Is there a craft beer “bubble?” No, really, is there? We don’t know… 

Our burgeoning beer industry was chugging along at a rapid boil back in the mid-1990s when we famously “hit the wall,” suffered a downturn in production numbers, and saw a lot of brewers (and beer marketers) fold. Sure, some of them had sketchy business plans that seldom included good beer in the equation. Remember Wanker? Rhino Chasers? Elvira gave her cleavage for beer, but even that went bust.

By the early 2000s, we seemed to be back on track, with the opening of new breweries that actually had beer in their mission statement. Then came some economic “bubbles” that truly changed everything. An overheated dot-com tech world saw huge losses when money invested failed to justify any possible product remuneration. Remember Pet.com?

An economic bubble (or a speculative or price bubble) is trade in an asset at a price that strongly deviates from the asset’s intrinsic value. During the 2000 Super Bowl, 17 dot-com companies paid $44 million to drive traffic to their operations. The follow year, only three dot-coms ran ads. Meanwhile, the stock market’s NASDAQ lost a trillion (with a “T,” folks) dollars in less than a month. Investment banks eager to fleece, I mean serve, investors created subprime mortgage bundles and sold them for astronomical prices… CONTINUE READING AT CELEBRATOR