US craft beer production

From 2005 to 2023, every time American microbreweries produced more barrels of small-batch IPA, more geocaches appeared in forests and behind highway guardrails around the world. The correlation is 0.9739 across nineteen years, which is remarkable given that geocaching is a hobby conducted entirely outdoors and craft beer is best enjoyed sitting down. Presumably there is overlap in the Venn diagram of people who think a tupperware container hidden near a trailhead is an adventure, and people who think a beer brewed in a converted warehouse is a revolution.

US craft brewery numbers grew from around 1,400 in 2005 to over 9,000 by 2023, producing an ever-larger share of total US beer volume as consumer preferences shifted toward local and artisanal products. Active geocaches worldwide grew from roughly 300,000 in 2005 to over 3 million by the early 2020s, driven by smartphone GPS adoption and the Geocaching.com platform's expansion. Both are classic expressions of the same cultural movement: the early-to-mid 21st century turn toward participatory, community-driven alternatives to mass-produced experiences. Craft beer rejects Budweiser; geocaching rejects passive tourism. They both peaked as hobbies at the same inflection point in smartphone culture.

Cultural movements tend to travel in packs — when a society decides to value authenticity and participation in one domain, it often decides the same thing across several others simultaneously. The numbers don't know they're part of a zeitgeist, but they act like it.