Brewing up big numbers

Source: Brewers Association

The big news in the beer world today was the Brewers Association’s announcement that for the first time, craft beer production topped 10 percent of the total U.S. market last year.

What hasn’t received much attention is the fact that milestone wasn’t so much reached through a change in drinking habits as a change in the way the numbers are being counted.

According to the association, craft brewers made 22.2 million barrels of beer in 2014, accounting for 11 percent of total U.S. production. That’s a huge jump from the 15.6 million barrels and 7.8 percent market share reported for 2013.

But about half of that increase comes from a change last year in the association’s definition of “craft brewer.”

Until then, that definition excluded anyone who brewed most of their beer with cheaper grains like corn or rice along with malted barley – like the macrobrewers do.

But since several small, independent brewers had been using such adjuncts for decades, before the modern microbrew movement, the association decided to soften that and accept any “traditional” ingredients.

That brought a group of brewers into the craft fold led by Pennsylvania’s Yuengling , founded in 1829, making it the the oldest operating brewery in the country. And last year, those breweries made roughly 3.5 million barrels of beer, according to Brewbound.com – about 3 million by Yuengling alone – that were suddenly added to the craft totals.

Without that, under the old definition, the craft share for 2014 would fall just short of double digits, at around 9.5 percent.

Of course, that’s still an impressive increase over 2013, as are some of the other numbers reported by the Brewers Association.

Even accounting for the definition change, craft production was up 18 percent for a second straight year. The dollar value of all that beer was $19.6 billion, up 22 percent.

And the total number of craft breweries increased by 19 percent, to 3,418.