I’m excited to announce a new Brewers Association (BA) member benefit: a quarterly syndicated data dashboard from Nielsen IQ, provided in partnership with 3 Tier Beverages. Access the 3 Tier Beverages/NielsenIQ Dashboard here.

Since it’s often better to show than just tell, I thought I’d use this announcement post as an opportunity to highlight a few of the data cuts that members now can access via the dashboard.

One of the challenges of scan data is that unless you have full access, you’re often just viewing the performance of a limited number of brands or companies that skew the data set due to their size. If a style is up, is that really representative of the whole style or just a few powerful market leaders? The 3 Tier team has cut through this challenge in this dashboard by providing much of the data separated between the top 15 craft players (based on the Nielsen IQ definition) and the small to mid-size craft brewers below them in size. For a mid-sized brand in the marketplace, this is extremely helpful in benchmarking performance, as views of all craft may not always be a realistic representation of your experience. As an example, in the latest 13 weeks, total craft IPA sales are up 5.2% by dollars and 1.1% by volume, but that’s heavily driven by the top 15 players, who are up 10.2% and 4.7% respectively. In contrast, small and mid-size craft brewers are only up 1.1% by dollars and down -2.4% by volume year-over-year (YoY) for that same 13-week period.

The interactive nature of the data also allows viewers to quickly see interactions between various categories, including package attributes and style, that can help them answer questions in new ways. Single format cans, for example, are up 17.7% in craft dollar sales YoY for the past 13 weeks (and, as the dashboard shows, driven almost entirely by 19.2-ounce cans). What happens if we remove IPA from that data? You can quickly see the number drop; without IPA included, single sales are actually down -4.2% YoY for the same time period.

There are more cuts of the data, including geography and package format, but I’ll stop there hopefully having whet your appetite to dig in and play around with this data a bit more. Yes, scan isn’t representative of all sales in the craft marketplace, but this tool does offer more opportunities to slice and dice the data than most syndicated reports you’ll find. So, happy data crunching, and as you use the data, please reach out with feedback and comments as we look to evolve this partnership and the data we present with 3 Tier Beverages going forward.