Below you will find the results of the brewer compensation survey I did a few weeks ago. After removing some suspicious responses and those from outside the US (sorry Canucks!), I ended up with 397 valid responses. As promised, I dumped identifying information after verification and before I started any data crunching. They are gone from the database, but I wanted to mention that during the verification, I was heartened by the number of female names I saw flit by. We're definitely seeing women entering this profession.

I am very pleased with this data set. There are a number of ways to confirm that it's both valid and representative when you start looking at the numbers, and at each of those points, the distribution looked as one would expect with a robust sample. This is only a sample and has the same margin of error any sample does; I am satisfied that it's fairly representative of the brewers in the US.

Again, I want to thank all of you who took the time to fill this out. There is an incredible wealth of information in the comments, and I will do a separate post looking at those. They give some feeling to the dry numbers that follow. Finally, after all the posts are done, I'll compile this into a .pdf report for anyone who'd like to have it on hand.



Demographics

The vast majority of breweries in the United States are small, and responses reflected that. Seventy-five percent of respondents work in a brewery of 10,000 barrels or less. Just 6% work at a brewery making more than 100,000 barrels. I didn't do a great job of getting this survey into the hands of people in the cellar or on packaging lines, but the distribution otherwise was fairly typical.