Athletic Brewing Is One of the Fastest-Growing Brands in Beer. Here Is Why That Should Matter to Every Founder in This Industry.

Circana does not include Athletic Brewing Company in its craft beer data set. The market research firm tracks non-alcoholic beer separately, which means that when you look at the standard craft performance rankings, Athletic is invisible. The craft category appears to be declining. The story looks straightforward.

Except when you run the numbers with Athletic included, something different emerges. If Athletic's brands were counted in the craft rankings for grocery stores year-to-date through late March 2024, the Connecticut-based brewery would have three products in the top 30: Run Wild IPA at number 15, Free Wave hazy IPA at number 19, and Upside Dawn golden ale at number 20. Three brands that are each growing at rates between 59 and 107 percent year over year. Three brands that would displace established names including Sweetwater 420, Goose Island IPA, and Fiddlehead IPA from the list entirely.

That is not a footnote to the craft beer story. It is the craft beer story.

What the Data Actually Shows

The April 2024 Circana grocery data is unambiguous on the Athletic numbers. Run Wild IPA posted dollar sales growth of 59.4 percent year-to-date and volume growth of 65.2 percent. Free Wave grew dollar sales 102.7 percent with volume up 107.6 percent. Upside Dawn grew dollar sales 64.6 percent and volume 70.2 percent. In the most recent four-week period, all three brands continued accelerating, with Free Wave posting 97.8 percent dollar sales growth and Upside Dawn at 68.2 percent.

For context, these growth rates are happening while the total craft beer category is posting dollar sales declines of 2.3 percent year-to-date in grocery, with volume down 3.3 percent. The brands outperforming in traditional craft are almost uniformly the ones that cut prices significantly: Voodoo Ranger Juice Force grew 101.5 percent in dollar sales while dropping its average case price by $2.32, and Kona Big Wave grew 55.3 percent while cutting its average case price by $4.24. The brands that raised prices were almost uniformly losing volume.

Athletic's brands are not doing any of that. They are not cutting prices. They are not offering a traditional product with discounted positioning. They are growing at some of the highest rates in the entire beer category by doing something categorically different.

Non-alcoholic beer is now the fastest-growing segment in grocery beer. Dollar sales grew 27.3 percent year-to-date and volume grew 22.1 percent, the largest percentage growth of any beer segment in the channel by a significant margin. For comparison, the next-largest growth segment was flavored malt beverages at 11.9 percent dollar sales growth. Non-alcoholic beer is running at more than twice the growth rate of the next-best-performing segment.

How Athletic Got Here

Athletic Brewing was founded in 2017 by Bill Shufelt and John Walker in Stratford, Connecticut. Shufelt, a former hedge fund trader, had given up alcohol for fitness and performance reasons and found the non-alcoholic beer options available to him almost uniformly terrible. Walker was a professional brewer. The combination produced a company built on a premise that most of the industry had written off: that non-alcoholic beer could be genuinely good, not a compromise.

The product had to come first, and it did. Athletic invested in a proprietary brewing process designed specifically for non-alcoholic beer rather than trying to remove alcohol from conventionally brewed beer, which almost always degrades the flavor. The result was a product that could compete on taste and drinkability with full-strength craft beers in a way that earlier non-alcoholic options never could.

The positioning was equally deliberate. Athletic never marketed itself as a deprivation product, the thing you drink when you cannot have the real thing. It marketed itself as a performance brand, a choice that active, health-conscious adults make because it fits the life they are building, not because they are missing out on something. The brand spoke to endurance athletes, early risers, people who work out in the morning and do not want to compromise their afternoons. It did not apologize for what it was. It built an identity around exactly what it was.

That positioning turned out to be extraordinarily well-timed. The broader moderation movement in beverage alcohol had been building for years, with younger consumers in particular showing declining rates of alcohol consumption. But the category options available to those consumers had historically been inadequate. Athletic arrived with a product and a brand story that made choosing non-alcoholic beer feel aspirational rather than remedial, and a consumer base that had been waiting for exactly that option moved quickly.

What the Circana State of Bev-Alc Report Says About Why This Is Happening

Athletic's growth does not exist in a vacuum. The April 2024 Circana "State of the CPG Beverage Alcohol Industry" report provides the structural context that makes Athletic's trajectory legible.

The report identifies Gen Z, specifically drinkers aged 21 to 26, as the primary driver of several key shifts in beverage alcohol. Gen Z tends toward products higher in ABV when drinking, products from familiar brand families, and packaging that works across multiple occasions. More broadly, they are driving demand for variety, convenience, and products with what the report calls a "for me for now" quality, meaning something that fits a specific moment rather than a general category default.

Critically, the report identifies a pattern of Gen Z extending the flavor and attribute preferences they have in non-alcoholic drinks into their bev-alc choices. The demand for energy, sweetness, intense flavor, and convenient formats that defines Gen Z's non-alcoholic beverage consumption is showing up in how they approach alcoholic beverages as well. The line between the two categories is more permeable for this cohort than it was for previous generations.

That permeability is exactly what Athletic exploits. A consumer who treats their beverage choices as expressions of lifestyle and values rather than strictly categorized drinking occasions does not see a hard wall between non-alcoholic and alcoholic beer. They see a range of options and choose based on what fits the moment. Athletic has built a brand strong enough to win that choice on its own terms, not by default.

The report also notes that bev-alc overall has seen the least inflation of any food and beverage department since 2019, up just 14 percent compared to a category average of 32.2 percent. Athletic's premium pricing within non-alcoholic beer has not been a barrier to growth because the consumer choosing Athletic is not making a price-based decision. They are making an identity-based one, which is a fundamentally more durable foundation for a brand.

What the Traditional Craft Segment Is Missing

The Athletic story looks even more significant when set against what is happening in traditional craft beer.

Year-to-date through late March 2024, 17 of the top 30 craft brands in grocery were in decline. The brands recording the sharpest losses were some of craft beer's most established names: Fat Tire down 34.5 percent in the 12-week period, Samuel Adams variety packs down 17.4 percent, Blue Moon Light down 12.6 percent, Voodoo Ranger Juicy Haze down 19.4 percent. The pattern of decline was not random. It was concentrated in brands that had built their following during craft beer's growth era and had not successfully evolved their positioning as the consumer changed around them.

The brands outperforming within traditional craft were almost entirely doing so through promotional pricing. Juice Force and Kona Big Wave, the two biggest gainers, both achieved their growth through significant price cuts. That is a viable short-term strategy and a troubling long-term one. A brand that grows when it discounts and shrinks when it does not has not built the kind of consumer relationship that sustains a business through a full market cycle.

Athletic has built the other kind. Its growth is happening with stable or premium pricing in a category where most brands are either discounting or declining. That is the definition of genuine brand equity: the consumer's willingness to pay more because of what the brand means, not less because of what it costs.

The Broader Signal

What Athletic Brewing represents is not just a non-alcoholic beer success story. It is evidence of something larger that every founder building a beverage brand in 2024 needs to sit with.

The consumer is not changing in one direction. They are not simply drinking less. They are making more intentional, more values-driven, more occasion-specific choices about every beverage they consume. The brands that are winning are the ones that have built a clear and coherent answer to the question of what their product means to the person choosing it, and that answer has to survive every occasion the brand is relevant in.

For Athletic, that answer is performance, intentionality, and the freedom to participate in the social rituals around beer without compromising anything. That answer resonates with a wide and growing consumer segment that the traditional beer industry had either ignored or served poorly.

The three Athletic brands that would rank in the top 30 craft grocery SKUs if Circana counted them are not there by accident. They are there because someone built a brand that a specific and growing group of consumers genuinely wanted, in a category that the industry had underestimated, with a product good enough to earn repeat purchase on quality alone.

That is how durable brands get built in any category. Athletic just happened to find that opportunity in one that almost nobody else was taking seriously.

At Liquid Opportunities, the Athletic Brewing story comes up regularly when we are working with founders who are asking where the whitespace is in a crowded category. The answer is almost always the same: the whitespace is where the conventional assumptions about who the consumer is and what they want have not been recently tested. Athletic tested the assumption that non-alcoholic beer could not be a genuine consumer choice, not a compromise. The market's answer has been unambiguous.