Make beer great again: cost of living crisis calls for a real drink

Has craft beer jumped the shark?

Here’s an economic theory that’s often overlooked, if only because I just thought of it. It’s called reversion to the familiar and it occurred to me the other day when I found myself reaching for strawberry jam from a shelf crowded with more interesting options.

Strawberry jam is not just a comfort choice, it’s a choice that always works, unlike more complex offerings that sit in the fridge waiting for a renewed appreciation of zucchini pineapple jam. In tough economic times, you know you’ll get to the bottom of the strawberry jam jar while the zucchini pineapple jam will have to wait for the Christmas ham to get a second life.

Reversion to the familiar is mucking up a lot of markets at the moment. Take craft beer. Until recently, everyone loved a craft beer. A can of craft was a conversation starter, it had a story, provenance, a funky label and a price that stopped you getting drunk too fast. Once thousands of hipsters had set up brew kettles and mash tuns, however, things began to get weird.

First there was watermelon beer, then pineapple beer. Ginger appeared, so did banana and strawberry flavoured beer. Then you could buy sticky toffee pudding beer, milkshake beer and rocky road smoked stout. Just as the makers were churning out beers that could have been jams, consumers declared enough! They reverted to wanting an inexpensive, non-threatening beer they could drink to the bottom of the can.

Other bros (they were almost all blokes) took to making natural wines, where they bought some grapes, borrowed a vat, poured the berries in and walked around the vat a few times, declaring that good wine didn’t need any intervention (or skills, really). They called it wine that Jesus drank and put a price on it that only King Solomon could afford. They forgot Jesus was a miracle worker and they were just conjurers.

Now the shelf space for natural wines is dwindling. The decent ones saw the swing and joined their “unnatural” cousins on ordinary shelves; the other makers went back to their ­accounting jobs.

A few might have gone into gin-making, judging by the explosion of creativity in the craft gin market. Sticky carpet gin, yuzu gin, Brussel sprout, ant, oyster and whale gin (more ocean salt than whale blubber) and, of course, the orchard flavours of strawberry, blueberry and mixed berry gin (these guys really should stick to jam).

Now there’s not enough shelf space for gins, wines and beers that have more produce than a green grocer. That’s because retailers can read the faces of the consumers that visit their stores. The consumers in a cost-of-living crisis can’t ­afford to take a punt on novelty. They aren’t interested in the story of an accountant, who found himself in a country town with a cheap shed and a copy of How to Brew. They know Jesus wasn’t a sommelier.

The reversion to the familiar is not an exciting place to be. And more forgiving types will lament the passing of the burst of creativity that took young people out of predictable jobs into the world of craft and illegible labels. Those rebels did a good job stirring up established business, they made us think about what was possible, they used up a lot of strawberries.

And they’ll come again. When we emerge from our doonas, when we tire of XXXX, when Vickers Gin tastes stale and the Aldi $3.49 shiraz doesn’t do it anymore, we will go looking for something new and enter the era of trend following (which is not only a real economic term but a happier place).

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