California breweries are *starred and our explanatory comments are in ( parentheses). Seltzers and any similar products that can be legally made by a brewing company but are not beer have been excluded from the output. The slightly annotated list that follows is not a list of brands or facilities, but a list of companies that brew beer. While some companies have relied entirely on contracted brews, there are many reasons active brewers make this arrangement with a third party.) Top 50 Craft Brewing Companies by Barrels of Beer Brewed in 2021 Buying new fermentors or building out more production space and increasing staffing is incredibly expensive. (Why would a brewer get help making beer from other breweries? We recently spoke with a brewer who told us about getting the taproom flagship hazy IPA brewed by another operation so the production crew could focus on making a variety of other beers rather than managing the production of that one crowd-pleasing beast over and over again. The one Gordon Biersch branded place to have a beer here in the Bay Area, where the brewery began, is inside Terminal 1 at SFO, as many have learned when flights are delayed. Gordon Biersch, south of the current BART transit footprint in San Jose, brews its own branded beers and also contracts to produce beers with store brands (such as Trader Joe’s) and as an assist for smaller breweries. (Trumer in Berkeley is not open for tasting but is a good place to check out at the California Craft Brewers Association benefit festival during SF Beer Week.)
In particular, the San Leandro 21A facility gives a good impression of how massive operations have to be to play on this level in the brewing world, even if you simply visit the taproom and peer around a little. With a Sierra Nevada taproom in Berkeley and two 21st Amendment locations in San Leandro and the original SF brewpub, there are three places to visit by BART, ferry and bus to tip your hat to the accomplishments of large craft beer companies locally. (This rocket to the top tier is likely explained by noticing that 20 showed Two Roads Brewing out of Connecticut on the top 50, and credible sources have noted that that brewery had been producing Athletic’s NA beers under contract in recent years, before Athletic bought their own production facilities.) A Taste of Success
Athletic Brewing Company, a non-alcoholic craft brewing company, leaped into the big leagues at position number 27. One outlier that journalists on the press conference call noticed was an unexpected newcomer in the middle of the list. Watson’s prognosis from crunching the numbers shows growth continuing, though at an expectedly slower pace than in the last decade.Įagle-eyed journalists compare these lists each year. Perhaps the next year will see more than one kind of post-pandemic adjustment – such as both this expected uptick in closures of those who are barely hanging on and an uptick of delayed openings – as the economy catches up and dreams are rekindled. These may turn into final closures in the wake of the pandemic. Some breweries still call themselves “temporarily” closed. The pace of openings and closures have both slowed somewhat, interpreted as functions of the maturing craft beer marketplace as well as the results of pandemic disruptions. In short, his reading of the pictures that his spreadsheets paint is that Craft Breweries are rebounding. On the Reboundīart Watson, chief economist at the Brewers Association, hosted a video press conference Tuesday where he further interpreted the numbers. So the very large brewing companies are still seeing their share of production erode slightly. The total volume of craft beer (by the BA definition of small and independent) continues to account for an increasing portion of the total beer brewed in the nation, hitting 13.1% in 2021, up from 12.2% in 2020. The barrel total for 2021, painstakingly pulled from a variety of governmental reports, sales data and self-reporting from BA members, was just shy of 25 million barrels of beer, up 8%, despite restrictions for on-premise drinking and dining in various areas of the nation for health reasons during parts of the year. And yes, the craft beer sector, by the BA definition, is still growing, essentially back from the Covid 19 dropoff in production. Īlong with the big fifty list comes a preliminary annual overview of the commercial scale of American beer. The big list features the largest fifty out of 9,118 operating brewing companies in terms of production quantity. The Brewers Association released their annual rankings of the “Top 50 Producing US Craft Brewing Companies” yesterday along with optimistic statistics about the “small and independent” sector in general. And Happily, the Other 9,068 Breweries Are Doing Pretty Much OK, Too
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