When it comes to the rate of brewery closures, should we benchmark against the past decade, when breweries in the United States—and many places around the world—experienced a surge in numbers not seen in the previous 200 years of industrial beer production? Or are we seeing something more in line with aggregate data for all businesses in the United States, now that the surge appears to be spent?
Or, more curiously, are we yet to see the full potential of the spike in breweries over the past decade, and are brewing businesses defying the closure gravity that statistically affects all businesses?
To explore this idea further, we dug into data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics about closures across all business types, to see just how breweries compare.