Battle of New Beer Releases

In recent years, new beer releases have become a much bigger thing across the nation’s craft beer universe. To obtain and maintain market share (i.e. sales), many craft breweries, large and small, have taken up the strategy of making new releases on a torrid schedule. While in past times a traditional brewery may have come out with a handful of recurring seasonal releases during the year in addition to their core lineup, some brewers today release multiple brand new beers every month.

Not only seen in other more advanced craft beer states, but a furious list of releases is hitting West Virginia too. For example, two West Virginia brewers released over 60 new beers each in 2021, according to data recorded in the Untappd.com website. Several others released over 20 new ones. In total, WV brewers released well over 450 brand new beers in 2021. These are new ones in addition to brewing their full-time core brands and rebrewing any brands that had originally brewed in previous years.

It’s gotten wild out there. This state of proliferation is challenging for beer retailers and wholesalers to keep up with, but it’s the way it is. No doubt, this trend will peak sometime and the pendulum will swing back to a calmer market state. It’s hard to believe that this pace of beer releases could continue long term, but then, no one ever predicted that it would be like this today.

A number of factors influencing this phenomena are discussed below.

Fickleness of craft drinkers

The frantic new beer release strategy occurs in large part as a response to the consumer’s constant desire for something new. As the craft market has grown, craft beer drinkers have developed a reputation for fickleness, and fickleness needs to be fed. Craft beer fans search out new beer releases. They shop retailers shelves and taps for new beers they haven’t before had. They regularly rave about them on social media. Being among the first to try a newly released beer is a badge of honor. It’s deemed newsworthy and post-worthy.

In response to their customers’ purchasing patterns, bars and retailers push breweries for more of their latest/greatest beers. Retailers see the new stuff selling faster and want more of it. Perfectly fine, good quality beers that have been around for a few years, now have trouble obtaining shelf space and tap handles. New is better. It’s what people want. In response, brewers often retire older brands or pause them, and instead, introduce new beers.

New breweries add to the pace

It’s not just existing breweries seeking market relevance or expansion that has led to the explosion in beer offerings. This phenomena is also fed by the rapid proliferation of new breweries. The count of small breweries in the U.S., which only a decade back hovered around 2,000, now exceeds 9,000. Thousands of new breweries translates to many thousands of new beers, which in turn, further excites the consumer’s desire to experience more new beers.

The West Virginia market is not immune to this phenomena. In 2011, five licensed breweries were found in WV. Today there are 30 open for business. In 2021 these 30 West Virginia brewers introduced over 450 brand new beers to the market. If you thought you knew the WV craft market last year, you don’t know much today. It’s evolving fast.

Just a decade ago, being a craft consumer in WV was like searching for water in a desert. It was a tough life. Today, you are literally inundated with choices. Heading into 2022, there’s no way craft beer drinkers in WV can begin to keep up with all the options available to them from WV brewers. Add to that the myriad of great brews from regional, national and international craft breweries; and wow, it’s only natural to be agog.

Newest WV breweries adding their beers to the count of new releases include:

• Cacapon Mountain Brewing (late 2020) with 34 beers introduced since opening;
• Big Sandy Brewing (summer 2021) with 11 beers;
• Big Draft Brewing (summer 2021) with 12 beers.

Hop breeding fuels new beer acceleration

Another significant contributor to the rapid proliferation of new beers are advancements in the development and popularity of new hop varieties featuring more juicy-fruit like flavors. During the past decade, use of newer aroma hop varieties such as Citra, Mosaic, Galaxy, Azacca, Sabra, Nelson Sauvin, and many others, exploded. More than any other factor this lead to the development and the skyrocketing popularity of IPAs, especially Hazy IPAs. To make hazies, brewers mastered and adopted techniques that allowed the hop aromas and flavors to shine through without adding much bitterness (whirlpool hopping, dry hopping). These New England-style or Juicy-Hazy IPAs opened up IPAs to a massive new audience of beer drinkers. The market fell in love with hops.

So with Hazy IPAs came a vast acceleration in the number of new beer releases as brewers used basically the same base beer but hopped each one differently. Thousands of new beers were released experimenting with both new single hop and new hop blends. In response, IPA drinkers learned to love exploring aromas and flavors of different hops. When you see a new one, you have to buy it. The more new ones a brewery produces, the more beer it might sell.

IPAs are still strongly the most popular stye within craft beer. West Virginia brewers released a boatload of new juicy and hazy IPAs this year. Some solid market-moving examples include:

• Short Story’s Return Flight,
• High Ground’s Heavy Handed,
• Weathered Ground’s On a Whim,
• Bad Shepherd’s Glacial Nugs,
• Stumptown’s Frog Juice,
• The Peddler’s Zamba Apocalypse, and
• Screech Owl’s Class III Whitewater

New tart beer styles encourage beer releases

Beyond Hazy IPAs, the most important factor influencing beer proliferation has been the development of a new, and distinctly American beer style known as fruited kettle sours or quick sours. This kind of sour beer was basically unheard of a decade ago. Today, most breweries make them.

Brewers take a light wheat beer base and quickly sour it in the boil kettle by adding a lactobacillus culture, similar to that used in making yogurt. Later, the addition of fruit purees turns the beer into a sweet-sour mix that has caught on wildly with the American consumers’ palate. As in the making of Hazy IPAs, the brewer has a whole pantry of flavors available to mix with the tart wheat beer. Think raspberry, cherry, blueberry, guava, blackberry, passion fruit, and so on. Unlike the Hazy IPAs, these kettle sours contain no or very, very few hops. They are fruity tart, not bitter, and are an extremely popular beer style in 2021.

To keep up with the raging demand for sours, West Virginia brewers released oodles of new fruity tart beers this year. Some of the best examples included:

• Bad Shepherd’s Sour Holler – Guava, Raspberry, Orange
• Parkersburg’s Aloha Summer
• Morgantown’s Fresh Squeezed – Blueberry Cheesecake
• Short Story’s Fun With Prisms – Orange Guava
• The Peddler’s Space Camp Tramp Stamp
• Stumptown’s Papaya Smooth-Eez
• Weathered Ground’s Bearer of Fruit – Pineapple and Cara Cara Orange.

The embrace of craft lagers

Craft lagers and pale lager substitutes, such as Kolsch/Golden Ales, are playing an increasingly important roll in the proliferation of new beers. Not long ago, finding a lager in a small craft brewery was unusual. And if there was one, it was often the only one they made, except for bringing out an annual Oktoberfest Bier. Years back, craft breweries avoided lagers because the popular-priced American lager style (Bud Light, for example) was the opposite of what craft wanted to be. Lagers were also harder to brew well and took a lot longer to make. Small brewers felt they didn’t have the space or time for lagers. My, how things have changed.

Because craft consumers and brewers today have finally recognized that high quality lagers are beautiful beers that need to be brewed, numerous breweries have gone full speed ahead with their lager programs. Craft fans are now queuing up for their crispy bois. West Virginia is seeing an upward trend in lager brewing among its brewers. Some better examples of newly released WV lagers and lager-esque beers in 2021 were:

• High Ground’s Gary
• Bad Shepherd’s Boho Pils
• Weathered Ground’s Eine Kleine Biermusik
• Chestnut Brew Work’s Chico’s Two Game Win Streak
• The Peddler’s Jewel City One Fidy
• Freefolk’s Goldilock’s Lager
• Cacapon Mountain’s Prost
• Big Draft’s Bored Bohemian Red
• Big Timber’s Babushka Grodziskie.

Pastry stouts have a role too

Along with Hazy IPA and Fruited Kettle Sours, and Craft Lagers, another new beer style development that contributed to the decade’s acceleration in new beer releases is the Pastry Stout, though it now appears to be on the decline. Pastry Stout is a generic term used to describe sweet, heavily-flavored-up imperial stouts. Imperial stouts are not new, but the development in popularity of pastry stouts is a product of the past decade. While never the market driver that hazy IPAs and fruited kettle sours became, pastry stouts really accellerated around mid-decade. Led originally by the popularity of brands like Founder’s CBS, and also by breweries like Angry Chair, Prairie, and The Bruery, brewers across America copied the style and have been producing variants ever since.

To make a Pastry Stout, brewers take a strong imperial stout, often aged in a whiskey barrel, and add flavoring (often called adjuncts) to it. Popular flavorings include vanilla, coffee, cocoa, cinnamon, coconut, peppers, cherry, maple syrup, tree nuts, and more. Because you can add just about any flavoring agent you think might make a tasty product, brewers are encouraged by the market to produce a series of these pastry stouts, each flavored a bit differently, and release them at different times throughout the year. The permutations seem endless.

West Virginia brewers continue to make and release new pasty stouts each year. Some solid new examples during 2021 included:

• Big Timber’s Hibernation Libation
• Weathered Ground’s The Italian Job
• High Ground’s TCB

How’s it working in West Virginia?

Given that the rapid-release business model for breweries has ascended to such great heights nationally, let’s take a closer look at it in our WV market. Who’s releasing new beers and how’s it working for them.

Mining data from Untappd produced a barrel-full of interesting comparisons and observations. Beers released by WV brewers in 2021 received roughly 25,000 reviews/ratings by craft beer consumers. One WV brewer alone received more than 4,300 reviews in 2021 for its new beers (Weathered Ground). One single new beer from a small WV brewery garnered reviews from 320 different reviewers (Class III Whitewater IPA from Screech Owl). Impressive numbers. Untappd data strongly suggests that the West Virgina market is responding to new beer releases in a big way.

Total Impact Score shows market movers

The Impact Score was developed by Brilliant Stream from publicly available Untappd data to suggest the relative market moving power of new beer releases aggregated by each brewery. Use it to compare breweries and see how they moved the market with new beer releases in 2021 based on the count of new beers released, the number of beer reviewers, and their average new beer rating. The higher the Impact Score, the more that brewery could be seen as moving the market with its new beer releases. Breweries with more new beers can be seen as more committed to that strategy of brewery business development. For this study, all underlying data was collected from Untappd.com in late December, 2021.

New WV Beer Releases in 2021 • Ranked by Brewery Impact Score

BREWERY NAME	Number of New Beers with Ratings*	Total Review Count	Average Beer Review Count	Average New Beer Rating	IMPACT SCORE	Unrated New Beers*
Weathered Ground Brewery	50	4296	86	3.87	16,620	13
Bad Shepherd Beer Co.	29	3373	116	3.77	12,730	8
High Ground Brewing	16	2666	167	3.87	10,328	1
Morgantown Brewing	23	2592	113	3.90	10,106	1
Short Story Brewing	15	2412	161	4.03	9,728	4
The Peddler	18	1864	104	3.95	7,360	1
Big Timber Brewing	17	1617	95	3.70	5,986	2
Abolitionist Ale Works	35	1123	32	3.68	4,131	29
The Freefolk Brewery	17	801	47	3.65	2,922	3
Stumptown Ales	9	733	81	3.92	2,870	2
Cacapon Mountain Brewing	14	574	41	3.77	2,165	0
Chestnut Brew Works	5	489	98	3.65	1,786	2
Big Draft Brewing	12	427	36	3.75	1,601	0
Screech Owl Brewing	1	320	320	3.74	1,197	0
Berkeley Springs Brewing	11	282	26	3.56	1,004	19
Greenbrier Valley Brewing	11	235	21	3.74	879	11
Parkersburg Brewing	3	189	63	3.82	723	0
Bridge Brew Works	2	171	86	3.72	637	0
Rambling Root	7	114	16	3.54	404	2
Bavarian Brothers Brewing	3	107	36	3.60	385	5
Dobra Zupas	2	90	45	3.72	335	3
Wheeling Brewing	4	90	23	3.63	327	2
Old Spruce Brewing	4	80	20	3.96	317	8
Brew Keepers	4	59	15	3.64	215	2
Big Sandy Brewing	2	32	16	3.56	114	9
North End Tavern	1	20	20	3.48	70	3
Mountain State Brewing	0	—	—	—	—	1
Sophisticated Hound Brewing	0	—	—	—	—	8
Rippon Brewing	0	—	—	—	—	2
Bannings	0	—	—	—	—	0

Brewery observations

For certain breweries, new beer releases appear to have become the brewery’s primary strategy. New releases seem to be given as much or more prominence as that brewery’s full-time core beers. This seems a significant departure from the traditional brewery operations model. Some WV brewers are moving strongly in that new direction. Whether or not it is a real long-term market advantage, only time will tell.

The next paragraphs review the top ten brewery market movers by their 2021 new beer release Impact Score.

Weathered Ground Brewery. With a massive count of 63 new beers listed on Untappd in 2021, it looks a lot like their core flagship beers are just sorta sprinkled into the mix of new beers, rather than the other way around. And it’s not just popular IPAs and kettle sours being released either. Weathered Ground ventures into new beer style territory including brewing numerous new farmhouse ales and English ales — styles that fall outside today’s more popular taste profile. While one would think brewing so many diverse beer styles at a small brewery could be very risky, Weathered Ground collected very good Untappd ratings for its new 2021 beers (average 3.87) — ratings that equal the brewery’s overall Untappd rating. Seems they know what they’re doing.

Bad Shepherd Beer Company. Data suggests that the brewery has deemphasized maintaining more than a couple of core beers and that strategy appears to be working for them. New releases are where all the action and focus was in 2021. Encouraging for them is the fact that their new releases earned a significantly higher average rating than the brewery’s overall Untappd score. Their Impact Score suggests this brewery did an excellent job making and marketing its new beers during the year.

High Ground Brewing. Its business strategy depends on growing market share through the distribution channel. Besides producing a solid set of core brews, they have decided on building a new release strategy to get attention in markets far from their home base in Preston County. In 2021, it achieved its marketing goals by releasing a high-scoring lineup of new release beers in popular styles, led by probably the year’s best IPA release: Heavy Handed.

Morgantown Brewing has completed its makeover from a brewery focused on core brands to a brewery living on exotic, one-off beers. To achieve this transformation, the brewers decided on emphasizing an active new release schedule. It was risky transformation strategy that is now paying off. Their 2021 average beer rating on Untappd is an impressive 16% above the brewery’s overall average beer score. Getting such a high Impact Score from beers sold only inside the brewpub (no distribution) is most impressive.

Short Story Brewing is a brewer that tends to have quite a few recurring brands, but balances out its offering with about half new beer releases. By sticking close to what they do well (mostly IPAs), their new releases earned higher ratings on Untappd than those of any other WV brewer during 2021. Their strategy is working well as this brewery keeps upping its overall performance year after year. They are achieving very strong performance in both average ratings and number of reviews for new beers sold almost exclusively at the brewery’s two taprooms.

The Peddler has been climbing the overall Untappd ratings ladder until it is now among the top echelon of WV brewers. Using a steady stream of new releases, this brewer keeps getting better and better. Its 2021 beers were the second highest rated of any WV brewer. While primarily an on-premise brewpub that does not can or bottle its beer, the Peddler does some self-distribution of draft beer around the Charleston-Huntington market. This likely helps its new beer gain traction. However, for a brewery without canning or bottling, The Peddler’s Impact Score is very strong.

Big Timber Brewing is the state’s largest, most successful brewer, with the strongest lineup of flagship beers — but they believe they can’t just rest on them. The brewery is committed to a strategy of adding more new beers each year, hoping to both increase sales and gain market intelligence as to what craft drinkers want. With 17 new releases recorded on Untappd in 2021, Big Timber gained a big dose of positive attention and interest that helped keep its overall sales and image strong.

Abolitionist Ale Works has always been a specialty brewer producing mostly small-batches of very unique and one-off beers. They produce a limited recurring core lineup. This year, as in the past, new releases seems to outpace core brand and recurring releases. The strategy helps this brewery create an identity as a fun, experimental brewery that stands out from the crowd in its jam-packed Metro D.C. market. Their solid Impact Score suggests the brewery remained on a positive track during 2021.

The Freefolk Brewery is a newer brewery that appears to be increasing its commitment to one-off new beer releases vis-à-vis its full-time core brands. Freefolk’s 17 new releases this year helped the brewery achieve attention and distribution in markets far away from its home in Fayetteville. Learning from the success and reaction to the new releases also helped the brewery better determine the direction it needs to take in the WV beer market as it delves more into canning its beer.

Stumptown Ales is an example of a brewery very strongly committed to maintaining its lineup of flagship beers, yet one that understands new beer releases are important too. It gets its high Impact Score by releasing new beers that get more Untappd ratings and higher scores on average than most other WV brewers. Their score is even more impressive when you consider that Stumptown does not distribute any canned or bottled beer, only draft. The fact that they released only 11 new beers in 2021 is largely due to the fact that they are maxed out on their brewing system (keeping up with their popular core lineup). Otherwise they would likely have released more new one-offs.

Miscellaneous observations on new beer releases

Whether or not brewers release many or few new beers in a year does not seem to determine brewery success.

For breweries that are almost totally dependent on sales inside their own brewpubs and are pretty much only concerned with selling in a very local market, new releases may not be so important to the brewery’s success. An established little neighborhood brewery that makes the beer its customers like and that is happy with the business it currently generates may not see releasing a bunch of new beers as something it needs to do. In contrast, it seems that a small brewery involved in distribution for a major portion of its sales is more likely to be committed to a frequent new-beer release strategy. For breweries seeking new customers, releasing well-made new beers in popular styles seems to give energy and momentum to beer sales.

The observation in the paragraph above is a generalization, and there are exceptions. Each brewery is free to choose the strategy they want, and often, it seems to depend a lot on the personality of the brewery owner. There is more than one way to achieve brewery success.

Screech Owl Brewing only released one new beer in 2021, but it received the highest number of Untappd reviewers of any single new beer — twice as many as the one in second place. Their Class III Whitewater IPA also received a very good Untappd rating at 3.74. If you are only going to release one new beer, this is the way to do it.

41 new releases without a score. Several breweries had a significant number of new beers that failed to reach the 10 review level required to have an Untappd score (especially Abolitionist, Berkeley Springs, Weathered Ground, Greenbrier Valley). These beers were almost all small batch beers released for the taproom only. Beer receiving that few reviews means it likely had little overall market impact.

Impact Score for new breweries is inflated. Two breweries that opened in 2021 — Big Sandy and Big Draft — have all their beers listed as new releases. (And to some extent, Cacapon Mountain, which opened at the end of 2020.) This year’s Impact Score wouldn’t seem to be a particularly accurate or meaningful reflection of the New Beer Release business philosophies for brand new breweries, since every beer they made was new. Next year’s numbers will tell more about their appetite for new releases.

Is it a measure of beer quality? The Impact Score is not a measure of beer quality. It is a representation of relative impact of new beers in the consumer market. It also shows how strongly a brewery depends on new releases as part of its core business strategy relative to the other breweries in the state.

What are market movers? Market movers are beers and breweries that create a measurable positive impact on the beer market. Beers getting both a lot of Untappd reviews and higher scores correlates to beers that are making a more significant market impact. Higher scores mean they are creating more buzz in the market. It does not necessarily mean that the beer is higher in absolute quality, but it does suggest that it is likely more in tune with the tastes and styles that craft beer fans are currently excited about.

Why use Untappd data. Untappd is by far the largest and best source of beer rating information open freely to the general beer consumer. Even in a smaller state like West Virginia, there are scads of Untappd users and many thousands of beer reviews submitted each year. There is no better database of beer rating info available today. Untappd’s data strength is especially found in its larger aggregate numbers and in its record of beer releases over time. The 25,000 ratings submitted to 2021’s new WV beers is an example of a strength. The larger numbers are meaningful, and that’s why this analysis of market impact aggregates all a brewery’s releases across the year to produce an Impact Score.

For breweries, bars, and beer retailers wishing to get more value out of Untappd, the company offers 10 things you can do.