NOSTRAD🔮UGLAS' 2025 Preview & Predictions Part 3: The Ununited States of IPA

IPA had a better 2024 than you might realize, but the cornerstone of craft beer is facing stagnation. Those three powerful letters have become almost as generic as "ALE", with brewers having spun-off more side stories than Disney+ after purchasing the Star Wars IP. For longtime enthusiasts, each of these IPA sub-styles feels like the latest season in a beloved TV series—an evolution that's gradual enough to be appreciated, with subtle nuances, codewords, and regional variations to explore. But for newcomers just starting to dabble in IPAs, it’s like trying to jump into a show during its final season and struggling to understand the backstory, depth of the characters, or the intricate details that Day 1 fans take for granted.

Despite all the headlines, IPA managed to stay flat in 2024 when totaling up it’s many sub-styles in NIQ scan data. The news may not feel like an industry-wide accomplishment worth celebrating, in part because of how it’s happening with Imperial / Double / Triple IPAs being the only source of growth.

Additionally, a lot of these increases are via craft juggernauts like New Belgium (+4%) and Sierra Nevada (+5%) who each have successfully used their focus, scale, pricing, and powerful distribution network to find growth. Despite a lot of negative numbers, there are still success stories around the country with independent regional IPA producers who demonstrated an ability grow in scans even during such a tough year, including Troeg’s +3%, Creature Comforts +4%, Ninkasi +8%, Saint Arnold +6%, Fiddlehead +25%, Russian River +13%, Rhinegeist +18%, and Lawsons +7%.

Outside the world of chain stores and these regional brewers, there’s thousands of local brewery taprooms across the country with draft lists covered in IPAs, where it’s still hard to find an open table on a Saturday afternoon. The industry’s long tail battles hard to keep IPAs fresh, interesting, and continue their forward evolution. The problem is that each brewery and each region is marching to the beat of their own drum, leading to inconsistencies between regions and even breweries right next door to each other. Combined with the proliferation of unique sub-styles, the resulting inconsistencies and confusion inflicts major damage to IPA’s already delicate reputation leaving consumers with declining confidence in their purchases, which get more expensive by the day.

Nostradouglas is back to fire up the crystal ball, look deep into the soul of IPA, identify it’s problems, and ponder what’s next for the style that built itself off that very notion.