Brewers Association: Craft beer hit 12.2 percent market share in 2015

BOULDER – Craft beer kept chugging along in 2015, upping its market share of the overall beer industry to 12.2 percent by volume.

Given the gap between national numbers and those in individual states like Colorado where the craft boom is particularly pronounced, craft brewers figure to have a lot of room for growth yet in many parts of the country.

The Boulder-based Brewers Association on Tuesday morning released several 2015 metrics for the craft beer industry, including market share.

Craft brewers produced 24.5 million 31-gallon barrels of beer in 2015, up 13 percent. Retail dollar value, meanwhile, increased 16 percent to $22.3 billion, a figure representing 21 percent market share in the beer industry.

The number of operating breweries nationally increased 15 percent to 4,269, with 620 new breweries opening and 68 closing.

“I think it has to flatten out at some point, but I think there’s still a lot of run room,” said Bart Wilson, the Brewers Association’s economist.

The question of whether a craft-beer bubble is on the horizon is one that often comes up, especially in Colorado where it seems there’s a new brewery per week.

Watson said he often keeps an eye on other markets like specialty coffee to try and get a feel for where the ceiling might be in craft beer. In other industries, he said, the high, or premium, end of the market can get to 40 percent market share. For beer, that premium category would include not only craft beer but also imports and premium offerings from mega-brewers like Anheuser-Busch InBev.

“Even if you add those all up, I think there’s still room for premiumization in the beer market,” Watson said.

State-by-state figures for the number of breweries and barrelage produced won’t be released by the BA for a couple of weeks. But Watson said IRI Group scan data pulled from liquor-store sales in Colorado showed a 26 percent share for craft by volume and 36 percent share by dollar volume. That doesn’t include restaurant and bar sales, which Watson said tend to lean toward craft even more.

While not every state will necessarily get to Colorado’s level of craft-beer influence, he said the figures here indicate that there is indeed plenty more room for growth in other parts of the country. At the same time, he said, large regional craft brewers are hitting some speed bumps as they encounter more competition as they try to enter new markets, though Watson noted that some of that is due to capacity issues.

Colorado boasted 239 breweries in 2014. Watson said that number likely will be in the high 200s when 2015 numbers are finalized, though he doesn’t expect it to hit 300, yet.

Nationally, the BA figures released Tuesday showed that craft breweries provided 122,000 jobs, 6,000 more than last year.

“Certainly I think there was a lot of growth (in 2015) in certain parts of the country that have been under-indexed in craft,” Watson said.