Interactive map of craft brewery growth

Wow, I didn't know alot of what I just read...thanks

 

Very cool. Would like to see the numbers breakdown by state too. Watching some states get lighter in color around 2000 and again around 2010 makes me wonder if it was small changes that happened to be right around the threshold numbers or if some states experienced big contractions during those times. Great to see how the growth moved around the country, though.

 

I dislike lazy statements like this:

"The combination of Prohibition and World War II had left America's beer culture in a sad state, defined by relentless consolidation and the death of local, flavorful brews."
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This falls into the "everybody knows" fact file that is not supported by the numerical data, IMO.

First of all, the decline in the number of brewers started well before prohibition.

Secondly, the decline was NOT accelerated in any significant way by either prohibition or WWII.

Look at the chart, and extrapolate the curve from before prohibition until it joins the curve after prohibition. It will pretty much match up exactly, and then the downward trend continues on the same curve until the bottom in the 80's.

There is a slight bump up and then down and then a slight flattening in and around WWII, but then the decline resumes on pretty much the same path it had been on since 1907 or so.

I maintain that this curve follows a general business pattern of consolidation into national and global companies in many consumer products businesses that had little to do with prohibition or WWII specifically.

Further, I maintain that the loss of "flavorful brews" was about these companies responding to consumer desires, just as the major food manufacturers did with other food products over this time. Cakes from mixes in the 50's were not nearly as flavorful as from scratch cakes from Grandma's oven, but they were much more convenient.

The pioneers of craft brewing (Anchor, SN, and BBC) re-introduced flavorful beers and let consumers know what they were missing, and thus began a consumer movement that the craft brewers are responding to. This same general trend is seen in other food products in farmer's markets and grocery stores around the nation.

But, it is easier to blame it on prohibition, and that sounds credible. It just isn't backed up by the number of brewers per year chart.

 

But Brewbound doesn't just say "brick and mortar" breweries:

That means some "brick and mortar" breweries are counted more than once if two or more licensed "brewers" are using the same facility under the rules of a legal alternating proprietorship. Probably also explains much of the difference between the TTB and Brewers Association total.

Also, it is a myth that there were no licensed breweries during Prohibition - there were hundreds, making real beer and then de-alcoholizing it for legal "0.5%" cereal beverage.



For the most part those are the breweries that were able to have beer to sell on April 7, 1933 in those state were it became legal (many states did not change their laws in time for the legal 3.2 beer allowed with the passage ans signing of the Cullen-Harrison Act in March).

 

Such a great article. Thanks for sharing.

The thing that struck me as most interesting was how it took over 10 years after Jimmy Carter legalized homebrewing in the late 70's for it to transition over to increase in micro-brewing at the commercial level. So many people have marked that law passing by Jimmy as the spark/catalyst that really sent us on our way, but why 10 year before it picked up any steam (state laws perhaps or just very few homebrewers had the vision and all it took was widespread visibility to what SN and SA were doing to lead the way for other homebrewers to make the leap)?

 

I am not a beer historian here but permit me to suggest that the delay was due to constructing business plans and convincing investors to provide money.

What I may state next is likely to be politically incorrect with the BA crowd but….

I wish that the plethora of new breweries in the planning and relatively soon to open stage would take more time before opening. A person who has homebrewed for 1-3 years is not the ‘optimum’ person to be opening or operating as a brewer.

Cheers!

 

There are definite prodigies that defy this, but on the whole I would certainly agree, and the quality (or lack thereof) of many local breweries in my area definitely speaks to this.

 

This probably is just nitpicking, but the grey symbol should really stand for 0 to 5 instead of just 0. Otherwise it seems that Geary's isn't accounted for in the beginning.

 

I think that the impact of Carter has been overstated. More important were local laws allowing self distributing and serving on premises; plus, just being a part of the local culture surely inspired people. The map shows that, actually, in how California and the whole west coast started out in the darker colors already.

 

Carter didn't "pass" any laws (that's not how it works in the US) - he merely signed a revenue bill passed by Congress which included, among other things, the change in ATF rules. If any one person in government should get credit, it'd be California's Alan Cranston. At the time of passage, the BATF even noted that "There has not been a home brew case made since Prohibition". Homebrew ingredients and shops were openly sold and advertised.

There had been some arrests over the years at the state or local levels, but they mostly dealt with selling homebrew without a license - violating the same law that someone who sold legal commercially-produced beer without a license would.

That "so many people" now claim that so-called legalization of homebrew was the catalyst is primarily due to a bit of historical revisionism, due to the incongruous situation in which a D-I-Y hobby group (the American Homebrewing Association) is also now under the same umbrella group as the main professional small brewers organization - The Brewers Association. The B.A. is a merger of the old American Brewers Association (a "small brewers" group started near the end of Prohibition) and the AHA-created Association of Brewers.

As noted by others above, there were numerous factors involved with the rise of "craft brewing" - which was already underway (Anchor and New Albion) by the time of the Homebrewing law change, and even some of the well-known homebrewers who went profession had homebrewed before legalization (SN's Ken Grossman, who even ran a shop, the most notable).

Other early brewery owners had been commercial brewers and winemakers -River City's Schlueter worked at Schlitz, the Coury's at Cartwright in Portland, and, later, Bert Grant who founded the US's first "brewpub", had worked at the predecessor to Carling-O'Keefe, one of the Big 3 in Canada as well as at Stroh in the US.

A reading of the articles in those late 1970s-early 1980s issues of Zymurgy on the early "micro-breweries" will show that, at the time, even the AHA didn't consider it was an outgrowth of homebrewing.

The changes in individual state laws to allow on-premise licensed "brewpubs" (which took a long time in many states - NJ didn't change until the early '90s) - yeah, but there weren't a lot of changes to self-distribution laws in the early decades of "craft", but many of the early "craft" states already allowed self-distribution - California, Colorado, Massachusetts and New York for just 4 examples.

 

Hey, I agree with your premise (and have made the point numerous times myself - even "tweaking" a Brewers Association graphic [BELOW] with an added red line once for some long forgotten thread) but that quote and rest of the article didn't really make the cliche "Prohibition & WWII caused the number of brewers to decrease" claim, only that those two events "...left America's beer culture in a sad state...".

While an argument can easily be made that several other factors were also involved and just as important or more so, one can't argue that neither Prohibition or WWII's grain rationing helped much.

Oh, and then there's the defining of "America's beer culture" to tackle.

 

So late 70's there was finally and change in increase direct in number of brewers after many decades of decline. Was that more due to Carters "thing" or local laws changing? Then what was the primary driver for the explosion increase in breweries that started close to 1990?

I pretty much think I know that the new exponential increase we are seeing from 2010 to current is relaxing of many local/state laws combined with a beer cultural shift towards a preference of local/fresh beers. This combination encourages more people to consider to start up a brewery small business as its easier to navigate how to get started while the demand for product is very present.

 

Fascinating that Mississippi was the last state to open a brewery, and still by far has the fewest. Anyone know if there's a reason?

 

We could hazard a guess that it is related to Mississippi also having the lowest household median income of any of the 50 states.

 

Yes, you are correct on the literal words of that sentence, but the entire article is about the decline and then the growth in the number of breweries, not about the state of American beer culture in general. For example, I don't see any pictures of 60's frat boys and Spuds MacKenzie followed by pictures of hipsters and neck-beards illustrating the overall transition of the American beer "culture"!

 

I think @jesskidden covered much of this nicely - people were already homebrewing, plus self distribution laws were catalysts.

Another thing to keep in mind was the increased distribution of 'boutique ' imports from the late 70's onward, which also seems to tie in with the increase of homebrewing during that time period - people now wanted to be able to reproduce styles that they were trying. Simultaneously, the contract brewing concept was being put to use for establishing flavorful domestic brands like New Amsterdam, and later on, Samuel Adams.

I'd actually put SA at the start of the second wave (1985-6), because suddenly the craft beers were being seen in a much wider footprint rather than local or even regional. By 1990 that wave was already well under way.

 

I will say the local culture has much to do with it, the last two states to legalize homebrewing were MS and AL. I think that the brewery came first.
https://www.brewersassociation.org/press-releases/homebrewing-officially-legal-in-all-50-states/

Someone I know has a brewery in Huntsville AL. There are quite a few breweries in the Huntsville area. He says it has one of the highest percentage of advanced degrees in the nation due to the Redstone Arsenal and NASA. So the local population has something to do with it.

 

Imported beer in general was credited as a major factor in the US beer renaissance of the 1970s-1980s by the writers of AHA's Zymurgy articles about small brewers. (After all, opening small breweries was just half the battle, getting people to buy those beers - at a price of 2-3 times the price of the standard US beers - was the other half).

From two of those articles on "micro-breweries"

Of course, at that time imports according for a mere 2% of the US market, compared to nearly 14% today. OTOH, today the most of the imports are adjunct lagers coming from Mexico, while in 1980 most of the top imports were coming from Europe (Holland, Germany, Ireland, France), Canada and Australia.

 

I agree with that!

Cheers!