US craft beer production

It appears that somewhere around 2005, Americans made a collective decision to simultaneously get better at brewing hoppy IPAs and worse at staying in bed, as if the universe were running a grim social experiment to see which trend line could climb faster. One charts humanity's creative ambitions; the other charts humanity's surprising vulnerability to gravity while unconscious. The correlation is so robust it makes you wonder whether craft beer drinkers are simply more adventurous sleepers.

The answer, almost certainly, is that both statistics are surfing the same demographic wave: a growing, aging population with more disposable income. The craft beer industry exploded as millennials came of age and developed opinions about fermentation, while simultaneously America's population got older, and older people fall out of bed with the kind of frequency that would surprise anyone who hasn't watched a grandparent navigate a mattress. Between 2005 and 2021, the US population grew by roughly 45 million people, and the over-65 demographic alone added about 15 million souls to the bedside-tumbling pool. Both trends also benefited from economic expansion (at least until 2008), which funded both ambitious breweries and, somewhat less intentionally, emergency room visits for elderly Americans discovering gravity the hard way.

So we have two entirely separate human endeavors—one involving yeast and hops and beards, the other involving mattress physics and mortality—moving in perfect synchrony for seventeen years, which tells us something unsettling about how much of what we do is simply the inevitable result of getting more numerous and slightly richer. The real pattern here isn't between beer and beds at all. It's between everything and everything else, waiting for someone to measure it.