The Brewer’s Association, one of the best sources for news and statistics on the craft brewing industry and related trends, just released the 2011 mid-year report on the state of U.S. Craft Brewers. To briefly summarize the report: Things are good, very good.
Here are some of the key stats for the first six months of the year:
- Dollar growth up 15%
- Volume up 14%, a 50% increase over the same period last year
- 5.1 million barrels of beer were sold (that’s about 1.6 billion 12oz beers)
- The industry employs about 100,000 people
- The US now has 1,790 breweries — a 10% increase since June of 2010. 1,740 of them are craft breweries.
And judging by this “chart”, this trend should continue for some time:
To put things in perspective, here’s the trend over the past 110 years:
We’ve just broken the previous high, from early last century.