Earlier in the year our CEO, spoke at a conference about the many trends that we can see developing in the craft beer industry. We had all kinds of insights from looking at our data regarding sales to outlets nationwide through our trade marketplace EeBriaTrade. There was a huge amount of interest and follow up questions from this exercise, so we've decided to start a series of blog posts on developing industry trends.

The subject of our first blog post is the incredible speed that packaged beer is changing, from bottles to cans, but also within cans from 330ml to 440ml. Below is a graph of the percentage of packaged beer sold (in terms of millilitres sold) on EeBriaTrade by each container.

As you can see, in the first half of 2016 the bottle (Blue Line) was king, with over 80% of all packaged craft beer selling in bottle. However the middle of 2016 saw the increasing prevalence of mobile canning, and brewers starting to move their whole range to can (Yellow Line). Since then cans share has continued to grow and pretty much the whole time since Jan 2017 has been the package of choice for craft beer.

In January 2017 when cans first took the lead, they were entirely in 330ml cans (Orange Line), however since then, lead by Cloudwater's decision to start using 440ml cans, we've actually seen a decline of 330ml cans - going from the peak of c.60% in early 2017 to around 40% now. In that same time 440ml cans (Green Line) have gone from nothing to now matching 330ml cans with c.40% of all craft packaged sales.

Now in October 2018 we're looking at a complete switcharound from a little over two years ago, where now 80% of all craft packaged is in can, and just 20% is left in bottle.

Looking forward it feels like cans are here to stay, and will continue to erode the bottle share further, and it's only a matter of time before the 440ml cans becomes the most popular format. Consistency of the product and of the quality of canning is improving all the time, and seemingly batch issues are rarer.

EeBriaTrade Craft Beer Trends