Two Numbers: One Million; 582 Million
Until sometime around 2010, it seemed possible to hold the scale of the US beer market in our brains. The country had fewer than 1,800 breweries, a figure that hadn’t changed much in a decade. Breweries made a regular line of beer, offered a few seasonals, and maybe an occasional specialty. No one kept track of these things, but I’d guess the average brewery made a dozen beers. Among brewpubs that number probably wasn’t much bigger—maybe double? Compared to 1980, that seemed to offer a tremendous amount of choice, though—30,000 individual beers, more or less.
While that’s a big number, consider that 60% of US breweries were brewpubs then, which were only relevant at the local level. When you focused on regular-production beers sold at grocery stores, you were talking about 4,000 beers (680 production breweries making six core beers). Okay, maybe you weren’t going to drink them all, but your mind didn’t reel at their number. Well,
I was doing that same back-of-the-envelope math recently, and things have changed just a smidge. American breweries are within spitting distance of making a million individual beers. Maybe they already do.
Three changes account for this. (1) The US has seen a more than fivefold increase in breweries since 2010, to around 9,500. (2) The number of beers each brewery makes has skyrocketed. Partly that’s a function of a changing market that rewards churn. But partly it’s a result of the fact that (3) almost all those breweries have taprooms, and a a lot have multiple taprooms. People are in turn drawn to those retail sites to sample new beers and buy four-packs they can’t get at the store.
How many beers will each brewery make in a year? Breweries still have their core line and seasonals, just like 2010, but it’s bog standard for them to also have special releases, limited releases, and collabs—and that’s just packaged beer. They also need to supply 20 handles at their taprooms year round. When you add all that up, it’s common for breweries to make a hundred individual beers a year. If that’s a nationwide average—and I bet it’s close—American breweries will release 950,000 separate beers this year. If the average is just a bit higher, 106, they’ll make more than a million.
That is … much harder to fathom.
(An interesting paradox lies at the center of this dynamic, too. Taprooms have become so popular because of the proliferation of breweries. Since 2010, space in a grocery’s beer aisle hasn’t grown much at all, and that’s not the only pressure. Those beer aisles are now clogged with seltzers, imports, and FMBs. Moreover, distribution is consolidating, further narrowing the pipeline breweries have to market. So, to get their cans to customers, breweries need their own retail outlet—thus the taprooms. But here’s the rub: once they start a taproom, breweries see the need to feed the beast with constantly refreshed offerings. So the answer to a market pinched by thousands of breweries and new product categories has been one that causes further spiraling in the number of beers sold in the US. Curious.)
582 Million Hectoliters
This is less a story than a data point, but it’s also one of those big-number facts that boggles the mind—or mine, anyway. BarthHaas recently released their annual list of the world’s largest breweries. AB InBev came in at number one, no surprise, with 581.7 million hectoliters (495.7 million barrels). That accounts for almost a third of the beer brewed each year in the world. But that doesn’t really capture how dominant the company is. Consider:
The 40th-largest brewery on the list (Veltins) makes .5% as much beer. Remember, there are 10,000 breweries in the US alone. 40th-largest is large!
The 10th-largest makes (Yanjing) makes just 5.7% as much.
ABI makes more than the next four largest breweries combined (and then some).
They make 2.5 times more than their closest rival (Heineken) and four times more than Carlsberg, the third-largest beer company in the world.
It’s a pretty interesting list, so click through if you’re curious which other breweries make the cut.