. . . depending on how you look at it. The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that beer sales fell 2.2%, a mark not seen since the 1950’s.

We had been hearing all along that beer is recession-proof until we learned differently last winter. The Journal reports:

“The decline, the industry’s first since 2003, raises demands for industry leaders Anheuser-Busch InBev NV and MillerCoors LLC to come up with better advertising and to rethink recent price increases, said retailers and analysts. ”

Better advertising? Yes, that could work. Improving the beer and making it more flavorful? Hogwash, the analysts say. That won’t do a thing!

Beer author/columnist, Stephen Beaumont, sums up how many (most?) craft beer writers are thinking: “A-B Inbev may be well down, as are MillerCoors, Crown (mostly Corona), Heineken and others, but Boston Beer and Yuengling are…up.

The BBC and Yeungling numbers are important because they represent what I believe is really going on, which is not so much a literal ‘worsening’ of demand, but rather a shift in demand, coupled with a growing endorsement of the old French axiom boire moins, boire mieux, or ‘drink less, drink better.'”

First, it would be naive to think that growth in craft beer is more than a tiny fraction of the reason that demand decreased for the big brewers. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence out there that would suggest otherwise but for it to be more than a tiny fraction, craft beer would have to be growing at a massive clip, far more than the 9% it is growing at now.

Second, the story that Beaumont is telling, and one that many other people in craft beer are, is one that is at least a few years old: demand in craft beer is growing. In a retrospective on 2009, however, summing up the last 4-5 years of craft beer isn’t terribly relevant. If we look at the mid-year numbers from 2009 compared to 2008, something the Brewers Association glossed over with its mid-year report press release, we see that growth in craft beer actually declined 2% from year to year (11% to 9%). Hopefully the year-end numbers tell a different story because that decline isn’t far off from the big brewers [edit: good point by Dean in the comments. Sales increased 5% in 1st half of 2009 vs. 1st half of 2008 but growth came down. That is a much different story than the big brewers though the underlying point that we aren’t where we were last year in terms of growth remains. I’m just trying to illustrate that, economically speaking, craft beer isn’t all roses though you well seldom see that written elsewhere.].

Back to the topic of success at Boston Beer, their shipments rose to 2,025,000 barrels. There has been speculation around what could happen to Boston Beer Co. should production exceed 2,000,000 barrels in 2009. A brewery with over 2,000,000 barrels produced annually is no longer considered a craft brewery according to Brewers Association definition. Though production did exceed that mark this past year, the definition excludes malternatives (hat tip to Tom Cizauskas at YFGF). Because BBC produces somewhere in the ballpark of 100,000 barrels of Twisted Tea, that number gets deducted from the total. For BA purposes, they most likely brewed less than 1.95 million barrels and it is reasonable to think that the brewery could still qualify as a craft brewer, even through 2011.

At that point, it will be interesting to see if the BA modifies the definition to keep them a craft brewery.

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