Net New Jobs at American Breweries, 2001-2016

Data: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Total Employment at U.S. Breweries, 2001-2017

Data: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Preliminary mid-2017 numbers from government data are even better. They count nearly 70,000 brewery employees, nearly three times the figure just 10 years ago. Average beer prices have grown nearly 50 percent. So while Americans are drinking less beer than they did in the 2000s (probably a good thing) they’re often paying more for a superior product (another good thing). Meanwhile, the best-selling beers in the country are all in steep decline, as are their producers. Between 2007 and 2016, shipments from five major brewers—Anheuser-Busch, MillerCoors, Heineken, Pabst, and Diageo, which owns Guinness—fell by 14 percent. Goliaths are tumbling, Davids are ascendant, and beer is one of the unambiguously happy stories in the U.S. economy. The same effect is happening at liquor distilleries and wineries. Employment within both groups grew by 70 percent between 2006 and 2016, thanks, in part, to the falling real costs of booze-producing equipment and the ease of advertising local businesses on social media.

When I first came across these statistics, I couldn’t quite believe them. Technology and globalization are supposed to make modern industries more efficient, but today’s breweries require more people to produce fewer barrels of beer. Moreover, consolidation is supposed to crush innovation and destroy entrepreneurs, but breweries are multiplying, even as sales shrink for each of the four most popular beers: Bud Light, Coors Light, Miller Lite, and Budweiser.

The source of these new jobs and new establishments is no mystery to beer fans. It’s the craft-beer revolution, that Cambrian explosion of small-scale breweries that have sprouted across the country. The West is leading the way—cities with the most craft breweries include Portland, Denver, San Diego, Seattle, and Los Angeles—but the trend is nationwide. In Illinois and Idaho, brewing jobs grew by a factor of 10 between 2006 and 2016, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. According a BLS economist that I spoke with, 2016 was likely the best year for job creation at breweries in American history.

But what explains the nature of the craft-beer boom? From several interviews with economists and beer-industry experts, I’ve gathered that there appear to be two big reasons—a straightforward cause and a more complex and interesting history.

The first cause is something simple yet capricious—consumer tastes. “At the end of the day, the craft-beer movement was driven by consumer demand,” said Bart Watson, the chief economist at the Brewers Association, a trade group. “We’ve seen three main markers in the rise of craft beer—fuller flavor, greater variety, and more intense support for local businesses.” These factors are hardly unique to the beer industry. One could use the same descriptors to explain the concurrent rise of fast-casual restaurants, like Sweetgreen and Dig Inn, or the growth in expensive coffee from $5 lattes at Starbucks to a $55 cup of Esmerelda Geisha. There is, perhaps, a new trendiness to rare beer and expensive coffee that is luring new entrepreneurs into the space.