Employment data for breweries?

Unfortunately craft brands pay VERY poorly to brewing staff. Probably because of how expensive it is to make.

 

Traditionally, The Beer Institute's (and its predecessor, the US Brewers Association) The Brewers Almanac used the Census Bureau's stats for the number of employed by breweries. The Almanac used to be a hard-copy annual release (not sure if it still published) and in recent years was a 47pg downloadable pdf and, last I checked, they only have a very shortened version for free on the "updated" BI website.

The last TBA pdf I have, 2013, listed the source as https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=bkmk . There "BREWERIES" are listed as 31212 as the NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) code. Currently, the most recent year listed has the figure at 30,080 brewery employees in 2014. (Obviously, the Feds number wouldn't count the importers' employees under that classification).

In this 2011 MBA article, Brewers Association member Dan Kopman (then at Schafly) claimed:

The 1000 bbl. figure seems a fair average for "craft" breweries (which, of course, vary greatly in annual barrelage and, as you note, brewpubs and other "on-site sales" and self-distributing breweries obviously employ many "non-brewery" workers) but "50k bbl" for macro brewery workers seemed way too high.

MillerCoors lists the employment figures for their individual breweries (pretty sure AB used to, but their new "updated" website doesn't) and the company seems to average between 10k-20k bbl/employee, and that figure goes way down when the number of "office workers" in Golden, Milwaukee and Chicago are added in.

A few years after the InBev take-over, in 2011 AB claimed to have 14,000 US employees and sold 99 million bbl of beer (most of it brewed in the US) -so, around 7k bbl/employee.

 

One thing going for a number of the bigger AAL breweries is that they're unionized: https://www.unionplus.org/blog/union-made/union-made-beer

 

That Union Plus page isn't particularly accurate - IIRC it's "user generated" rather than based on actual union contracts. Are there any US AB breweries in which the Machinists have a production contract (maybe, like the Operating Engineers, there are IAM trades local contracts). AB has long been 100% IBT for production workers.

And, of course, while some Coors, Miller and other MC brands are brewed under Teamster, Machinist or Autoworker contracts, not all of it is - given the still non-union former Coors plants.

And "Czechvar" as Teamster-brewed? Kirin is brewed in the US at AB's IBT Los Angeles plant, so why is it "IAM"?. And Labatt Blue is imported from Canada, brewed by Molson (so probably under the Canadian Brewery Workers/NUPGE if it's from Toronto.).

Here's a Teamster map of the main AB and MillerCoors breweries from 2013 (I added the names and locations of the breweries, and updated it slightly - Eden, NC as closed. For some reason, AB Jacksonville is missing. Otherwise, pretty sure it's accurate but I haven't done a lot of brewery union research in the last couple of decades...).

 

This is should a myth that has existed for too long. Yes, many owners try to hire cheap. They end up hiring homebrewers or people with minimal experience from small breweries. Those breweries rarely are competitive and those brewers leave for better paying jobs. Many breweries have now learned from the mistakes of the past and will now go out of their way to hire people with experience and a brewing education. Breweries that start with that type of experience can quickly thrive and people are beginning to realize that. Bad wages are quickly becoming a thing of the past.

 

Which, in my view, is a very good sign.

 

Having worked at a brewery and made minimum wage, none of the brewers or long time workers there made any more than $20 an hour. Hopefully wages can start going up, as people are becoming more educated, because working in a brewery is very hard work and verrryy dangerous. Cheers.

 

Most of the head brewers I know are salaried around the median income for their areas. I would say $50k, plus insurance, and sometimes profit sharing or ownership is common as a baseline for a head brewer at a start up. Maybe nano breweries are less. The ones that are being paid less will either actively seek out other jobs or will be ready to be swept away when an offer is made. I don't know anyone that hires brewers for minimum wage unless they just work the packaging line or keg washing, and normally those guys supplement their incomes by working taproom shifts and getting tips.

 

Yeah, the only problem is that wage is for head brewer, aka the boss of everyone. Shift brewers, cellarman, likely aren't near that wage. This is likely only common for smaller regional brewers. I bet places like Sierra, Stone, etc., are able to pay higher wages. Just a guess.

 

That's also for a startup where there is only need for one brewer. Most shift brewers I know are hourly and the pay varies a lot. $30k was common for shift brewers when I was in Alabama. In a lot of cases, I see breweries set up inefficiently and as a result they require more employees to make up for it. I know by myself I can do all the tank cleaning, cellar work, brewing, ordering, keg cleaning, kegging, and production records on our 15 BBL system for up to 3,000 BBL a year and I'd probably be averaging 50 hour work weeks. If I was to hire an employee to take some of that work off my plate, it would be for keg washing and filling, which are two things that wouldn't demand a high wage. On the other hand, if I needed another brewer to brew on triple batch brew days, they would be able to demand a liveable wage.

 

A couple of things to consider.

Kitchens and restaurants employ more people than in the brewpub I just looked at a destination place up North in MI. ~66 in the restaurant, 3 in the brewery. That doesn't include management.

At a production brewery with a large territory, a sales staff is needed. That staff can be larger than the brewery staff.

 

Anheuser-Busch brewery workers in the U.S. make approximately $32+ hour for full time employees, covered under their Teamster contract. They get time/half and double/time depending on how much OT worked per week (usually 1 1/2 on Sat and double on Sundays). They also get Company paid insurance, pension, 401K and two cases of beer a month. They are the highest paid in the industry.
I have a few friends that work their and they all make 100K a year with OT. The hours suck and the work is demanding, but they take good care of their workers.

 

Well said!

 

Are the cases BCBS? One can hope to dream... even tho I'm not in the job market.

 

Those damn big breweries! Providing employees a living wage, health insurance and pensions. WTF!! Boycott!

Next thing you know they'll be sending water to flood victims.

 

It might take the same or fewer people to brew 1000 bbl on a fully automated system than it does to make a 7 bbl batch on a manual system. Economies of scale apply to the rest of the process.

 

Here's some stats (source- USBA/BI's The Brewers Almanac using BLS figures.).

1948 - 466 breweries employed 64,000 to brew 87.9m bbl.
1983 - 92 breweries employed 28,500 to brew 195.6m bbl.

1948 -US brewing industry employment pretty much peaked (tho' it would again reach that figure in the early 50s) in the post-Depression/WWII period. The then-Big Four - Pabst, Schlitz, Ballantine, AB - each brewed between 4 and 5 million barrels that year, so around 5% market share for each.
Also of note - the Census Bureau's figures for brewing industry employment was much higher that the BLS's in the decade after the War - in the 80k range.

1983 was pretty much the low point in the number of actual licensed breweries (not "brewing companies" - so it includes each facility owned by the multi-site large brewers).

Besides increasing mechanization and automation, and greater economies of scale - fewer but larger capacity breweries - the fact that more and more beer during this period was going through the Three Tier system also meant less brewery employment.

In 1940, half the beer sold in the US was still essentially via a "two tier" - brewery/brewery branch > retailer - system. As late as the 1970s, Schaefer (+5m bbl/yr, #6 in the US and the largest "regional" brewer) sold 52% of its beer through company-owned branches. Ballantine employed over 4,000 when it was a 4-5 million bbl. brewer, self-distributing to the NYC-NJ metro area as well from a dozen other company branches up and down the east coast.

 

How much of that goes back to the Teamsters?

Not sure that $32/ hour is a good thing based on the product they put out. Reminds me a bit of the domestic automakers before they redid the union contracts when workers were making something like $70 an hour when benefits were taken into account and the result was American autos became a laughing stock for poor quality....amazing how quality has gone up since labor rates went down.