MAY/JUNE 1999

VOL.4 NO.2

North American Craft Brewing Dead? Some Aussies Think So

From the April 19 edition of the Melbourne newspaper, The Age, comes a story about number three Australian brewer, J Boag & Son, planning to take a crack at the U.S. beer market. Nothing terribly unusual about that---except for the fact that it will mark Boag's first foray overseas---but the opening paragraph of the article certainly raised my eyebrows.

Writes reporter Helen Shield: "The demise of boutique brewers in the US has thrown up lucrative global opportunities for Tasmanian brewer J Boag & Son."

Demise? Once again, to paraphrase Mr. Twain's famous line, reports of the death of craft brewing in the United States have been greatly exaggerated. Far from being dead, the craft beer renaissance is alive and well in both the United States and Canada.

The latest numbers from the Institute for Brewing Studies, the Boulder, Colorado-based craft brewing industry association, tell the story: In 1998, sales of craft brewed beer held steady in the U.S. at approximately 5.6 million barrels (6.6 million hectolitres). This may be a far cry from the double digit growth rates experienced in the mid-1990's, but it still mirrors the brewing industry as a whole, which remained steady or experienced only marginal growth in 1998.

Even more encouraging is the growth demonstrated by twenty top craft brewers. The list is headed by California's Sierra Nevada Brewing, which reported an increase in sales of 26% in 1998 to finish the year at 382,050 barrels (448,336 hectolitres). Other craft breweries that saw strong growth in 1998 included Colorado's New Belgium Brewing Co. (up 31% to 104,835 barrels or 123,024 hectolitres), Oregon's Deschutes Brewery (up 18% to 76,100 barrels or 89,303 hectolitres), Alaska's Alaskan Brewing Co. (up 18% to 59,000 barrels or 69,236 hectolitres) and Illinois' Goose Island Beer Co. (up 15% to 43,200 barrels or 50,695 hectolitres).

What these figures show is that far from being dead, the craft brewing industry has merely reached a levelling off point. What the columns of morbid pundits predicting the end of the industry are ignoring is the fact that the craft beer business has been around for almost two decades now and the expectation that it could continue to grow at a rapacious rate is simply absurd. The entire theory is, in fact, as illogical as the notion that beer drinkers accustomed to full-bodied and flavourful ales and lagers are going to happily return to drinking the mass-produced brews author William Moon once described as "wet air."

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