How Many Breweries Will Be Active in the US Five Years From Now?

Yeah, but that'd be up to an organization like The Brewers Association and would depend on "self-reporting" (which I guess is how they've determined BBC's "beer" barrelage vs their actual total the last few years). The Feds and most Industry publications/groups don't really care - it's all money to them. And even the B.A.'s list of the largest US brewers/marketers lists "Mike's Hard*" at #6 in 2019 (within a couple hundred thousand barrels behind Boston).

*Not sure why they call it by that name rather than the corporate name, Mark Anthony Brands, Inc. But, then, I never understood why Mark's hard lemonade was attributed to Mike or which one had the claw...

 

Agreed. I'm not holding my breath waiting for BA to update their reporting to show that craft beer sales are actually falling in some statistics. At some point though if FMB trends continue upward (which certainly seems to be the case), that divergence is going to become impossible to ignore.

 

Don't know what's going on in CA but in NJ some of the small breweries are brewing there own hard seltzer for taproom sales. As an owner recently told me, seltzer is much cheaper to brew than beer and he sells it for only $1.00 less a pint.

 

If it keeps the brewery in business then awesome!

 

I voted 10k+ and agree with other commenters that it will probably be more breweries selling less total beer. We still aren't back to the breweries per capita numbers that existed pre prohibition and I don't see much reason to believe we won't get there. The vast majority will be neighborhood pub type places serving a small local community as a social space that happens to make (at least some of) the beer they sell

 

Most local breweries are doing seltzer in my area of California, both in draft and packaging. I homebrewed a seltzer and it’s way cheaper and is ready to drink 10xs faster. So breweries can brew it cheaper and faster. It blows my mind that a 12 pk of bud light is like $9 but a 12pk of bud light seltzer is $12.99-$15.99.

 

Well, one reason would be that in the 1870s when the pre-Prohibition number of US breweries peaked (I guess the same would be true of breweries per capita), unlike today, the two biggest breweries didn't brew ~60% of the beer* nor was ~15% of the beer consumed in the country imported. (* Of course, both AB & MC have been losing US market share - wasn't too long ago that figure would have been around 75% IIRC).

Looks like the two largest US brewers at the time, Best (Pabst) and Conrad Seipp were around 100k bbl/yr at the time, so together they accounted for 2% of the 9.8M bbl. beer market and imports were negligible. That means Yuengling and Boston today have a bigger share of the US market than the largest two did in the 1870s.

 

Interesting question. I voted for the 8000-10000 option. Locally, I am pretty sure more breweries have opened in the past year than have closed. I could be wrong about that, but am pretty sure I am not. I know it is not the US, but I think locally speaking, there is still a lot of room for smaller operations, particularly those that operate very locally and incorporate food service.

 

Not off hand but I will look. I can get a rough number for Ontario pretty quickly though.

 

The numbers are dated by a couple years, so are likely somewhat higher. In ‘19 Canada surpassed the 1000 brewery mark. Ontario was at about 275. I know the latter is now over 300. I’m guessing around 1200 give or take a few right now.

I can tell you that Nunavut Territory has 1 licensed brewery!

 

5k or less. Why? Lots of small shoestring businesses are closing in my area right now. Breweries aren't immune. I figure the places that started in the last 5 years will likely be the ones that fail, 5 years ago we had 5k breweries. Seems like a good guess.

 

That's a good point and if I were a betting man I'd bet against my prediction! However I think that when I last looked at the per capita breweries the year before prohibition and translated that to today's population it was something like 20,000+ breweries. And trend lines are heading back toward more breweries slicing up the pie so I'll stick with my wild and hopeful guess

 

According to money.com (my go to source for all brewery stats )

So 10k seems reasonable

 

Probably wasn't the year before, if you're thinking 1919. WWI, so-called "Wartime Prohibition" (several presidential proclamations under the Lever Act - no beer over 2.75% and limits on grain use, closing of breweries) and many states' statewide prohibition meant that the number of breweries and barrelage was down quite a bit. Brewery total was under 700, and total barrelage and per capita consumption were both nearly cut in half from 1918. US population was 104 million.

US breweries peaked in 1873 at 4,131 / US pop. 43 million. The average barrelage was 2,944.

(Oops - missed your post #34. Was 'multi-tasking'... )

 

I'm betting that's the number used to get the 30,000+ figure in that money.com article I linked above.

I looked at it a while ago, and don't remember what year I looked at pre-prohibition, but remember that the per capita equivalent would have put us at over 20,000 breweries.

Like others have noted, I haven't seen the broad failure of breweries feared at the beginning of the shut downs. And when I have seen breweries close they have been replaced by another brewery in the same location.

We might not get to 10,000 in 5 years, but I definitely wouldn't be surprised if we did.

 

Yeah, looks like it. But, again, the average brewery in 1873 had a barelage of under 3k. OTOH, per capita consumption was still a relatively low at 6.6 gal. That peaked in the 1910s at 21, reached that again in by the mid-70s, peaking at 22.5 gallons in '77. Think it's been falling slightly ever since but still around 20.something IIRC.

 

Ya lots of variables at play. I'm sure glad that its not my job to predict how many breweries there will be in the future

 

Correct. The "business case" rests on the product(s). Your job as a business owner would be to come up with a steady stream of successful new products. How long can you survive doing that? It's like the fashion industry but worse. You have an overhead that won't go away after a few unpopular releases (but the fickle consumers can leave). Rather than preparing four seasonal releases, as in fashion, you will probably need to issue a new product every few weeks. You aren't likely to be able to establish a long term seller like Anchor Steam, Widmer Hefe, Stone IPA, New Belgium Fat Tire, Deschutes Black Butte Porter. , , . Don't give up your day job.

 

I don't think this accurately describes the job of the vast majority of breweries and I think we often forget that. Clearly the majority of beer sold, period, is just a handful of brands (flagships from the.big macros and the biggest craft brands) not the cumulative total of all the constantly cycling hazy ipas. And I think that the majority of successful brands, now and into the future, won't be the ones that can deliver the steadiest stream of novelty but the ones that can reliably deliver a product (be it a packaged beverage or a social experience focused around fermented beverages) that enough people in their area are willing to pay for.

The majority of beer consumers that I know don't care to seek out the next hip beer, they just want beers that reliably satisfy their tastes. We lot, the people on this forum, are a weird niche of a niche. You would be I'll advised to develop a business plan around trying to sell us beer