Thursday 16 October 2008

Number of breweries question

This might sound like a weird question. Especially coming from me. Well, it's not so much one question as a couple.

Does anyone know:

the number of breweries in the USA in 1996
the number of breweries in Canada in 1976
the number of breweries in Australia in 1996
the number of breweries in Switzerland in 1976 and 1986

I would be most grateful if anyone could help out. An accurate count of the current number of breweries in Canada and Australia would be nice, too.

5 comments:

Andrew Elliott said...

1996 US Breweries:

The US Craft Brewers Association publishes a magazine, "The New Brewer," quarterly (IIRC). They always discuss a lot of statistics, so that's a good place to look. Archives are at:

http://www.beertown.org/craftbrewing/nb/nb_index.aspx

So far, I've only been able to find "Over 900" (_New Brewer_ vol 13 #1-P24, "Industry Revealed"). This was from a summary of the article... I'll have to track this issue down. I've also come across a figure from 1997 of "1302 micro-, pub- and regional craft breweries" (http://www.beertown.org/education/craft_history.html).

I'll let you know if I get my hands on a 1996 issue.

I believe the Canadians have a similar organization.

Kristen England said...

Ill get the US info for you. Just put a call into one of my buddies at the BA so I should have the data soon. Just those years?

Ill try to get the Canuckistan data also. I don't know why it matters. Once you'd tried Labatts is there anything else that matters!? :)

Kristen England said...

Here you go choppy. This is for 1996 only. I don't have anything for 1976.

1996
US Breweries – Total 927
25 Regional specialty
349 Microbreweries
553 Brewpubs

1996
Canada – Total 107
11 Regional specialty
38 Microbreweries
58 Brewpubs

Ron Pattinson said...

Kristen, that's brilliant! Now you come to mention it, 1986 for the US and Canada could be handy, too.

Anonymous said...

Hi Ron,

I'm afraid I don't have the figures for Switzerland in 76 and 86.

The people who can no doubt produce such figures are the Schweizer Brauerei-Verband (SBV) in Zürich.
=> www.bier.ch

At the time , they were more or less co-ordinating the beer cartel (which disappeared in 1991), so they'll no doubt know.
Just be aware that their figures may possibly ignore the breweries that weren't part of the cartel, i.e. Fischerstube and Boxer.

Cheers !

Laurent