Photographer: Heami Lee for Bloomberg; Prop Stylist: Lili Abir Regen
The 11 Best Beers Brewed This Year
It’s a tough job, but our beer expert tasted hundreds of options all across the U.S. to crown these cans and bottles in a league all their own
Craft beer got weird in 2019. Not only did two of America’s most well-known and well-loved breweries get sold—Delaware’s Dogfish Head for $300 million to Boston Beer Co.; New Belgium Brewing to a subsidiary of Japan’s Kirin Holdings—but earlier this month, Constellation Brands jettisoned Ballast Point Brewing for a fraction of the $1 billion it paid for it in 2015. The buyer was a largely unknown Chicagoland concern called Kings & Convicts Brewing, whose production was approximately 600 barrels this year (minuscule by any scale) and who had a total of just nine employees.
As head-scratching as this all seems, it’s entirely indicative of an increasingly cutthroat beer market. As with 2018, overall beer consumption this year is projected to be down. But among the vast majority of the 8,000-plus breweries in operation in 2019, production volumes and sales were up, an indication that the big players (namely Anheuser-Busch Cos. and MillerCoors) bore the brunt of the market’s decline. One of the major factors was the summertime explosion of the hard seltzer industry that saw even well-regarded cult breweries such as Monkish and Fonta Flora try to combat White Claw.