With today’s drinkers pulled in more directions than ever, brewers can stay the course with beer or branch out to seek new sales opportunities in other categories, such as wine, spirits, cider, or even malt-based ready-to-drink cocktails.
Yet there’s another hot category in the drinks world, though it’s a trickier one for alcoholic-beverage makers to navigate: functional beverages. The same rising wellness focus that’s driving the growth of nonalcoholic beer also motivates shoppers to seek out drinks with electrolytes for energy, adaptogens for mental clarity, and probiotics for gut health, among other things.
Allied Market Research valued the functional-beverage market at $110 million in 2020, estimating that it would hit $200 million by 2030. And according to Innova Marketing Insights, beverages aimed at improving gut health make up the biggest portion of the functional beverage market, at 26 percent.
Most of us may associate probiotics with yogurt and similar fermented foods, but they should be especially familiar to craft brewers. There are different genera of microbes touted as gastrointestinal aids, and one of the best known is Lactobacillus—the same often used for kettle acidification or included in mixed cultures.
So, does that mean it’s within easy reach to brew a probiotic beer, and to tout its wellness benefits to potentially grab new customers? The answer is complicated—both scientifically and legally.
In the liquid, probiotics face a ton of competition from other bacteria, hops’ iso-alpha acids, and ethanol, so ending up with a beer that you’re sure has some effective level of probiotics left is far from simple. Then, if you invest the time and resources into making a probiotic beer, marketing it is murky territory. To what degree can you communicate health benefits when you’re selling an alcoholic beverage?
Here we speak with brewers, marketers, and experts on the science of fermentation to get more insight into the obstacles to brewing and selling gut-healthy beer.