A Half-Year Covid Volume Report in Oregon
The Oregon Liquor Control Commission tracks the taxable barrels sold by Oregon breweries in Oregon. I’ve been watching to see when the June report would drop, because that will give us six months of data to see what kind of violence COVID-19 has done to breweries. The upshot: it’s been bad, but maybe not as bad as we might have guessed back in March. Thirteen of the top twenty breweries were down from this time last year, some substantially. But overall, the top 20 breweries were only down 2% from the same period in 2019.
One very large caveat! Month-by-month data isn’t precise, because of reporting and shipping idiosyncracies. Sometimes it takes a while for numbers to register. For example, pFriem sold 5,130 barrels from January through May, but the OLCC records just 65 barrels in June. I doubt seriously the brewery’s sales fell by 90% in the middle of summer. (pFriem has the biggest percentage drop of the bunch, but if we assume it was a typical month for 2020, they’d be down 31% instead of 42%.) Another example: Boneyard, one of Oregon’s largest breweries, isn’t in the OLCC report at all.
So these data aren’t solid enough to be anything but suggestive and I wouldn’t put a huge amount of stock in them. But scanning the list, the loss of draft sales seems to track to the damage done to certain breweries. Consider this the opening bid on any discussion you’d like to have about the pandemic and the way it’s affecting breweries. To prime the pump, try these questions on for size:
Are Ninkasi’s impressive numbers due to its purchase of Laurelwood under the new Legacy Breweries umbrella?
Hop Valley (Molson Coors) is up 8%, while 10 Barrel (AB InBev) is down 58%. Theories? (Draft, perhaps?)
Is draft responsible for Deschutes’ big drop?
Oh, and a thanks to Pete Dunlop for alerting me to this and taking the first cut on the spreadsheet. [Update. Someone made a stupid error calculating the 2019-2020 change. Management regrets the error.]