That's a Lot of Beer
I still defend the use of "craft brewery" as applied to Boston Beer (Sam Adams), but "micro" it is surely not:
There's no reason to think it couldn't get ten times that big in the next two decades. The idea that a craft brewery must always remain small and that the macros will always have dominance--it's time to give that one up. Craft brewing is big business.
Now, Boston Beer is tied with Pennsylvania-based D.G. Yuengling & Son as the largest American-owned brewer. Both companies shipped about 2.5 million barrels last year.It's always hard to wrap your head around brewery size, but here are few benchmarks. When it closed down, Henry Weinhard was making about a million barrels a year. The largest ale brewery in Britain, Greene King, makes about 700,000 US barrels. Brasserie Dupont made 12,500 US barrels in 2011. Boston Beer is brewing something like one in five of every craft beer made, depending on whom you include (Yuengling, for example, is generally not included.) All the breweries in Oregon brewed just over a million barrels in 2010. Boston Beer accounts for over 1% of all beer sales in the US--and there are 1700 breweries.
There's no reason to think it couldn't get ten times that big in the next two decades. The idea that a craft brewery must always remain small and that the macros will always have dominance--it's time to give that one up. Craft brewing is big business.