Craft Beer Trending

It’s no secret that craft beer is booming in popularity and a good visual of just how fast it’s rise has been in recent years in the Google Trends tool.

Google Trends displays data on what people have been searching for going back to 2004. It’s interesting to see how much the search keywords ‘Craft Beer’ have risen over the past decade.

Starting in 2004 the graph shows very little search volume for craft beer and only a slight rise which trends slightly upwards roughly from 2005 to 2010. From there the growth rate starts to climb rapidly. The sharpest climbs look to be in the two most recent years (2013 + 2014).

The graph below was originally generated half of the way through June 2014. The data displayed on the graph is normalized to show trends relative to overall search patterns. As the number of internet users continue to grow it would make sense that most search terms would get more absolute searches, but this graph isn’t displaying the exact amount of times that the term is searched. What the graph actually shows is the popularity of searchers looking for craft beer compared to all other searches on Google.

There are certain countries where searching for craft beer is more popular than others. Right at the top of the list is Canada followed by the United States and South Africa in the third position. The list below gives a score of 100 to Canada and a lesser score to each each country below Canada. Again, these numbers aren’t absolute. The rankings are normalized to compare the popularity of the search term relative to the amount of searches that are generated from a particular country. In all likelihood craft beer is typed into google much more often in the USA than it is in Canada simply based on the population difference. Canada has a population of around 34 million people compared to the USA’s roughly 318 million people. The graph data adjusts to be able to compare the relative popularity of a search equally from region to region.

(These data charts aren’t static, so the visuals may change depending on when you are reading this article)

The location can also be broken down further to look at which cities produce the most searches for a term relative to their total number of searches. When looking at it by cities, Canada currently takes the top three positions with Calgary, Vanvouver, and Edmonton leading the charge. The top American city on this list is Boston in the number 4 positon.

If you want to search for trends on other beer related terms you can go to the source: Google Trends