The 50 Biggest Craft Breweries Are Making a Lot of Beer

And Happily, the Other 9,068 Breweries Are Doing Pretty Much OK, Too

The Brewers Association released their annual rankings of the “Top 50 Producing US Craft Brewing Companies” yesterday along with optimistic statistics about the “small and independent” sector in general. The big list features the largest fifty out of 9,118 operating brewing companies in terms of production quantity.

Along with the big fifty list comes a preliminary annual overview of the commercial scale of American beer. And yes, the craft beer sector, by the BA definition, is still growing, essentially back from the Covid 19 dropoff in production.

The barrel total for 2021, painstakingly pulled from a variety of governmental reports, sales data and self-reporting from BA members, was just shy of 25 million barrels of beer, up 8%, despite restrictions for on-premise drinking and dining in various areas of the nation for health reasons during parts of the year.

The total volume of craft beer (by the BA definition of small and independent) continues to account for an increasing portion of the total beer brewed in the nation, hitting 13.1% in 2021, up from 12.2% in 2020. So the very large brewing companies are still seeing their share of production erode slightly.

On the Rebound

Bart Watson, chief economist at the Brewers Association, hosted a video press conference Tuesday where he further interpreted the numbers. In short, his reading of the pictures that his spreadsheets paint is that Craft Breweries are rebounding. The pace of openings and closures have both slowed somewhat, interpreted as functions of the maturing craft beer marketplace as well as the results of pandemic disruptions. Some breweries still call themselves “temporarily” closed. These may turn into final closures in the wake of the pandemic. Perhaps the next year will see more than one kind of post-pandemic adjustment – such as both this expected uptick in closures of those who are barely hanging on and an uptick of delayed openings – as the economy catches up and dreams are rekindled. Overall, the picture looks good. Watson’s prognosis from crunching the numbers shows growth continuing, though at an expectedly slower pace than in the last decade.

Eagle-eyed journalists compare these lists each year. One outlier that journalists on the press conference call noticed was an unexpected newcomer in the middle of the list. Athletic Brewing Company, a non-alcoholic craft brewing company, leaped into the big leagues at position number 27. (This rocket to the top tier is likely explained by noticing that 2019 and 2020 showed Two Roads Brewing out of Connecticut on the top 50, and credible sources have noted that that brewery had been producing Athletic’s NA beers under contract in recent years, before Athletic bought their own production facilities.)

A Taste of Success

With a Sierra Nevada taproom in Berkeley and two 21st Amendment locations in San Leandro and the original SF brewpub, there are three places to visit by BART, ferry and bus to tip your hat to the accomplishments of large craft beer companies locally. In particular, the San Leandro 21A facility gives a good impression of how massive operations have to be to play on this level in the brewing world, even if you simply visit the taproom and peer around a little. (Trumer in Berkeley is not open for tasting but is a good place to check out at the California Craft Brewers Association benefit festival during SF Beer Week.)

Gordon Biersch, south of the current BART transit footprint in San Jose, brews its own branded beers and also contracts to produce beers with store brands (such as Trader Joe’s) and as an assist for smaller breweries. The one Gordon Biersch branded place to have a beer here in the Bay Area, where the brewery began, is inside Terminal 1 at SFO, as many have learned when flights are delayed.

(Why would a brewer get help making beer from other breweries? We recently spoke with a brewer who told us about getting the taproom flagship hazy IPA brewed by another operation so the production crew could focus on making a variety of other beers rather than managing the production of that one crowd-pleasing beast over and over again. Buying new fermentors or building out more production space and increasing staffing is incredibly expensive. While some companies have relied entirely on contracted brews, there are many reasons active brewers make this arrangement with a third party.)

Top 50 Craft Brewing Companies by Barrels of Beer Brewed in 2021

The slightly annotated list that follows is not a list of brands or facilities, but a list of companies that brew beer. Seltzers and any similar products that can be legally made by a brewing company but are not beer have been excluded from the output. California breweries are *starred and our explanatory comments are in (parentheses).

Rank	Company	City	State
1	DG Yuengling & Son	Pottsville	PA
2	Boston Beer Co	Boston, Milton	MA, DE
*3	Sierra Nevada Brewing Co	Chico	CA
*4	Duvel Moortgat USA (Including Firestone Walker)	Paso Robles, Kansas City, Cooperstown	CA, MO, NY
*5	Gambrinus (Including Trumer)	Berkeley, Shiner	CA, TX
6	Bell’s Brewery, Inc	Comstock	MI
7	CANarchy (Owned by a big bev company but not a big brewery. Changes to the definition of Craft may be on the horizon)	Longmont, Tampa, Salt Lake City, Comstock, Dallas	CO, FL, UT, MI, TX
8	Artisanal Brewing Ventures	Downingtown, Lakewood, Brooklyn	PA, NY, NY
*9	Stone Brewing	Escondido	CA
10	SweetWater Brewing Co	Atlanta	GA
11	Deschutes Brewery	Bend	OR
12	New Glarus Brewing Co	New Glarus	WI
13	Brooklyn Brewery	Brooklyn	NY
14	Matt Brewing Co	Utica	NY
*15	Gordon Biersch Brewing Co	San Jose	CA
16	Abita Brewing Co	Covington	LA
17	Minhas Craft Brewery	Monroe	WI
18	Stevens Point Brewery	Stevens Point	WI
19	Great Lakes Brewing Company	Cleveland	OH
20	Odell Brewing Co	Fort Collins	CO
21	Harpoon Brewery	Boston	MA
22	Summit Brewing Co	Saint Paul	MN
23	Allagash Brewing Company	Portland	ME
24	Troegs Brewing Co	Hershey	PA
25	Georgetown Brewing Co	Seattle	WA
26	Three Floyds Brewing	Munster	IN
27	Athletic Brewing Company (The non-alcoholic brewery that seemingly leapt onto the charts this year. Now brewing in San Diego, too.)	Stratford	CT
28	Rhinegeist Brewery	Cincinnati	OH
29	Kona Brewing Co	Kailua-Kona	HI
30	August Schell Brewing Company	New Ulm	MN
31	Alaskan Brewing Co	Juneau	AK
32	Narragansett Brewing Co	Pawtucket	RI
33	Rogue Ales Brewery	Newport	OR
*34	Kings & Convicts Brewing/Ballast Point	San Diego	CA
35	Flying Dog Brewery	Frederick	MD
36	Long Trail Brewing Co	Bridgewater Corners	VT
*37	Lost Coast Brewery	Eureka	CA
38	Revolution Brewing	Chicago	IL
39	Surly Brewing Company	Minneapolis	MN
40	Ninkasi Brewing Co	Eugene	OR
41	Creature Comforts Brewing Co	Athens	GA
*42	21st Amendment Brewery	Bay Area	CA
43	Maui Brewing Co	Kihei	HI
44	Saint Arnold Brewing Co	Houston	TX
45	Scofflaw Brewing Co	Atlanta	GA
46	Shipyard Brewing Co	Portland	ME
47	Left Hand Brewing Company	Longmont	CO
*48	Modern Times Drinks (The Oakland taproom recently closed)	San Diego	CA
49	Fiddlehead Brewing	Shelburne	VT
*50	North Coast Brewing Co Inc	Fort Bragg	CA

Dig into this BA annual report on their site. They also include a second list showing the 50 largest breweries when you do not exclude the industry giants and all the brands and breweries they now own, including Anchor, Magnolia/New Belgian and Lagunitas from our region.

Did we miss anything interesting? We’d love to hear your comments. (For those who really want to sift through the economics of local and national beer, more details are released by the BA annually at the upcoming Craft Brewers Conference, and there are additional interactive charts here.)

Standard Deviant Abides

While the big players on the national scene provide some context, one of the great pieces of news from the BA was that so many beloved smaller local places around the nation – far too many to list -survive and many are thriving.

Recently, we heard a rumor that Standard Deviant Brewing Co. in San Francisco was closed! Since we have lost a few local breweries, fact checking was in order. Happily, a quick field trip to the taproom in the Mission District debunked that grim fiction. The taps are flowing with both new and familiar beers (Porter, anyone?) while people who evidently scoff at rumors are happily gathering. Standard Deviant is still firmly in the Venn diagram of open and brewing its own beers. And that’s significant.

Here’s to the craft and passion all along the “long tail” of craft breweries when ranked by size. Get out there and calculate your own internal rankings according to what you like to do and taste.

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