Notes on the Brewers Association's Latest "Largest Breweries" List
Each April, the Brewers Association releases an important package of data, headlined by a list of largest US breweries. I’ll get to those in a moment, but increasingly, the more important information concerns overall industry performance. This year’s numbers were a mixed bag, and revealed a lot about the state of the industry. It’s the final report on a complete year of data, so these look back to 2023. The major findings:
The number of breweries in the US is roughly stable. We topped 9,000 in 2020, passed 9,700 in 2022 and were up to 9,812 in 2023. That incremental change is reflected in the openings (495) and closings numbers (418), which are getting close to equilibrium.
Ten thousand may sound like a lot of breweries, but the mix illustrates how many are small operations. Beginning in 2018, the BA started differentiating “brewpubs” and “taproom breweries,” but they are functionally the same—each serving at least a quarter of their production on-site. The only difference is food service. Those establishments (7,367 combined) account for three-quarters of the breweries in the US.
American beer had a bad year, falling 5.1% (this figure excludes FMBs and seltzer, though they fell by roughly the same amount). Craft beer shrank by 1%, but that meant it increased as an overall percentage of the beer market. Craft represents 13.3% of US beer volume, a level that appears to be its ceiling, though in dollar value, it represents a quarter of the beer market. Years ago, the Brewers Association thought craft might one day constitute 20% of the market, but that didn’t happen.
The BA also released their list of largest breweries, which you can find here. Comments below.
Below are lists of the largest ten US “craft” breweries* and their performance and the largest movers year-to-year. As noted above, we’ve entered an era of stability, and that’s reflected in these tables. There was no movement in the top five, and the two biggest movers were outliers. Tilray absorbed a bunch of new breweries from Anheuser-Busch this year to move to the number six slot, and non-alcoholic brewer Athletic rose three spots to enter the top ten. Athletic seems to have cornered the small and slow-growing NA segment, and their success is impressive. It looks like there’s only room for one NA brewery to enjoy this kind of success, however.
The biggest movers offer some suggestions about the state of the market. Four larger breweries climbed the list—Allagash, Georgetown, Fiddlehead, and Jack’s Abbey. All three are mature regional breweries with stellar reputations for quality. It’s interesting that three are in New England, and I’m not sure what that suggests. Regional breweries producing mainly domestic lagers had mixed fortunes. Two (Pittsburgh and Schell) grew, while Minhas sank.
Stability isn’t as much fun as rocketing growth, but it’s what you expect from a mature market.
* The Brewers Association is a trade organization representing most of the small breweries in the U.S. as well as some of the larger ones. They deploy a convoluted screen for assessing which breweries qualify for membership, but these numbers are a useful breakout to contrast with large breweries making mass market lagers.
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