I Don’t Think The US Has Anywhere Near 10,000 Breweries

I am excited to report that Celebrate Oregon Beer should soon have a website. This post isn’t about that. Rather, it addresses a discovery I made while assembling a spreadsheet of Oregon’s breweries. These will be the heart of the website, allowing people to find a beer wherever they are in the state. One of our organization’s goals is to make sure it’s accurate and up-to-date.

That isn’t always easy. Breweries are so common now that media don’t always report on their comings and goings. Covid made this a lot worse because so many businesses were failing that it was impossible to keep up. More than that, it was often not obvious that a brewery had gone out of business. Every brewery suffered a break in production, which meant a lot of social media accounts and other signs of life went dormant. Sometimes they stayed that way. Last week, I posted the ghostly image of Freehand Brewery’s Facebook page, where the most recent post dated to February 2020.

As I checked the status of an initial list I’d compiled, I found many of the breweries were no longer around. It wasn’t a marginal number. Despite the ambiguities in identifying what a brewery is, the number I ended up with was about 30% less than the Brewers Association’s official tally. For a number of reasons, this may be higher in Oregon than elsewhere: we have a more mature market, which means a lot more breweries have taprooms, which confounds things, and we also have more breweries closing because competition is so fierce. Nevertheless, it seems almost certain that the number of breweries in the US is thousands fewer than the regularly-cited figure of 10,000.

How Many Breweries?

For the purposes of the Celebrate Oregon Beer website, we include all the breweries that make beer and all their taprooms, plus standalone beer brands you can find in the market, but not side-project brands. This resulted in a spreadsheet with about 350 entries. At first blush, that seems about right: the Brewers Association says Oregon has 318 breweries (or, if you click through to get listings for them, 321).

But many of the breweries in the Brewers Association database don’t exist. I don’t know if they did once and vanished, all the while escaping my notice, or if they were slated to open and never did. But once I started boiling the list down to extant breweries, I got a much lower number: 225. That is about 70% of what the Brewers Association lists. To put that in perspective, if it were accurate across the country, we wouldn’t have nearly ten thousand breweries, the figure everyone uses, but fewer than 7,000.

Until you’ve gone through the exercise, it’s really challenging to count breweries. I’m not surprised the Brewers Association had trouble getting an accurate count. But just glancing through the list, I see that they include not just beer companies, but all the breweries operated by a beer company. So Deschutes has three listings—one for their original Bend brewpub, one for their Portland brewpub, and one for their production brewery. McMenamins has eighteen listings (and it’s pretty accurate). But other places they include a taproom that’s not a brewery (10 Barrel, Chuckanut).

They miss breweries as well. Sometimes a restaurant will start making beer on a one-barrel kit. I’m not sure how well these are tracked by taxing authorities—which is, I assume, one of the ways to identify a brewery. (Sometimes a restaurant will call itself a brewery but make no beer, too, which for obvious reasons confuses search engines.) Contract-brewed usually appears, but not always. I suspect the brewery name isn’t always the same as the company paying the taxes.

The biggest issue is the active status of a brewery, though. Many have done the permitting and may have even announced themselves to the world, but haven’t made any beer. Then there are situations like Three Creeks, a brewery in Sisters, Oregon. The owners recently sold the restaurant portion of the brewery, but not the production facility. If the brewery does find a buyer, the Three Creeks brand may become a contract-brewed product for the old restaurant. In other words, Three Creeks has entered a limbo phase that may last months or years. For the moment, it’s in the spreadsheet, but it’s easy to see how a status change could happen without anyone noticing.

Those situations are marginal and rare cases, however. The real issue is that a lot of the breweries on the Brewers Association’s list, at least in Oregon, don’t exist. So how many breweries does the US contain? Probably more than 7,000, but certainly not 10,000. We should quit using that figure.