Anyone looking for an answer to when craft’s current era of compounding hurdles and declines will come to an end received a reality check Wednesday during Brewers Association (BA) president and CEO Bart Watson’s state of the industry address, held at the start of Day 2 of the Craft Brewers Conference (CBC) in Indianapolis.
Around 10,000 industry members are expected to make the trip to Indianapolis for the 2025 Craft Brewers Conference and BrewExpo America (April 28 to May 1). The gathering takes place against a backdrop of growing headwinds for craft breweries and an overhaul of CBC’s host organization, the Brewers Association.
The Brewers Association (BA) has named Bart Watson as the trade group’s next president and CEO. Watson will succeed Bob Pease, who is retiring from the organization, effective January 3. Watson’s first day in the new role will be January 6.
Craft industry members are constantly asking about “price elasticity,” according to Brewers Association (BA) chief economist Bart Watson in his latest deep dive for the trade association.
Homebrew Con, the American Homebrewers Association’s (AHA) annual gathering of homebrewers, is on hiatus.
Brewers Association (BA) president and CEO Bob Pease acknowledged 2023 was “challenging for many small and independent brewers” in a recorded video accompanying the organization’s annual report.
Chief economists Bart Watson (Brewers Association) and Lester Jones (National Beer Wholesalers Association) spent much of the past couple years staving off fears of a recession and preaching about how beer is “economically resilient.”
Craft beer has entered “no to negative growth territory,” Brewers Association (BA) chief economist Bart Watson said during a year-end webinar last week. “We were in double-digit growth as recently as 2014, 2015, and then we moved into kind of a more developed, slow, single-digit growth rate,” Watson said. “COVID hit, and we had the worst year in craft history in 2020 with a partial bounce back in 2021.
This year will be the first, other than 2020, in which independent breweries’ volume has declined in the modern era of craft beer, according to the Brewers Association’s (BA) 2023 Year in Beer report.
After a seven-month slowdown, beer inflation “has reemerged in the past three months,” Brewers Association (BA) chief economist Bart Watson wrote on Twitter/X, following the release of the October Consumer Price Index (CPI) from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
The Brewers Association (BA) published its first Salary and Benefits Benchmarking Report since 2020. Sixty breweries responded with information about 80 common industry jobs, representing 7,396 employees.
The demand for craft beer isn’t growing anymore, and craft has officially become a mature – not maturing – market, Brewers Association (BA) chief economist Bart Watson told industry members Monday at the Massachusetts Brewers Guild’s Technical Brewing and Business Conference, held at Jack’s Abby in Framingham, Massachusetts.
