Looking at stores’ beer coolers, one might assume drinkers had collectively decided to stick to their New Years’ resolutions. “Low-calorie” IPAs—usually around 100-120 calories per 12oz serving—have proliferated over the last two years. They’re brewed by some of the country’s largest breweries, with placements in chain and locally owned retail coast-to-coast.
A number of brands—essentially repackages of the Session IPA trend of 2016-2017—are performing well, enjoying a boost from the perception of being newly available products. Hits range from Dogfish Head Brewery’s Slightly Mighty and Bell’s Brewery’s Light Hearted Ale, to Goose Island Beer Company’s So-Lo and Oskar Blues Brewery’s One-y. Firestone Walker Brewing Company’s Flyjack is essentially a new Easy Jack IPA, which had already been rebranded to tout its low-calorie recipe. Cigar City Brewing will soon release a low-calorie version of Jai Alai IPA called Jai Low.
But the success of these brands and other low-cal IPAs isn’t because there’s suddenly a new breed of customer, or that drinkers are clamoring for lower-calorie, “better-for-you” craft beer options. Low-calorie IPAs aren’t attracting drinkers away from hard seltzer or Michelob Ultra; they’re just another new variation on IPA that existing craft beer consumers can add to their shopping carts.
And that’s telling for a category that’s being rehashed for 2020: If there’s not a new customer base for these beers, and if these 100-calorie IPAs follow the boom-and-bust trajectory of Session IPAs (or their even more recent low-carb cousin, Brut IPAs), then their clock is already ticking.
The Mich Ultra-fication of beer presumes that nutritional considerations are what drive purchasing decisions. For a segment of the beer-drinking public—the 40% of Americans who say they are conscious of calories in beverages—this is certainly true. But is that segment buying craft beer? Likely not. Those drinkers are already well served by Michelob Ultra (+20% in the latest 52-week period, as tracked by market research company IRI); domestic light beers; hard seltzers; and, outside of beer, a growing number of ready-to-drink, low-calorie canned cocktails.
As Brewers Association (BA) chief economist Bart Watson noted in his mid-year 2019 report, craft beer drinkers “are clearly still looking for flavor and higher ABV” while hard seltzer and other options are “pulling calorie- and carb-conscious consumers away from beer altogether.”
The increase of 100-calorie IPAs assumes there is an unmet need among craft beer drinkers who are concerned with carbs and calories. But it’s not clear this mythical drinker exists at all.
“With One-y, I don’t think [its consumers are] dramatically different from the folks drinking the rest of our beers,” says Aaron Baker, senior marketing manager for Oskar Blues. “There still is a ‘craft’ line that people have to be willing to cross in order to pick up One-y the week after picking up Michelob Ultra. I’m not sure there’s a ton of overlap there.”
If a drinker really cares about calories, they’ll likely buy something that isn’t craft beer. Survey data collected by the Brewers Association and Nielsen show that among people who do buy craft beer, flavor and high-ABV rule. Low-alcohol content—synonymous with low-calorie IPAs, which generally clock in at 4% ABV or less—isn’t important.
The survey—conducted this spring—found that 96% of respondents who identify as craft beer drinkers said flavor was somewhat or very important to their beer-buying decisions, the highest percentage among all factors. High ABV was considered important to 66% of craft beer drinkers, while low ABV was ranked as important to the fewest number of drinkers.
Flavor is more important to craft beer drinkers, and to them, IPAs are synonymous with flavor. Breweries’ motivations for launching low-calorie IPAs are as much about drinkers’ unslakable thirst for new IPAs than they are about drinkers’ desire for low-calorie beers—if not more.
Speaking to the reasons behind launching the 96-calorie Flyjack in January, Firestone Walker co-founder David Walker said the foremost impetus was the brewers’ desire to iterate on craft beer’s most reliably successful style: IPA.
“We take a lot of pride in mastering the IPA style in its many forms, and this was another opportunity to do that,” Walker says.
He adds that there’s a “legitimate market” for low-calorie craft beer. But the choice to make Flyjack a Hazy IPA seems like a strategic one at a time when drinkers are eager for any new iteration on this style. A new IPA, whether it’s low-calorie or not, is probably going to sell just fine—for a few years.
Given that most of these low-calorie IPAs fall within the 3-4% ABV range, why not just call them Session IPAs? Because Session IPAs were a trend a few years ago, old news by now in the mind of the craft beer drinker who’s always in pursuit of novelty. (According to Beer Marketer’s Insights, new SKUs made up two-thirds of beer’s growth from 2015-2019, yet of the 3,700 new SKUs that debuted in 2016, only 2,700 were still around three years later.)
It’s notable that, as Flyjack added $1.5 million to Firestone Walker’s bottom line in the first eight months of this year, Easy Jack, the brewery’s 120-calorie, 4% ABV beer is on pace to hit just a third of the dollar sales in 2020 that it did in 2018, according to IRI data. On face value, drinkers are replacing the brewery’s previous low-calorie, Session IPA with its newer version.
Cigar City Brewing is already hedging its bets against cannibalization with its plans to release Jai Low, a 100-calorie, 4% ABV version of flagship Jai Alai IPA, this October. Justin Clark, vice president of commercial development for CANarchy Craft Brewery Collective, of which Cigar City is a member, says a key reason Jai Low will only be available in cans is so it’s not competing with Jai Alai for draft lines.
He’s also clear that while Jai Low was conceived as a lower-ABV version of Jai Alai (which is 7.5% ABV and contains 225 calories per 12oz. can), calling it a Session IPA wasn’t in the cards. The term “session” didn’t connect with drinkers long-term, he says, but he thinks the concept of a lower-ABV IPA is still relevant. “We’re talking about arguably the same thing in different ways,” he says. “This has a different opportunity to connect with the consumer. […] If this wellness category is here to stay, I think it’ll be a success.”
That’s a big “if.” Not only are Session IPAs old news as a label, they’re not in line with what craft beer drinkers are buying. While low-ABV, sessionable beers have increased in number, craft beer drinkers haven’t been demanding them en masse. In fact, it’s the opposite. High-ABV craft beers as a category are growing more rapidly than low-ABV craft beers: Through the first half of 2019, BA-defined craft beers at 7% ABV and up grew 10.5% in volume sales as tracked by IRI. During the same period, volume of BA-defined craft beers with less than 5% ABV fell 0.8%.
Existing craft drinkers aren’t interested in low-ABV beers, or in Session IPAs that were cool four years ago. They want what’s new. (Brut IPAs—also low-calorie and low-carb—didn’t even enjoy the lifespan Session IPAs had.) It’s no surprise that breweries are spinning their latest sessionable IPAs by a new name.
If low-calorie IPAs are threading the same needle Session IPAs did a few years ago, they’re not long for our fridges. Founders Brewing Company’s All Day IPA is the lone success story from an era that saw breweries across the country roll out a 4%-ish ABV IPA—and that’s mostly thanks to All Day’s 15-pack format. (All Day is +13% in IRI stores vs. 2019.)
The 100-calorie IPA is designed as yet another IPA spinoff, not to cater to a unicorn of a calorie-conscious IPA fan who doesn’t exist. Health-conscious drinkers already have an increasing range of hard seltzers, wine spritzers, and light beers to choose from. Meanwhile, craft beer drinkers continue to stock up on Triple IPAs during the pandemic—calorie counts be damned.
Words by Kate Bernot