/ck/ - Food & Cooking

>>12027449
Not great really. Growth in craft beer sales has been shrinking year over year for the past 3 years, but more and more breweries are opening every day. The beer market cannot support the insane amount of growth the industry has seen I the last 20 years. There are so many regional breweries competing for the same customer base.

Currently the only way to stay relevant is staying ahead of the trends in beer, even when they seem stupid. However those types of sales tend to be fleeting and new fads and styles pop up.

The overhead on starting a brewery is very high due to permits, licensing, equipment costs ect. Owners who think it would be fun to own a brewery but know nothing about it are really common, and they can burn a lot of employees when they realize they are tons of debt and are not going to be profitable for the next few years, so they close down within 5 years of opening. I see it all the time in the industry.

In my opinion, the smaller local places that are in tune with their communities and pander to local consumer base will survive, as will the giant craft brands like Sierra Nevada and Deschutes. It's the medium sized breweries that will struggle and start closing down more and more over the next ten years.