feature | CRAFT BREWERIES
Craft Beer Makers May be Small, but They Boost Jobs, State Revenues by Jennifer Ginn Although they live on opposite sides of the country, Oscar Wong and Van Havig had similar problems when they were in college. They both liked beer and neither one could afford it. “I like to joke around and say I got into home brewing for the Canadian reason,” said Havig, who attended college in Portland, Ore. “In Canada, beer taxes are really high, (so they brew their own). In the late ’80s, I was a graduate student at the time and I had no money. I liked to drink good beer and I couldn’t afford it.” Wong was an engineering graduate student at Notre Dame when he and a friend began home brewing. “In grad school, we were not very well off and we did not want to cut back on our beer,” Wong said. “We had to eat, so we couldn’t cut back on food that much. … It (home brewing) is a lot less expensive and it wasn’t very good, but it still had alcohol in it.” It’s safe to say that both men have gotten
CRAFTING DRINKS PORTLAND, Ore.—Don Younger, owner of the Horsebrass Pub, serves up a pint of a Framboise, a raspberry-wheat beer. © AP Photo/Don Ryan
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better at brewing beer since their college days. Havig is co-owner of Gigantic Brewing in Portland. Wong is owner of Highland Brewing in Asheville, N.C. They’re beer lovers, entrepreneurs and job creators—just the kind of people more policymakers are hoping to find in their own states.
Weathering the Storm
With the country still recovering from the Great Recession, beer sales declined by 1.3 percent overall in 2011, according to the Brewers Association, an organization dedicated to protecting small and independent American brewers. Craft beer, however, has been a different matter. In 2011, sales of craft beer rose 13 percent by volume and 15 percent by dollars as compared to 2010. According to the Brewers Association, craft brewers are ones that produce less than 6 million barrels of beer a year, with less than 25 percent of the company owned or controlled by
a large alcohol producer or brewer. Business for craft brewers is good, said Paul Gatza, director of the Brewers Association. “This year, we’re seeing a record number of breweries opening, (the most) since Prohibition was lifted,” Gatza said. “It looks like we’re seeing breweries opening about one a day on average now. We’ve gone from 1,500 (breweries) seven or eight years ago; right now, we’re closing in on 2,300. Things are definitely booming.” Those breweries also can mean big business for states. Craft brewers provided almost 104,000 jobs and created $8.7 billion in retail sales across the country in 2011. According to state brewing associations, craft brewing contributed $3 billion in total economic impact in California in 2011. In Texas, it generated almost $76 million in sales and $16 million in state and local tax revenue. Here’s how three states—all in different stages of development—are trying to maximize the potential of craft beer within their borders.
