Number of craft breweries in the US

As craft breweries have proliferated across America, deaths from falling out of bed have increased with almost perfect correspondence, a correlation of 0.996 that practically writes its own punchline. The obvious joke—that IPAs are making Americans fall out of bed—is too good to be true and too statistically significant to ignore. The breweries open, the bodies tumble, and the data delivers the kind of number that makes you want to verify the math and then immediately tweet it.

Craft breweries grew from about 1,400 in 2005 to over 9,500 by 2021, on a smooth growth curve powered by consumer premiumization and the cultural fetishization of artisanal everything. Bed-fall deaths grew as the population aged. Both curves are perfectly monotonic upward, and two smooth upward trends over seventeen years will produce a correlation this high regardless of mechanism. The craft brewery customer and the bed-fall victim are not the same person (the median brewery customer is 35; the median bed-fall victim is 78), but the chart cannot see demographics. It can only see shapes.

A correlation of 0.996 between craft breweries and bed falls is the most entertaining number in this entire dataset and possibly the most useless. The beer flows, the elderly fall, and the coefficient sits between them like a comedian who has told the perfect joke and is now waiting for the audience to realize it isn't funny. The hops are fresh. The correlation is overripe. The bed rail remains uninstalled.