TikTok has Facebook terrified. Google is poisoning its own search results. Former longshot anti-woke Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy just bought a stake in BuzzFeed. If you needed more evidence that Web 2.0’s dominant format for organizing information — the list — was past its prime, it’s really started to stack up lately.
Still, there’s one list that will forever remain relevant to our purpose here at Hop Take, reader: the Brewers Association’s annual top-50 ranking of craft breweries in the United States by volume. The latest edition of this list dropped in April 2024, but it wasn’t until last week, when the May/June installment of the org’s New Brewer magazine was published, that brewery-by-brewery barrelage became available to the trade press. Those data, combined with the list itself and cross-referenced with broader drinking trends both within the beer category and beyond it, give us a pretty good, albeit incomplete, picture of what’s going on at the upper end of the American craft brewing business these days.
In the not-so-grand tradition of last decade’s digital discourse, I now present you with a list of my top five takeaways from this year’s top-50 breweries list. In order of rising significance…
5. The “could be worse” era was very literal last year.
Last month at the BA’s 2024 Craft Brewers Conference, I reported on what I called craft brewing’s “could be worse” era, a nod to a similarly titled slide presented at the event by BA chief economist Bart Watson. The premise
