A thread on r/beer this month asked what has been going on in craft over the last five to ten years, and the top answers agreed on a story: hard seltzer took the volume, the haze craze cooled, and lager came back. One reply put the counter-case in nine words. “They still have 8 IPAs. They just have 2 lagers now too.”
That reply has 99 upvotes and, as far as the paperwork is concerned, it is the correct answer.
What we counted
Every beer sold across state lines in the United States needs a Certificate of Label Approval from the TTB before it ships. We read the labels as they clear. Between 6 May and 1 August 2026 that came to 4,260 product filings from 867 different companies, and we classify each one into a style family off the label itself, not off a brewery's marketing.
A filing is not a case sold. It is a brewery spending money and paperwork on the belief that a beer is worth making. That makes it a leading indicator rather than a sales figure, which is exactly what you want when the question is where the industry thinks it is going.
One caveat, stated plainly: this is a summer window in a single year, not a decade-long trend line. Anything below describes what breweries filed this summer.
IPA still wins. The margin is the news
The IPA family — hazy, West Coast, double, fruited, and everything filed as plain IPA — accounts for 1,373 filings, or 32% of the window. The lager family, counting pilsner through helles, Mexican lager, rice lager, bock and the Oktoberfest beers that get filed in July for September, comes to 1,088, or 26%.
That is a ratio of 1.26 IPAs for every lager.
If your mental model of a taproom is eight IPAs and a token pilsner, that model is a decade old. If your model is that lager has taken over, the register does not support you either. Both styles are being filed at close to the same rate, and the interesting part is that this counts as a lager victory. Getting to near-parity with IPA is a bigger move than beating it would have been in 2016.
Inside the IPA number, hazy is not the leader
Break the IPA family apart and the shape changes again:
- Double IPA — 422
- Hazy IPA — 343
- West Coast IPA — 191
Double IPA outfiles hazy by 23%. And West Coast IPA — the style that was supposed to have been buried around 2018 — is at 191 filings, better than half of hazy's total. Breweries are labelling beers “West Coast IPA” on purpose again, which they would not do if the phrase were a liability on a shelf.
I'm telling you: the haze craze did not end. It stopped being the only thing on the label.
The lager number is not a German revival
This is where the romantic version of the story falls apart. If lager were coming back as a craft statement, you would expect the traditional continental styles to lead. They do not.
- Pilsner — 250
- American lager — 200
- Lager, unspecified — 187
- Oktoberfest / Märzen — 98
- Mexican lager — 77
- Amber lager — 63
- Fruited lager — 60
- Rice lager — 48
- Dark lager — 44
- Helles — 39
- Bock — 22
Pilsner leads, which fits the story. Then it is American lager and plain unspecified lager, which do not. Add Mexican lager, rice lager, and fruited lager and you have 385 filings of beer that is built to be easy rather than to be studied.
Helles gets 39. I lived in Munich for two years and judge every lager I meet against Augustiner, so I would like this number to be larger. It is not.
The honest read is that the lager surge is mostly a light-beer surge wearing a craft label. Breweries are filing the thing they can sell to a table of four where only one person came for beer. u/Guy_Buttersnaps described the same mechanism in that Reddit thread without seeing any of this data: “Times got hard. Costs went up. Customer spend went down. Breweries started focusing more on producing the stuff they know they can move.”
The number nobody predicted
Non-alcoholic beer: 51 filings in the window. That is more than helles. It is more than bock and dark lager combined.
Fifty-one is a small number against 4,260. It is a very large number against zero, which is roughly what it would have been five years ago, and NA is the only category here where the growth is not coming out of another style's share.
Who is actually filing
The most-active filers in the window are not the names you would guess:
- Twelve Percent — 108
- Burial Beer Co. — 63
- Tree House Brewing — 54
- Urban Family Brewing — 52
- It's Good Imports — 49
- Isle Brewers Guild — 41
Twelve Percent and Isle Brewers Guild are not breweries in the way Tree House is. They file on behalf of other people — contract production and import houses whose paperwork carries dozens of brands. Their presence at the top of a filing leaderboard is a reminder that the label record measures who does the compliance, not who owns the recipe.
Urban Family at 52 is the one I keep coming back to. On a single day in May they cleared nine fruited sours at 5.5% — Pampered House Cat, Silent Cartographer, Prickly Planet, Pie Oh My! — which is what a summer fruit program looks like from the compliance side, months before any of it is announced.
What this predicts
Autumn is already on file. The 98 Oktoberfest and Märzen filings cleared in June and July for beer that pours in September, and the 150 barrel-aged stouts in the window are the winter shelf being built while it is still hot outside.
You can watch the rest arrive as it clears. The register updates daily, the lager page and the IPA page hold the running counts, and the Weekly Docket is where I write up whatever the week did that I did not expect.
Method
4,260 TTB Certificate of Label Approval records with a product label, approval or application dated 6 May to 1 August 2026, style classified from label text. Excludes keg collars without a product label and non-beer malt products where the label made that clear. Style families group as listed above; “lager, unspecified” covers labels that say lager without naming a sub-style. Counts move as the register ingests; figures here are as of 3 August 2026.