at the end of 2009. The U.S. is adding 1.5 new breweries a day, and they’re all fighting for a piece of a shrinking market — or, at least, a shrinking light lager market in which Budweiser, Bud Light, Coors Light and Miller Lite all saw production and market share slide in 2013.

Even craft brewers have trouble retaining market share among beer drinkers. According to a Nielsen survey from 2014, drinkers below the age of 30 are 34% more likely to drink beer than the average U.S. consumer. That said, they’re only about 26% as likely to drink a craft beer as their average counterparts. In fact, they’re way more into flavored malt beverages (which they’re 74% more likely to drink than anyone else) and are twice as likely to consume hard cider as any other generation of beer drinker. If you’re wondering why Boston Beer has staked so much on its Angry Orchard brand and why Anheuser-Busch InBev BUD, -0.75% , MillerCoors TAP, -2.13% and the Craft Brew Alliance (makers of Widmer Brothers and Kona) have all produced new ciders in recent years, there ya go.

Faced with the choice of listening to a relentless argument over which beer is craft, which beer isn’t, which craft beer is lame and which craft beer that’s available only in wine bottles is the only beer worth drinking, jumping to a cider or hard lemonade doesn’t sound like a bad option. It’s also the reason, along with loosened marketing regulations, that more U.S. drinkers are.

Beer’s outlook doesn’t need to be dour, and beer drinkers really don’t need to be so pessimistic. It’s still early in the year, and there’s still enough time for beer lovers to positively change their views for 2015. Here are five resolutions that we offer not only as examples, but as our own guidelines for the new year:

1. Try everything: This is our one standing bit of advice for every year. Try all of it.

Curious about Goose Island’s Bourbon County Stout but unsure about Anheuser-Busch InBev’s impact since buying the brand in 2011? Try it anyway. Did a new brewpub with a terrible logo just open up down the street? Try it anyway. Is your beer-snob friend pushing a limited-release, 750-milliliter bottle of some beer from a brewery with no mailing address? Drink it anyway. Did your uncle offer you the last Schlitz in his beer fridge? Drink it anyway.

If you’re nervous about it because it came out of a nitrogenated tap, a firkin, a beer-machine tapped cask, a wing joint pitcher or your friend’s homebrew setup, try it anyway.

It doesn’t take a well-rounded or even particularly smart person to scan the RateBeer or BeerAdvocate Top 50, make a list and work his or her way though the beers of the moment. It takes a far more open mind to step out of one’s comfort zone and expand the palate a bit.

Beer education is a continuing process that’s only inhibited by dismissing beers out of hand. It’s one thing to come to Colorado, take in the Great American Beer Festival and leave with a few bottles of Crooked Stave just because everyone raves about it. It’s entirely another to take a few days, visit the Coors plant in Golden, pop over to Boulder Brewing in Boulder, visit Oskar Blues in Longmont or Lyons, pop into New Belgium in Fort Collins, make your way to Trinity Brewing in Colorado Springs and then circle back to Ska Brewing and SandLot in Denver to get a more full picture of that state’s brewing history and culture.

Just as Marshall Wharf or Maine Beer would remind drinkers that Maine’s brewing history didn’t end with Shipyard in Portland, Long Trail would remind drinkers that Vermont brewing didn’t start with Hill Farmstead or Lawson’s Finest Liquids. There’s an entire story to U.S. beer, and unless you know and respect the march from pre-Prohibition brewers like Yuengling and August Schell to modern-day genius brewers like Evil Twin Brewing’s Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergso — even if you don’t like their beers — dismissing any point on that spectrum outright flirts with willful ignorance. Don’t blindly follow trends like some half-drawn urban stereotype and don’t cling to one brand or style out of fear of change or resentment of the new. Try it all.

2. That said, circle back every so often: There’s a misconception out there that if you have a beer you enjoy and you come back to it after you’ve tried other things, you’ve somehow given up and stopped “exploring.”

Nonsense. In a $100 billion beer market, craft beer grew by 20% to $14.3 billion in 2013. That’s fairly impressive, considering it was just 7.8% of the beer market at the time, but it could have been much bigger in both volume and pricing if just a few more drinkers occasionally settled into six-packs or cases of beers they actually liked. When beer drinkers go grazing for “whales” — rare, high-potency, high-priced limited releases like Cigar City’s Hunahpu’s Imperial Stout or Founders Brewing’s Kentucky Breakfast Stouts — and ignore year-round releases like Cigar City’s Jai Alai IPA or Founders’ All-Day IPA, they don’t do themselves or the breweries any favors.

Used correctly, those beers are supposed to function either as rewards to longstanding customers looking for a once-a-year treat or lures for beer geeks and curious drinkers who haven’t cracked the annual offerings yet. When they’re the only beers buyers go for, and the others are left in the store or kegs to expire, that makes bars, bottle shops, supermarkets and sometimes even the brewers themselves less prone to keep them around.

Even if you land on a more standard offering and approach it with a pint or a 22-ounce bottle, you’re not being as helpful to yourself or the beer you love as you could be. Consider that the $5 “pint” you have in your hand, which is typically a smooth-sided “shaker pint” that only holds 15 ounces of beer, equates to a whopping $24 six-pack. Or that 22-ounce bottle you picked up for a “bargain” $8? Yeah, that’s a $26 six-pack. If your brewery of choice actually bottles or cans its beer, it’s a better bargain for everyone involved if its fans pick up a six pack or case every so often. In some states, breweries will let you pick up six packs right in its own shop or even give you fresh cases on the loading dock. It not only ensures you a fridge full of beer you actually want to drink, but it creates more volume and revenue for your favorite brewer and helps keep it alive.

If bottles, cans or even growlers aren’t an option, we humbly suggest you:

3. Hit the local brewpub: Of the 2,768 licenses issued to brewers in 2013, a whopping 1,237 were issued to brewpubs.

Granted, there’s a whole lot of leeway in that definition — which applies equally to big chains like Gordon Bierch, BJ’s BJRI, -2.72% and Darden’s DRI, -1.80% Yard House and small, single-location operations like Amnesia Brewing in Washougal, Wash., or Cambridge Brewing Co. in Cambridge, Mass. — but there’s something to be said for having a restaurant that brews its own beer on site right in your backyard.

Not only is it providing local jobs, but it’s functioning as a hub for the surrounding community or neighborhood. In many ways, the proliferation of the brewpub — which began when Bert Grant opened his Grant’s Brewery Pub in Yakima, Wash., as the first post-Prohibition brewpub in the U.S. in 1982 — is the most European element of the U.S. craft beer movement. It’s still a huge portion of German culture, beer or otherwise, and it makes brewers there and in other countries key portions of their tiny communities and places where everyone from local politicians to local children can congregate without it standing as some sort of house of vice.

Here in the U.S., brewpub chains from the McMenamins pubs, hotels and theaters in the Pacific Northwest to the Iron Hill pubs and restaurants in the Mid-Atlantic have high-chairs and children’s menus, while spots like the Firehouse in Sioux City, S.D., and Ann Arbor Brewing Co. in Michigan are draws for locals and tourists alike. Just as important, however, they’re a means for small brewers in most states to get their beers to the marketplace without being beholden to distributors. With distributors consolidating and Anheuser-Busch distributors increasing their presence, a proliferation of brewpubs beats beer lovers’ alternative: 3,000 breweries all competing for finite truck and shelf space.

4. Share: If you can’t physically swap the beers you love with people (and delivery services rarely ask questions when you try), at least tell other people what you like and what experiences you’ve had. Not only does its spread the wealth for brewers — who might then expand their distribution radius as a result — but it also helps people in other states change laws that prevent them from enjoying high-alcohol beers, filling growlers or having beer with a movie.

While it’s great to lord your access to Heady Topper, Pliny the Elder, Mornin’ Delight or Abraxas, it’s far better to enhance everybody’s enjoyment of beer by giving them more access to it instead of less.

5. Stop treating beer like Us Weekly: When 10 Barrel or Blue Point are sold to Anheuser-Busch InBev, that’s a beer-industry issue. When a beer name causes a trademark suit, that’s an industry issue. When brewers snipe at each other over their size, tactics, ideological purity or public perception, that’s noise.

Differentiate the two, while heeding more of the former than the latter, and you’re well on your way to a more enjoyable beer experience. Blend the two into one chorus of griping, however, and you’re doomed to become one of those miserable folks who’s routinely abandoned in barrooms mid-conversation. Don’t be that person.

Last-call notes

“If we do not get Budweiser and Bud Light in the hands of those consumers, the beer category could become in serious trouble.” This is what Anheuser-Busch InBev actually thinks about young beer drinkers in the U.S., according to a spokesman. It’s why A-B, even after paying more than $1 billion to wrest the National Football League’s official beer sponsorship away from MillerCoors and millions more to lock down exclusive Super Bowl advertising for more than three decades, is making a big deal out of marketing to millennials with this year’s Super Bowl ads. Good luck, folks. If young drinkers already think Sierra Nevada and Samuel Adams are dad’s beer, just imagine what they think about Bud. Oh wait, we already know. They care about that brand about as much as they care about the Clydesdales, which aren’t quite as dead as some believed.

But wait, A-B seems to know it, too. Why else would they have stated their intention to buy up more craft brewers like 10 Barrel and Blue Point (which they denied a few months ago)?