Craft Brewers Regroup After ‘Crappy’ Year and Brace for Another at 2025 CBC

INDIANAPOLIS — “How was everyone’s 2024?” Matt Gacioch asks. The near-capacity crowd in this conference hall here at the Indiana Convention Center murmurs. The Brewers Association’s new-ish chief economist surveys the room like an improv artist waiting for a prompt. “That wasn’t a rhetorical question,” he says.

Finally, somebody chimes in. “Crappy!”

No improvisation necessary: it’s an answer everybody sort of expects, including Gacioch. The question that brought America’s craft brewers and fellow travelers to Indianapolis this final week of April for the 2025 Craft Brewers Conference, though, is what the hell they’re supposed to do about it.

With the usual caveat that ~9,600 small, independent breweries do not a monolith make, it’s fair to say that the craft brewing industry had a crappy year last year. And the year before that, too: By the Brewers Association’s (BA) own estimate, production volume was down approximately four percent nationwide year-over-year in 2024, compared to the already soft one-ish percent decline in 2023. The trade organization, which ambitiously predicted that its volume share of the overall United States beer market would be “20 percent by 2020” just over a decade ago, saw more breweries close than open last year — the first time that’s happened since two decades ago. (Overall volume share held steady at 13.3 percent last year.) Macrobrewers are cutting bait, distributors are tuning out, and drinkers are sipping with the enemy. Times are tough for the trade.

It’s in the air as I walk the floor of the convention center here in Circle City this week. Not desperation, per se. As Isaac Arthur of CODO Design points out at an after-hours gathering in the Indy agency’s new digs a few miles south of the convention center, breweries represented at CBC 2025 “are still investing in their businesses.” Maybe they’re among the 43 percent of respondents that reported growth to the BA in 2024. Maybe they’ve got a diversified business model that can absorb losses from the brewing unit, or a big cash cushion from selling a building in a newly gentrified neighborhood. Whatever the case may be, the conference vibe is considerably more upbeat than mainstream headlines would lead you to expect.

Still, the crowd is noticeably thinner on the exhibition floor this year. Sources that I’ve counted on seeing at CBC for years have been held back in the home office for budgetary reasons, or laid off entirely. The tales of vendors throwing lavish open bar parties with prime-rib carving stations ring in my ears like pure fantasy compared to the mostly sensible sponsored fetes I’m seeing here and now. (There are whispers of an invite-only party featuring sushi, Scotch, and circus-style performers Wednesday, but your humble Hop Take columnist was not on that list.) Everybody I talk to is cautiously hopeful that better times will return, if only because their costs to attend CBC — let alone their costs of operating a craft-brewing business — are nonrefundable.

“I sell beer for a living, I have to be optimistic,” says Qurban Walia, the co-CEO of Crafted Exports in Brooklyn, on Wednesday morning. We’d both attended a panel discussion on developing an export business, which he and his partners have done over the past 10 years with a clutch of firms up and down craft brewing’s volume ladder, from Boston Beer Company to Other Half Brewing Company. This might have been a record year, Walia adds, but for the fact that much of Crafted Exports’ international sales come from Canada and China, two markets among the hardest hit by President Donald Trump’s destructive trade war. He echoes what panelists have just told the audience: foreign sentiment towards America, The Brand is going to be harder for craft brewers to rebuild than towards America, The Craft Beer Portfolio. Add it to the list of intractable problems the BA must solve for the segment.

Craft beer isn’t dying. Almost 10 years ago to the day, then-BA chief economist Bart Watson told me that he believed the American drinking public made its affirmative preference for full-flavored beer explicitly clear. He was right then, and he’s right now. “Even in a declining environment, there are plenty of growth stories,” he tells the packed house at the convention’s general session Wednesday morning, speaking in his recently minted capacity as the BA’s chief executive. Even the aggregate figures offer rays of sunshine if you drill into them. Brewpubs beat the segment on volume, losing three percent, and showing (frankly kinda-shocking) promise as customers shift their spending to more experiential drinking occasions. Regional breweries, a catch-all cohort that includes firms producing anywhere between 15,000 and 6,000,000 barrels annually, also managed a “pyrrhic victory” (Watson’s term), posting its own three-percent loss. If you restrict the data to exclude some big-volume brewers who fell far and fast last year, this tranche actually grew a bit. There’s good news here, for those with eyes to see.

But whether the decline is terminal or temporary, it’s certainly happening. You can see it most among America’s microbreweries (15,000 bbl/year or less, selling 75 percent of beer off-site), production from which fell seven percent in 2024. “There are going to be winners and losers, and the tyranny of space means something has gotta go,” says Watson. “If you’re in distribution, you need to constantly be thinking how you’re going to remain relevant.” This is a tall order for the thousands of micros on craft brewing’s long tail, especially since draft sales — on which craft has long overindexed — declined slightly in 2024 and remain well below their pre-Covid levels. The BA projects total CBC attendance at around 8,000, with 8,375 submissions from 1,761 breweries in 49 countries to the concurrent World Beer Cup competition; those figures are all slightly to moderately down from last year, due at least in part to the Trump administration’s interrelated and self-inflicted sh*tshows. There’s bad news here, for those with eyes to see.

I find myself Tuesday afternoon in a presentation about how to “keep [a] brewery’s flagship alive” cohosted by Brian Grossman, second-generation owner-brewer of Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. With respect to the firm’s venerable, green-labeled Pale Ale, it’s been in decline for years. Protecting the past is a worthy goal, certainly, but most breweries lack SNBC’s resources, relationships, and brand equity to, as he says, “weather the storm” through which the segment is stumbling here in the present. This gets at a lurking tension in the trade, at the trade show, and within the BA itself — craft breweries that once styled themselves as Davids to Big Beer’s Goliaths are now several orders of magnitude larger than most of the segment they helped to create. Watson has less than six months in the saddle at the head of the org; to succeed, he’ll have to find a way to hold that center, to equitably serve the needs of a very top-heavy membership. After he sorts out the trade war, of course. “I can now readily tell you the flight times from Denver to Washington, D.C., as well as the closest taprooms to the Capitol,” he jokes Wednesday. Grim chuckles roll through the hall.

I could go on. What of the state-by-state THC beverage bans, and the cannabis industry’s effects on beer sales? What of the long-looming revision to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, in which the United States Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services will finally publish their hotly contested new recommendation for alcohol intake later this year? What of these goddamned Zoomers and their supposed sober-curiosity? On the latter matter, Rabobank’s Bourcard Nesin earned several mentions from several CBC daises for his recent research debunking the mass-media narrative that the nation’s legal-drinking-age ‘yoots’ simply aren’t interested in drinking. Relieving though it may be, it’s just one answer. Brewers have come to Indy with a lot of questions about the future thirst of America’s drinking public — and their livelihoods quenching it.

You can feel the urgency in the final query that the BA’s Gacioch fields from the audience on Day One. “Is a craft brewery’s ‘story’ important to Gen Z?” The chief economist does his best, digressing into some data on consumers’ evolving expectations for how brands should fit into and reflect their identities. But the upshot, to my ear, is that it’s just impossible to say right now. Sounds familiar, I know. Let me get back to you on it next year.

🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now

Boston Beer Co. had a shockingly solid start to the year, putting together its strongest quarterly performance since Q1 2021. With good overall figures — 5.3-percent depletion growth, 6.5-percent revenue growth — plus Sun Cruiser doing well and Hard Mtn. Dew hanging around, the firm had more than normal to celebrate. But behind the earnings-report headlines lurked some more concerning details. Er, make that Twea-tails: Twisted Tea was up just one percent in dollars for the quarter, a “more than anticipated” slowdown that had analysts “surprised at how fast and steep the drop has been” from that sweet double-digit year-over-year growth. And then there’s Truly and the rest of BBC’s malt-based portfolio (read: Sam Adams, Dogfish Head) to figure out. So.

📈 Ups…

Anheuser-Busch InBev is finally bringing the beloved Busch Light Apple line back… Congrats to all this year’s 50 Best Bar winners, and especially to the High Life-slinging savants at Best Intentions in Chicago, in at No. 25… The summer of hard lemonade draws ever closer as Truly Unruly announces its own eight-percent ABV entrant…

📉 …and downs

Missouri lawmakers are angling to cut taxes for the state’s breweries by a staggering 67 percent per barrel to “incentiv[ize]” production in-state instead of [checks notes] Mexico?… Some 100 Teamsters at Finley Distributing in Arizona have unanimously authorized a strike, accusing bosses of dragging out bargaining in advance of a mid-May contract expiration…

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