Late last week, the Brewers Association announced that the number of breweries in the United States had eclipsed 2,500. As of May 31, brewery detective Erin Fay Glass put the number of breweries in America at 2,514, which is 767 more than there were on the same date two years ago.
More from the press release:
The list includes 24 breweries we code as “large” in our database for A-B, MillerCoors and breweries named for brands of Goose Island (packaging brewery), Leinenkugel’s and Blue Moon. In addition there are 109 regional breweries, 1214 microbreweries, and 1167 brewpubs.
The number of microbreweries passed the number of brewpubs in February 2013 for the first time since 1987.
Our count of breweries-in-planning is at 1559, up from 1228 a year ago. (But we did purge a couple hundred from the roles last fall and winter.)
At the current pace, the BA expects that the number of breweries should surpass 3,000 sometime in 2014. Sheesh.
