Sobering Stats Confront The Craft Beer Biz

If you don’t think the craft beer industry is changing, and that it has entered an era where unlimited growth is no longer a given, you need to check what you’re smoking immediately.

According to a recent article that the Brewers Association published in the latest issue of The New Brewer, production at 25 of America’s Top 50 breweries DID NOT grow in 2016, portending a slowdown that we expect to spread this year.

And as the BA’s Chief Economist Bart Watson touched on during his “State of the Industry” discussion at this year’s CBC, It’s the bigger regional craft breweries (those producing between 15,000 and 6 million barrels of beer annually) that appear at first to be most vulnerable.

According to Brewbound “beer sales for four of the top five craft breweries — D.G. Yuengling & Sons, Boston Beer Company, Sierra Nevada and Gambrinus Company — declined last year.”

Those are sobering stats that you’d be a fool to ignore.

Yes, not all the big craft breweries are slowing. In fact the fourth largest craft brewing operation in the country, New Belgium was up by 5 percent.  And Firestone Walker has been killing it, up over 30 percent for the third year in a row.

But half of the nation’s biggest craft breweries have stopped growing and scale alone might not explain why so many of the larger craft beer are showing signs of slowing volume sales,

Brewbound’s Justin Kendall goes on to detail that “production for about 20 percent of the first 1,000 microbreweries listed in the New Brewer issue was either flat or down in 2016,” and you’ve got to admit that’s concerning as well.

As we’ve editorialized almost endlessly here at American Craft Beer, “anything that can’t go on forever…won’t,” and that includes the seemingly endless growth the craft beer industry has been experiencing over the last decade.

And no craft beer isn’t going away, but the industry is changing, and 2017 is going to be a sobering year for many craft breweries.