The Brewer’s Association released their annual Top 50 list of breweries yesterday. This list ranks craft breweries on their sales volume over the last year, but it does not provide scale or margin of victory to see just how big the top five breweries are compared to spots 46-50.

Last year I compiled these lists into a data visualization to see how these breweries have grown over the years. With eight years of data we can start to see some interesting story lines play out with the ebb and flow of a certain brewery’s production compared to the whole. As many of the big craft breweries start to expand the distance between the micro (< 12,000 bbl) and regional breweries (between 12,000 and 2 million bbl) widen and new players emerge.

I’ll let you ,the viewer, find the stories that interest you the most but will note a couple of changes from last year’s list:

Biggest Jump

– Ballast Point Brewery jumped a whopping 17 spots after entering the top 50 for the first time just last year

Biggest Drops

– Craftworks Breweries dropped seven spots. This umbrella company owns Old Chicago, Gordon Biersch, and Rock Bottom.

– Blue Point Brewing dropped six spots. It’s falling position might have something to do with it’s willingness to be bought by AB-InBev.

– Rogue Ales dropped five spots.

Newbies

– Duvel Moorgat USA

– 21st Amendment Brewing

– Sixpoint Brewery

Breweries who fell out

– Troegs Brewing

– Big Sky Brewing

– Schlafly Beer

It’s interesting to note that Duvel Moorgat’s addition and prominent position comes primarily from it’s acquisition of Boulevard Brewing earlier this year. Thus they combined Boulevard’s previous top 12 status with Brewery Ommengang who is also owned by Duvel.