Craft beer’s bubble isn’t bursting. It’s just becoming more well-rounded.

One of the most fascinating parts about covering craft beer, which is still just a scant 11% of the beer industry’s volume, is that it’s either imploding or evolving on nearly a daily basis. One day the U.S. beer landscape seems overcrowded by its more than 4,200 craft breweries, the next it’s singing the praises of those breweries for helping to refine drinkers’ palates.

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There was strong evidence of the former earlier this week when Tara Nurin over at Forbes pointed out, with beer-rating app Untappd’s help, that an unusually large amount of the fall’s pumpkin-beer supply was still on shelves. Part of the blame fell on fatigue from the lengthy pumpkin-beer season — which we first addressed in early August, but which begins in earnest when brewers start their batches in May or June. It doesn’t help that last fall was the hottest on record for the lower 48 states, which made Oktoberfest lagers and lighter summer leftovers far more palatable than pints of pumpkin pie.

The bigger issue, however, was that there just might be more pumpkin beer on the market than beer drinkers want. Phin DeMink, owner of Lakewood, N.Y.-based Southern Tier Brewing Co., gets his Pumking imperial pumpkin ale to market by July. However, in discussing his brewery’s private-equity deal with new partner Victory Brewing in Downingtown, Pa., with us last week, DeMink predicted that hedging on the retail success of a new seasonal beer like a pumpkin ale may not be an option for small brewers much longer:

“You’re going to see the wholesalers dig deep and go back to their roots where they’re building brands and they’re focusing on core items that have longevity and aren’t as complicated to manage ... or sometimes less risky to manage. Sometimes brewers are asking wholesalers to take propositions on products that have no history and, on some occasions, wholesalers are getting burned and have massive amounts of inventory that they’re dumping and taking losses on. I think there is going to be some shifting at the wholesaler level for seasonal, special-release and one-off products unless you’re these well-established brands like Victory and Southern Tier.”

Looking at Nurin’s photos of pumpkin ale overstock languishing in late February, it’s clear that even the bigger brewers aren’t always safe amid a sea of competitors. When we asked Chris Furnari, editor of beer industry trade publication Brewbound, how many different stock keeping units (SKUs) were floating around the craft beer segment in 2015, his best guess was “around 10,000.” According to the National Beer Wholesalers Association’s (NBWA) bi-annual Distributor Productivity Report, the average beer distributor carried just 190 unique SKUs from an average of nine beer suppliers. By 2010, the number of SKUs in the average warehouse jumped to 536 from 18 beer suppliers.

As the number of brewers has increased and established brewers have spread their offerings across four-packs, six-packs, 12-ounce bottles, 12-ounce cans, 16-ounce cans, 22-ounce bottles, 64-ounce growler jugs, 15-packs, cases and other vessels, the number of SKUs has continued to swell. With retailers struggling to replace unsold fall stock with winter seasonals and all of the above competing with year-round offerings and limited releases, Victory co-founder Bill Covaleski noted that a shift in strategy may be in order:

“Often times, the dynamics of the situation involving prolific brewery SKUs and a very fickle audience conspire to make beer museums out of retailers. That’s not what they want to be doing. They want to be moving larger volumes of steady products.”

One of those “steady products” just happens to be in Victory’s beer portfolio: its Prima Pils pilsner. John Coleman, a former Pabst and Anheuser-Busch executive who now oversees Victory as head of its Artisanal Brewing Ventures parent company, notes: “Just because there have been pilsners or lagers available since the beginning of beer doesn’t mean you can’t make a better one.” As drinkers are increasingly discovering, the pale Bohemian lager that dates back to 1852 not only requires a deft hand to produce, but can be more complex than what they’ve sampled from the Beck’s, St. Pauli Girl, Amstel and Stella Artois brands.

Pilsner, as Josef Groll first made it with Pilsner Urquell, is unfairly tarred as the inspiration behind the U.S. light lager that’s increasingly losing market share to other styles. Though that’s somewhat true, that combination of pale malt and mild Saaz hops also caught craft’s attention. Longmont, Colo.-based Oskar Blues, for example, used cans of its traditional Mama’s Lil Yella Pils to woo light-lager-loving NASCAR fans at Charlotte Motor Speedway after opening a brewery in Brevard, N.C.

Sierra Nevada (Nooner Pils), New Belgium (Blue Paddle), Lagunitas (PILS), Brooklyn (Brooklyn Pilsner), Firestone Walker (Pivo Pils) and Samuel Adams (Downtime Pilsner) all make some version of pilsner. Last year, according to Nielsen, pilsners made by craft beer brewers saw their sales rise 76% in 2015. That was the biggest gain for a style with more than 1% market share that wasn’t a variation of hard root beer and one of the few upticks in market share for a style that wasn’t IPA. It also came during the same year that seasonal-beer sales, including those of pumpkin beer, dropped more than 20%.

Pilsner is not only a great gateway to craft beer from light lager, which still accounts for roughly 80% of all beer consumed, but it’s a style that displays the maturity of both its brewers and drinkers. It requires time and space — both of which upstart brewers typically lack — to cold ferment. It also allows brewers to dial back the malt and showcase their hops a bit. We were reminded of this when Goose Island — which is owned by Budweiser and Stella Artois’ parent company, Anheuser-Busch InBev BUD, +1.66% — sent us a sample of its new Four Star Pilsner this week.

First introduced as a test batch in Chicago last year, Four Star uses Mount Hood hops to frontload lemon zest aroma, before using Equinox and Meridian to add tropical fruit flavor with just a bite of black pepper on the end. It has pilsner’s crispness, but enough fruit flavor to appease drinkers who’ve worked their way through fruit juice radlers and hazy, juicy IPAs.

If pumpkin ales were the novelty introduction to craft beer’s adolescence, then this surge in pilsners is its early adulthood. It’s gone exploring, it’s dabbled in extremes, it’s been as promiscuous as the market would allow. Now it’s looking to settle down with an intellectual peer. Just because craft beer has outgrown pumpkin ale and its myriad other seasonal and one-off dalliances doesn’t mean it’s doomed. As its pilsner-pouring bigger brewers remind us, it’s just growing into the next stage of its development.

Jason Notte is a freelance writer based in Portland, Ore. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post and Esquire. Notte received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University in 1998. Follow him on Twitter @Notteham.