OK, I just tried to do a quick search of the interwebs using gaggle and another search engine but didn't come up with anything that approximated what I'm looking for which is this (& I'm sure jesskidden knows where it's at if it exists): What site would hold the information of all the American brewery startup dates down through the last quarter century? Half century? Century? Closing dates or still-in-operation info would also be a plus but is there someplace that would list the names of the breweries that opened up during a past year without having to gaggle up the name of each individual brewery to find out their first year of operation? For instance, what were the american breweries that opened up in 2006? 1995? 1982? 1959? etc.? Oddball question but I'm not getting anywhere other than having to look up each individual brewery by name to find out the first year of existence.
Hoping to find something in-one-place easier to see just how long today's breweries have been in operation than having to look up & research each brewery individually.
I don't regularly use (or, more importantly, trust) online sources since too often when I do, my first reaction is " Gee, that doesn't sound right..." which send me down a rabbit hole. For the US pre-craft era I use books like AMERICAN BREWERIES II by Dale P. Van Wieren [1995] (so obviously it does cover the early craft brewers up to that point), 100 Years of Brewing [1903], Beer - Its History And Economic... F W Salem, Beer From the Expert's Viewpoint Wahl & Wahl, The Brewers Almanac (published by USBA > Beer Institute), etc., as well as back issues of magazines like The Brewers Digest, American Brewer, The Brewers Association's The New Brewer and other AoB/B.A. publications, Brewery registers and the pay site Newspapers.com. The Van Wieren book is OoP but used copies are available. (The "II" in the title refers to the fact that it is a sort of update w/corrections and additions to 1976's The Register of United States Breweries 1876-1976 Friedrich & Bull). Some of the other books and publications above are available as pdfs online (makes searching a lot easier since indexes of the past often sucked). Some of the above books are somewhat "chronological" (most notably 100 Years of Brewing which covers the US brewing history by decades for individual states). I keep thinking I have a book with a chronological list of brewery foundings by year (probably only pre-Pro...) but can't find it. Online, https://www.taverntrove.com/index.php (click on BREWERY HISTORY SEARCH in the INDEX) seems to be based on info from American Breweries II though some entries disagree. Never spent much time there, doesn't appear to cover more recent, craft-era breweries.
Good information there Jess, thanks for posting. Have you ever came across brew logs like the ones Ron Pattinson uses in his research?
Try http://www.oldbreweries.com/. They list by legal business, not brand, so one brewery that changed owners five times has five entries. And @jesskidden would know more about how reliable it is. But I find it useful.
Huh. Last time I looked for that site, I couldn't find it. Appears to be the same info (same numbering system but deletes some "aka" brewery names and street addresses) as Van Wieren's AMERICAN BREWERIES II. As such, it doesn't appear to have most craft era breweries (No Sierra Nevada under Chico, CA for instance).
