The Brewer’s Association mid-year production survey indicates that BA-defined craft brewery production is down about 10% through the first half of 2020 compared to the same period last year.
But it comes with a catch, BA chief economist Bart Watson explains. “Analyzing our survey data, and more generally thinking about the midyear numbers, it is clear we need to assign bigger error bars to that statement than in the past, due to increased variation in brewer performance, greater challenges in aggregating sources such as scan data, and a lack of accurate tax data to fill in the gaps,” Bart says. “Simply put, in normal years, when I use various methods to triangulate on midyear growth, they generally end up fairly close; this year they are all over the place.”
Bart goes into the details in his blog post, but concludes by saying, “is it -9%, -13%, -12% or -6%? The most likely answer is somewhere in between, hence my “around 10% down” estimate.”