The prevailing opinion among industry experts is that craft beer is about to grow and that the “bubble” may not really exist. It didn't happen overnight, since what would become a beer revolution spent decades preparing in garages and sheds, where beer lovers honed their skills and developed the various creations that, finally, began to offer the small farms that gradually began to emerge in the following decades. In recent years, the ability of a brewery to constantly produce new beers has become almost as important as the quality of the beer itself when it comes to standing out in an increasingly crowded package. It wasn't about struggling to get their beer to bars, but rather it boiled down to beer itself.
We like to think that California played a role in the great American beer revolution that ultimately changed the world of beer. While Firestone Walker has largely been able to weather the storm, there is still a lot of concern about what the state of craft beer will be when the world returns to a relatively normal state. So, despite all this good news in the midst of the craft beer revival, skeptics often want to know when the other shoe will fall, when we have too many breweries that can't keep running. Noble Rey has a more robust brewing system than On Rotation, but both opened with the same concept: making good beer while still presenting draft beers from other breweries.
Lately there seems to be a constant tendency for people to talk about the saturation of the Texas beer market, or about some proverbial “Is the craft beer bubble about to burst in Texas? Firestone Walker joined the many other craft breweries that suddenly materialized on the bookshelves, many of which were also able to take advantage of the new laws that allowed them to evade the three-tier distribution system by opening taverns where they could serve their products as soon as they left the tank and “start talking about their beer face to face with their customers.” For all breweries that connect to the Internet, they can almost count on the exclusive support of people who choose craft beer. In 1996, the duo decided to take a turn when they founded Firestone Walker, joining the ranks of Anchor Steam, Sierra Nevada and other California breweries that would play an important role in putting craft beer on the map. While the bubble hasn't fully burst when it comes to craft beer, as some viewers have been speculating for a long time, the industry is struggling for small, local breweries, which experienced growth mostly for more than a decade. Doug Veliky, director of strategy at Revolution Brewing in Chicago and a regular commentator on the craft beer industry on his social networks, compared the industry's difficulties to “a video game in which the strongest characters save resources for difficult times.” This allows them to distribute their beer (either through a distributor or through self-distribution) and, at the same time, continue to sell beers to drink on site and to take away.
There were “craft” brewers who called themselves craft brewers even though they were actually contracting their beers from pre-existing breweries. The craft market grew by around 18% in the last year alone, while the beer industry only grew by less than one percent as a whole.
