US craft beer production

It turns out that Americans have spent the last seventeen years engaged in a curious synchronisation: the more we've learned to ferment hops in artisanal batches, the more of us have choked to death on food. One might almost imagine beer was training us for it. The universe appears to have noticed a correlation where none of us thought to look.

What's probably happening here—and it's far less sinister than it sounds—is that both trends are mostly riding the same wave of American population growth and ageing. The US population increased by about 4% between 2005 and 2021, which would nudge both metrics upward almost automatically; older adults choke more easily on food (your swallowing mechanism apparently comes with an expiration date around seventy), and simultaneously, millennial Americans have spent these same years treating craft beer the way previous generations treated golf courses. There's also the economic recovery after 2008 to consider—disposable income returned, restaurants opened more frequently, and people ate out more often, which is where choking deaths tend to cluster. It's rather like noticing that ice cream sales and drowning deaths both increase in summer, then spending three years wondering if someone should warn people about cones.

What we're witnessing is not some dark warning from the beer gods, but rather a reminder that the human mind is a pattern-recognition machine that will happily link craft beer production to mortality if you give it seventeen years of data points and nothing else to do. The craft beer industry and choking deaths were never in conversation with each other; they were simply both passengers on the same demographic bus. Still, you might want to chew slowly.