Despite estimated production volume declines of 4%, craft brewers are feeling confident halfway through 2026, according to the Brewers Association’s (BA) mid-year report.
Small and independent craft brewers’ output declined 4% in 2025 – more than 25% less than was previously reported by the Brewers Association (BA). The BA issued a correction of its 2025 Beer Industry Production Survey (BIPS), which was published last month, after receiving “revised production figures for a small number of regional craft brewers,” a BA spokesperson said in a statement shared Tuesday with Brewbound.
More than half (55.45%) of Brewers Association (BA) defined regional craft breweries beyond the top 50 recorded production volume declines in 2025, but there are still signs of improvement compared to 2024, according to annual data shared last week by the trade group.
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.
October domestic tax paid shipments from U.S. brewers were down -10.8% versus October 2022, to an estimated 11.35 million barrels, marking a loss of 1.38 million barrels year-over-year (YoY), according to Beer Institute (BI) chief economist Andrew Heritage.
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.
Domestic tax paid shipments from U.S. breweries have now declined for seven months in a row, declining an estimated -7.4% (nearly 14.3 million barrels) in September versus September 2022, according to the Beer Institute (BI) in the trade group’s latest round of monthly economic reports.
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.
The Beer Institute (BI) has hired Andrew Heritage as its new chief economist, filling the data head vacancy left by Danelle Kosmal.
Domestic tax paid shipments from U.S. breweries continued their six-month streak of declines, with a -5.1% dip in August 2023 compared to August 2022, the Beer Institute (BI) reported, citing numbers from the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB).
The Beer Institute has awarded Jim Ryan the 2023 Jeff Becker Beer Industry Service Award for his leadership and dedication to the U.S. beer industry.
The Beer Institute (BI) has updated its Advertising and Marketing Code, including new guidelines on social media marketing and advertising placement standards.
Domestic tax paid shipments for July were down -8.4% versus July 2022, to 12.8 million barrels, according to the Beer Institute (BI) in its latest round of economic reports.
Domestic tax paid shipments for the first half of 2023 declined -5.9% year-over-year (YoY), to nearly 77.16 million barrels, according to estimates from the Beer Institute through June.
Danelle Kosmal will leave her role as VP of research for industry trade group the Beer Institute (BI) later this year.
