10 most popular beers of 2024

Please have a happy holiday season with your family, friends, co-workers, and guests. Hopefully the end of the year at work is busy, profitable, and not too hectic.

We'll be back in your inboxes next year! 🍻

It's that time of year! Here are the most popular beers of the year, according to pageviews on BeerMenus.com.

It's a weird list, as these things always tend to be. There are some unsurprising entries that always turn up here—e.g. craft heavy hitters like Heady Topper and the fruity Busch Light contingent—but then there are some real surprises too. (See: Surfside Iced Tea.)

But the data doesn't lie. And it certainly doesn't care what I think about an oddball seltzer turning up on our year-end list. So without further headscratching, here's the full top 10:

	Busch Light Peach Lager · 4.1% · St. Louis, MO
	Löwenbräu Original Helles Lager · 5.2% · München, Germany
	The Alchemist Heady Topper Double IPA · 8.0% · Stowe, VT
	Schlitz Pale Lager · 4.6% · San Antonio, TX
	Busch Light Apple Fruit Beer · 4.1% · St. Louis, MO
	Maine Lunch IPA · 7.0% · Freeport, ME
	Stateside Surfside Iced Tea Hard Seltzer · 4.5% · Philadelphia, PA
	Champale Pink Lager · 5.4% · San Antonio, TX
	Presidente Pilsner · 5.0% · Santo Domingo
	Colt 45 Malt Liquor · 6.0% · San Antonio, TX

Why it works

Customers can order more quickly, meaning your bartenders can serve more customers, faster.

How it works

• On their own, without the help of the bartender, your customers can read your full-info Print Menu (includes beer descriptions, ABV, etc.) to hone in on what to order.
• Then they can step up, look at the TV Menu, and just say “I”ll have a number 4” to the bartender.

The interaction is finished and significant time saved—no asking what's on tap, no samples, no back-and-forth about what to order.

This time savings can add up quickly on a busy night, and the more time saved means the more folks served per hour. And that means more sales.

David Hayden of multi-state chain Up-Down says this phenomenon "works out to thousands of additional dollars on a Friday or Saturday night."

How can I do it at my business?

You could do this manually. Google the beers you have, copy the info you need, drop the info into your Print Menu doc and your editable TV Menu, then adjust the design as necessary.

• Food delivery platform Grubhub sells for 90% loss. In 2020 it was sold for $7.3 billion. Four years later, it just sold for $650 million. This take from Fast Casual says the dramatic loss proves the current delivery service model is unsustainable. No argument here. That's an astounding value decline in four years.
• Bud Light no longer most popular draft beer. It used to be true that Bud Light was untouchable. But things change—one day Kid Rock peppers it with a machine gun, the next Michelob Ultra unseats it as the most popular draft beer in the country. Tough stuff for the folks in St. Louis...I mean Belgium. Or is their HQ in Brazil now?
• Weird item of the week: a Western style beer bar is opening in a suburb of Pyongyang. Most of North Korea can't afford enough food, let alone beer. But for the country's elite and the limited tourists who visit, I guess it'll be a nice respite. Looks like the selection will mostly come from the state-owned Taedonggang Brewery, so probably not a ton of experimentation with goofy hops and kettle sours.