the growth of craft brewing in the U.S.

With most indicators pointing to the first American microbrewery opening in 1976 (New Albion in Sonoma, California), we’re going to use that as our jumping off point for this article.

Before moving ahead, it bears repeating that several other pre-existing breweries that now qualify as Craft breweries, opened as much as a century before New Albion, but this article is only looking at the growth of microbreweries in the modern era.

From that auspicious opening, it took nine years for the United States to reach the 100 small brewery plateau -and that was without the groundbreaking New Albion which had already closed down a few years earlier.

In the following eleven years the industry grew to ten times that number, with a thousand microbreweries in the U.S. by 1996!

Within the following decade a whopping 4,000 more small breweries opened, bringing the total to 5,000 across the country in 2016.

In just two more years (2018), the total swelled to 7,000 breweries!

By 2019, another thousand breweries were added, with another 1,000 joining them by 2020.  With 9,000 breweries now operating throughout the U.S., it seemed as though there was no end in sight.

But we all know what happened in 2020.  A global pandemic brought to a rather abrupt halt what had been an astounding increase in small breweries in a relatively short period of time.

Though slow growth did continue with brewery openings that were already in the pipeline when Covid hit, there was also a corresponding decline in numbers due to increasing closures.

By 2023 –the most recent year for which there are official statistics—the craft brewery count hit its zenith at 9,906* -a mere 96 breweries short of 10,000.  (*according to the Brewers Association)

Many media outlets proudly proclaimed that there were ten thousand breweries in the U.S., but that figure was misleading.  The claim was based mostly on the fact that there were that many brewing licenses issued, but many of those breweries failed to launch and never saw the light of day.

Perhaps the worst part about all this is that we will never know what the growth potential of the craft beer industry truly was. 

Main Source: Craftbeer.com