Why Craft Beer Needs a New Generation of Beer Bars

Michael Roper knew this would happen.

In 2018, the publican saw his once packed beer bar, the Hopleaf Bar on Chicago’s North Side, start to lose customers. He knew why.

“What started as humble tasting rooms, places to have a sample in a plastic cup after a brewery tour or growler fill stations has morphed into something much more sophisticated and tavern-like,” he wrote at the time. With more than 80 Chicago breweries with taprooms operating at that time, he saw direct competition. “It has had a tremendous impact on traditional corner pubs and specialty craft beer bars like mine as it has siphoned off a lot of business. For us, it has brought a plunge in business, staff cuts, and caused us to reevaluate plans. It means we focus more on food, wine, and spirits. I go to neighboring taprooms. They are busy. That is a good thing except that the audience for beer is finite. Every full seat there means there is an empty seat at a nearby bar.”

His predictions for the future were grimly prescient. “The overall volume of beer being consumed is flat or falling,” he wrote. “With hundreds of new competing tap rooms entering a stagnant market, there will be closures. Some of the closures will be traditional pubs and some will no doubt be tap rooms themselves. Until consumption rises, it will be brutally competitive for each customer’s beer dollar.”

Seven years later, Chicago boasts more than 160 breweries, almost all with tap rooms, and Roper’s predictions have come true. “The tap rooms have siphoned a lot of beer business away from multi tap beer bars like ours,” he recently wrote on Facebook. “We sell nearly half as much beer as we sold a decade ago…If we were opening today, I’d probably have half the draft lines I have now (62). Very few new places are opening with our international and domestic craft beer focused offerings. Tap rooms own that audience.” 

Beer bars didn’t just pour pints, they helped build a movement. They pioneered the promotion of small, unknown microbreweries, the first to take a chance on their often unsteady beers. They introduced drinkers to bold flavors before “craft beer” even had a name. 

These trailblazing bars are well-known in older craft beer circles, including Monk’s Cafe, Toronado, Max’s, Blue Tusk, DBA, Brickskeller, O’Brien’s, and the Brick Store, among many others. From the Great Lost Bear, which poured the first pint of Allagash White on July 1, 1995, or the Horse Brass Pub in Portland, Oregon, which introduced several dozen small breweries to its thirsty patrons, these small, publican-led bars helped nurture the nascent craft brewery movement. At their best, beer bars provided a smart, curated, opinionated take on beer, serving the best beers available in a wide variety of styles. 

The art of beer curation, the superpower of beer bars, is now nearly lost to time. During their heyday, visiting a beer bar gave pubgoers an unparalleled opportunity to sit in one place and experience the best beer had to offer. You could drink a wide swath of styles expertly curated by an experienced, informed palate, the original beer influencer who waded through countless beers on your behalf. Competition for these tap lines was fierce. Securing a coveted spot meant something. 

That experience is absent in the tap room era. While taprooms have liberalized the tasting experience, rare are the breweries that produce a wide range of styles let alone world-class versions of each. Beer bars provided one place for exposure to such a wide variety. Today you’d have to visit a dozen or more breweries to sample excellent versions of all these styles (the lager brewery, the haze factory, the pastry stout spot). 

Beyond curating a collection of the world’s best beers, the death of beer bars also portended other losses. With their decline has come a fixation on only a few styles, such as hazy IPAs and pilsners. Tap room brewers grew content on the easy sales of hazy IPAs, regardless of their uniformity of character. With few curators left to seek out and promote other styles and breweries, variety has diminished. This has led to the slow death of Belgian style ales and other styles. Hell, even Allagash is releasing hazies and lagers. 

Beer bars didn’t just serve, they educated and evangelized. Breweries large and small appreciated the important role these bars played in developing their customers. Rich Doyle, one of the founders of Harpoon in Boston, once told me that his brewery tap room sold beers above market price because he didn’t want to compete with the bars in the neighborhood that supported his brewery. That ethos has long since evaporated. Beer bars introduced new and small breweries to their local markets, were their original customers and cheerleaders, yet ultimately ended up their victims.

With the rise of tap rooms, some beer bar owners lashed out, believing breweries were invading their sovereign territories. Chris Black, founder of the Falling Rock Tap House in Denver’s LoDo neighborhood, calls himself a “40-year veteran of the craft beer wars.” 

In 2016, he wrote an open letter to the owner of Oskar Blues, decrying the brewery’s plan to build a large new bar in downtown Denver where it would serve not only its beers but those from other breweries. Black loudly announced he would stop selling beers from Oskar Blues at Falling Rock. At that time, he took exception to Oskar Blues’s plan to sell “other people’s beers” but said “I fully support a Brewers right to a Tap Room. I think it is a vital part of building your brewery & its brand…When you want to sell your own products, I am a huge supporter.”

By 2018, his viewpoint had changed.

Black looked around and saw the number of visitors to his seminal craft beer bar, often called the unofficial headquarters of the annual Great American Beer Festival, beginning to drop. Brewers celebrated GABF medal wins at the beer bar, while beer nerds marveled at its one-of-a-kind beer lists. But Black watched it all slip away, not to wine bars or sports bars, but to the very breweries he once supported. Taprooms didn’t just compete, they redefined the game, and left bars like his behind.

In a lengthy, sometimes rambling 4000-word screed on Falling Rock’s blog, Black decried “Disneyland Destination Breweries” with events every weekend, movie nights, weekly bands…” Where Black once complained about breweries selling other people’s beers, he now went on the offensive against breweries selling their own beers in multiple locations. He complained that brewers no longer provided him with special release kegs, instead opting to tap them in their own establishments often during beer release parties. 

And while some lacked empathy for Black’s complaint against the simplest form of capitalism–competition–he had a point. Brewery tap rooms have obviously impacted beer bars. Tap rooms completely upended the traditional business model for selling beer in this country, moving from competing for tap lines, cold box space, and shelf storage, to controlling it all themselves. 

In response, Black and other beer bar owners issued a warning to these would-be brewery tap rooms: open a satellite tap room and we’ll stop carrying your beer. What Black and others failed to foresee, however, was the brewers’ response: we don’t need you anymore. 

After fighting against the dark sides of the three-tier system, small brewers relished the chance to directly serve their consumers and to avoid sharing profits with middlemen, even previously supportive publicans. Losing a handful of tap handles is nothing compared to the opportunity to directly sell beer to thousands of consumers. Once tap rooms hit, everything changed. Thousands on thousands of small breweries opened with tap rooms as the center of their business models. They didn’t care about Falling Rock; they may have never even been. They wanted to make beer and sell it directly over their bars to people, not kowtow to the gatekeeping of Black and others.

Tap rooms cannot shoulder all the blame here. As the times changed, beer bars failed to evolve. They either grew bloated, with too many tap handles, or maintained design schemes straight out of the 1980s, loaded with oversized tin beer signs, bright neons, and walls decorated with old tap handles no longer in use. They looked like an aging beer geek’s rec room or an old tchotchke-filled Applebees in desperate need of a design refresh. They grew comfortable, complacent, and saw no need to change. And then their monopolies ended. 

Moreover, their deaths appear as a form of planned obsolescence. As beer bars were born of a need to provide a nurturing sanctuary for better beer, once craft beer attained mainstream popularity, their purpose seemingly evaporated. The success of craft beer was the death knell for beer bars. 

Nostalgia can be a tempting but ultimately toxic impulse, especially where it invites lethargy. Craft beer has long been defined by hyper and continued evolution and change. It’s a necessary constant. But in the change to tap rooms, something important was lost. 

Beer bars once served as focal meeting points for the craft beer community, while taprooms are silos. The craft beer community has left the third spaces of beer bars for the bland and often interchangeable environs of most tap rooms. Taprooms are now the place you go to have a beer, and with dozens of tap rooms operating in most American cities, it’s easy to fall into the rut of visiting the same brewery all the time, further limiting a drinker’s exposure to other breweries and styles. 

The loss of these central meeting places is felt most strongly in Denver during GABF, where Black’s Falling Rock stands vacant, having closed on June 21, 2021. It’s like the heart of the GABF was torn out. Falling Rock’s famous marquee sign now hangs in the rafters of the nearby Bierstadt Lagerhaus’s taproom.

Beer bars have long played a vital role in the craft beer ecosystem and we’re in need of a new generation of owner curators to help revitalize the beer industry. These saviors won’t be found in gargantuan bars with hundreds of taps but instead in smaller, thoughtful spaces such as The Beer Temple in Chicago or Delaware Supply Company in Albany, New York. This gem, in a simple space in an unassuming neighborhood, has a smartly curated tap list featuring world classics, such as Dupont Bon Voeux, alongside local favorites, including Threes Brewing Yore. The beer moves quickly, remains fresh, and is expertly and lovingly served in proper glassware.  

Modern beer bars need a complete makeover. In an era when ‘drink local’ has become a tired mantra, maybe focus on the opposite. If differentiation is key, only serving beer from out of the area certainly makes a statement. And why support local breweries if they’re just going to steal your business?

Craft beer talks a big game about innovation, but real disruption might mean going back. Back to bars that cared. Back to quality over quantity. Back to curators, not just creators. Craft beer is stagnant, complacent, and in desperate need of a change. On their death beds, we’ve never needed beer bars more.

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