Those numbers are probably accurate but ten years ago I believe that number was around five percent of all beer. It doesn’t sound like a lot to go from five to thirteen percent but think about how much beer is consumed and how much money large brewers have to throw around. Doubling or tripling the market share which includes a lot of breweries who spend very little on marketing is more of an achievement than it seems on the surface.
Certainly even in a craft beer supportive city like here in Denver, where you can find bars absent any large conglomerate beers, industrial lager outsells everything across the city. I’d venture a guess just what is sold at sporting events and concerts outsells all craft beer even counting what brewers sell on premise.
my issue is somewhat historically/location based, as “cream ale” was always a thing in canada and never really faded out of view. i know some places in the states have had it as well. it was nothing special, and known as basically NAIL by another name mostly.
over the past decade in ontario cream ale has in my opinion come to be the default macro replacement on craft taps, and so it is not done from any true passion or belief in the style but just doing what they expect people will buy.
more specifically, i have a lot of problems with ontario microbreweries because i think they are generally very bad, and continue to exist because they are “in” on the provincial government’s beer monopoly, and because of the province’s history of keeping out the great american microbrews. the latter has led to even educated and into-craft people having very poor palates for beer, while imagining that they are totally up to date and consuming beer of a similar quality to the stuff they see elsewhere in the world.
resultantly there are a lot of really bad examples of cream ale (bland all 2row grist or maybe corn or rice or even adjuncts, 10-25IBU, ANY yeast) here all selling for the minimum domestic craft price which is an insane $3.50 (pint at a bar $7 and up) per can wholesale.
I’m on Drew’s side lol I mean, I don’t just drink cream ales all the time but if it’s a summer heat wave and I can’t find any helles, I’m looking for that Cream Ale.
Off topic, I also had a dream last night that I went to mash in but didn’t crush my grain… I pulled my grain out and it was just corn… odd… but then I was like, well let me see if I have that I need to make a cream ale [emoji23] no lie… I don’t know that’s going on with me right now.