At the halfway mark of 2026, slowing volumes tell a misleading story. Outlaw Light Beer CEO Ari Opsahl argues the category is sorting itself into brands that continue to earn consumers’ attention and those that assume they’ve already earned it. Beer doesn’t have a beer problem; it has a brand problem, and where a brand lands comes down to whether it’s still willing to build.
The easy version of the beer story right now is one of steady decline. The version I see is more nuanced. With summer soon behind us, people had more choices for how they spend their discretionary pounds and dollars, and more of that spending is shifting toward ready-to-drink cocktails and, lately, hemp-derived drinks.
The brands feeling that shift hardest are the ones that quit giving drinkers a reason to stay. A category losing some ground to newer options is not necessarily a category in trouble. It is a category being sorted, one brand at a time, into those that continue to earn attention and those that assume they’ve earned it. The trouble was never the beer. It’s the brands that stopped building. Price is only the first place you see it.
Pricing has found its ceiling
I have argued for a while that beer was overdue for a pricing correction. The question of whether it arrives is behind us. The large brewers are already answering with rebates, scan deals and discounting across retail, which is how a market behaves once it has pushed price too far.
Domestic beer has climbed to a point where a shopper can spend the same money on a bottle of vodka and feel like they got more. When a case of beer competes with a bottle of spirits on plain value math, the fault is not the drinker. It is the tag on the shelf.
Buyers are working through the same fast-moving landscape as everyone else, now with challenger brands like ours turning up at the table. Their goal has not moved.
They want beer to drive more volume and more revenue while pulling people through the door. Beer was once one of the great traffic builders for the big grocers, and it still does that work, just with less force than it used to. Bringing that force back is the real assignment.
The brands earning shelf space are helping retailers drive both volume and revenue. Brands losing shelf space have stopped giving retailers a reason to choose them.
Distribution first, then velocity
For any brand growing quickly, there is real tension between chasing new distribution and protecting how fast product moves where you already sit. The two are not rivals. They are a sequence.
You cannot build velocity on a product people cannot find, so shelves have to come first. There is a point, though, once you can honestly say you are stocked at nearly every major grocer, where the job flips and the whole game becomes velocity.
Reaching for more doors past that line without guarding your rate of sale is how young brands stall. Get the order right, and both tend to take care of themselves.
Marketing that stopped connecting
Getting on the shelf is only half the battle. The harder part is giving people a reason to choose you once you’re there. Somewhere along the line, the biggest brewers lost their hold on the drinkers who once reached for them without a second thought. Most of that traces back to the marketing.
Too much of it feels manufactured. Campaigns try to speak to every possible customer at once, and in doing so they give no single customer a reason to stay. The brands gaining ground are pulling people into something they want to be part of, rather than telling them to go buy a can.
The split in the category rewards a closer look. Some brands are climbing while others are losing ground. The ones moving ahead are treating every touchpoint as part of the brand, not just the liquid in the can. They’re trying new things instead of relying on what worked in the past.
Whether it’s concerts, community events, sporting events or in-store activations, they’re creating reasons for people to engage long before they reach the cooler.
They obsess over the purchase decision itself, including how the package looks on the shelf, whether the price feels right and what gives someone a reason to choose it over a familiar name. They continue investing in the market rather than treating their brand as a cost to manage before the next earnings report.
Meanwhile, the brands losing ground are living off awareness they built decades ago and managing toward a share price instead of a drinker. Coasting works until it doesn’t, and plenty of names are finding that out this year. None of this is beer’s fault — it’s the fault of brands that quit building. Outlaw was built to buck exactly that.
The road head in 2026
I’m not bracing for a dramatic swing in the back half of the year. The one development the industry is underrating is unfolding in Washington and across a number of statehouses.
The regulatory future for hemp-derived THC and delta-9 products looks likely to get sorted in the fourth quarter, and to my eye, those drinks are the closest thing to a straight beer alternative on the market today.
Whichever way the rules fall, the effect on our category will be real. Anyone drawing up a plan for 2027 while tuning that debate out is building around a blind spot.
But that threat cuts the way all the others do: a new competitor takes drinkers from the brands that stopped earning them, not the ones still doing the work. Hemp will move volume; it won’t decide which brands survive it. That part is still on the brands.
For Outlaw, the rest of the year comes down to two things: velocity and growth in the bars and restaurants where people gather to drink. We have spent a long stretch building distribution nationwide, and that work is nearly complete.
Currently, we’re hyper-focused on making sure that once someone finds an Outlaw, they keep reaching for it. Growth from here is not about being everywhere. It is about being chosen. That is true for us, and I would argue it holds for the whole category as this reset runs its course. That’s what this reset is really about. The opportunity is still there. It’s just being redistributed.
