The Ubiquity of Good Taste: A Spatial Analysis of the Craft Brewing Industry in the United States

Abstract

The performance and composition of the U.S. brewing industry have changed dramatically over the past three decades. More specifically, the industry has experienced contradictory shifts in both aggregate production volume and number of firms. While aggregate beer production in the US has increased modestly, per capita beer production has decreased steadily since the early 1980s, dropping 26 % from a record 26.2 barrels per person in 1981 to a low of 19.5 barrels per person in 2011. However, the number of brewing establishments increased substantially during the same period, expanding from 48 breweries in 1981 to nearly 1,700 by 2011–a 3,500 % increase. So what explains this counterintuitive story? And how has this story manifested itself over space? This chapter seeks to answer these questions by analyzing the economic geography of the U.S. craft brewing industry. Specifically, our empirical approach consists of three exercises. First, we examine the temporal changes in the aggregate production volume and the total number of brewing establishments for each state. Second, we examine state-level variation in total beer production, total craft-beer production, percent craft beer production, and per-capita craft beer production. And last, we map the precise location of craft beer establishments to show the spatial and temporal distribution of active craft breweries in the US. Our results are three-fold. First, we find the change in total brewing establishments and total beer production has manifested itself rather unevenly over space. Second, we find that craft-beer production at the state level has also increased in a spatially uneven manner, as the largest production still occurs in the states with a history of high beer production. Last, and in contrast to our first two exercises, we find that within states, the location of active craft-brewing establishments have spread from major urban centers in the 1980s to many non-urban locations by 2011. We conclude that although growth in the craft-brewing sector will continue to be highest in areas with already high levels of brewing activity, there will be significant growth in regions that currently have few brewing establishments.