The Craft Beer Boom
There are currently 230 breweries in Wisconsin.
Now, anyone who is from Wisconsin, has been to Wisconsin, or has heard of Wisconsin shouldn’t be surprised about this. (We’re the number one drinking state after all… again) But it’s not just the dairy state that loves its beer.
Colorado has 428 breweries.
California has 931.
This overwhelming number of hops, malts, and hipster mustaches was not always the case though. In the 1960s there were just 229 breweries cumulatively in the U.S.
How did we get from 229 in total, to 230 just in one state alone? When did the craft beer boom really show up? And why?
A Quick History
Brewing has pretty much always existed in the colonized U.S.
As early as 1660 there is a map of New Amsterdam that shows 26 breweries and taverns in what is today the area of New York.
However, up until the mid-1860s, brewing was mostly a local affair; local beer in local taverns or public houses.
It was the decade after the civil war when large commercial breweries really became a profitable industry with the help of massive immigration, continuing industrialization, and increasing wages (which increased spending money).
From 1865 to 1915 the U.S went from a national production of 3.7 million barrels to 59.8 million. Though what’s really interesting is that the number of breweries actually went down during this time; the local breweries were replaced by industrialized large-scale commercial ones.
This decrease in breweries continued through the late twentieth century. (We’re just going to skip over prohibition. No one wants to dwell on that.) We went from 2,252 breweries in 1865 to just 101 breweries in 1980. ONLY ONE HUNDRED AND ONE BREWERIES IN THE ENTIRE U.S. …is anyone else astounded by this?!
To me, it now makes sense why my parents said they literally drank a beer in college named “beer”. There was no hoppy creativity during this time! There was no need because the same 100 breweries owned everything and people were going to drink it anyway.
But then, finally and thankfully, two major things sparked the flame that would be come the craft beer movement.
A beer-splosion
The first thing to reverse the decline in breweries was that home brewing became accessible and popular.
This is an important step because home brewing was actually illegal until the 1970s! In October of 1978 President Jimmy Carter signed H.R. 1337 which finally federally legalized home brewing, allowing states to create their own home brewing laws from that point forward.
Not wasting any time, beer die hards turned around and pretty much immediately got busy. In December of that same year, a man named Charlie Papazian established the American Homebrewers Association in Boulder, Colorado.
The purpose behind this group was to promote a community around home brewing, and empower home brewers to make the best beer in the world. The group is still going strong today, with memberships, publications, and the world’s largest amateur beer competition.
Home brewing was a crucial step in the populous’ discovery of what beer could be, not just what it had always been.
This in part then led to beer enthusiasts creating hundreds of small new breweries across the U.S., which were in fact so small they earned the nickname microbreweries.
To be considered a microbrewery, you had a production size of between 5,00-10,000 barrels annually.
The very first “DIY brewery” is attributed to Jack MacAuliffe, who opened New Albion Brewing in October of 1976. His was such a small operation he reportedly welded dairy equipment together to convert it into usable commercial brewing tanks. DIY spirit at its best!
Because these smaller folks couldn’t complete with the big advertisements or product placements of the big guys, they competed in a more dynamic way: they made beer interesting. They experimented with bigger flavors, new hops, stronger abv,, and even trying out long unused brewing methods. They also emphasized the freshness of the ingredients and the importance of supporting local businesses.
This has been incredibly successful and today we are in a craft beertopia, with a whopping total of ~9500 breweries open in the U.S. as of 2022.
Weekly Adventure
Stay local this week, my friends. Your task is to find the newest local brewery in your area and give them a little love: visit their taproom, buy their beer at your local market, or even just re-post and like their stuff on social media. Let’s keep this boom going!
Cheers,
Molly
Resources:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/726518/number-craft-breweries-state/
https://eh.net/encyclopedia/a-concise-history-of-americas-brewing-industry/
http://washingtonbeerblog.com/brewers-association-releases-the-year-in-beer-report-for-2022/
https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/membership/american-homebrewers-association/