Is it time to short Sam Adams?

After reading this article on why Boston Beer Company (ticker SAM) is a good short, I started thinking about the whole craft beer craze.

I have found the whole craze a bit of a double-edged sword.  On the one hand, I’m seeing a ton of more craft beers at bars and liquor stores.  Gone are the days where I would struggle to find anything but Bud, Bud Light, High Life or Miller Lite at a store.

However, on the other hand, I have to hear everyone and their mother talk about beer, as if they know EVERYTHING there is about the drink (for the record, I don’t consider myself particularly knowledgeable about craft beer – by any stretch of the imagination).

However, I’m more and more realizing that the whole craft beer craze is probably just that – a craze.  It’s the latest fad, and it’ll be gone before you know it.  The masses will move on and become experts in whiskey, wine, or even pot if states keep voting to legalize it.

Let’s take a look at a couple charts to prove this out.

Here’s the chart for google searches for the phrase “craft beer” since 2004

 

You can see that the search volume peaked this past summer and has fallen a touch in the past 6 months or so.  One can only assume that there’s a bit of seasonality there, so let’s just say that the search volume is flat is the past 6 months.  How does this compare to other crazes? I’m going to focus on consumer and pop culture crazes that have had an exponential growth in google searches followed by precipitous a fall off.  Y’all are hopefully clever enough to figure out what happened next (and clever enough to know that google searches aren’t dollars).

Here’s MySpace

 

 

Here’s Ja Rule (Ja released an album in 2012)

 

And Digg (RIP)

 

AOL Instant Messager (google trends only go back to 2004)

 

P90x

Minimalist Shoes (I wore minimalists until I got plantar fasciitis in both feet)

Now, to put it all into perspective:  Searches for “poop” are at an all time high!  You all are disgusting