In a typical year, the Brewers Association only conducts two market surveys, our annual Beer Industry Production Survey, and our mid-year survey. To say that 2020 isn’t a typical year is putting it mildly.

Consequently, we’ve conducted three additional impact surveys looking at how this year’s dramatic market swings have affected craft brewers and their businesses. To help fill in the gaps between those surveys and our annual survey, we’re launching a Q3 survey covering the period from July-September. We hope you’ll take a few minutes and fill it out.

Answers won’t be published, except in aggregate, but you can opt in to share your response with your state guild leader.

What are we hoping to learn?

At a top level, we’re hoping simply to learn how much the beer market has recovered since our last survey when we found sales were still down 30% from a year ago. While we can estimate some of these shifts from other data sources, nothing is quite like getting the full data straight from members.

Here’s what some of the aggregated data is telling us, but these averages don’t give us a distribution, or cover the full range of small brewery business models.

In addition, we’re hoping to delve a bit deeper into things that scan data can’t cover. This includes what has changed about your business, both in terms of new sales methods and channels, and how that might change as we move into winter and outside seating starts to look less appetizing to some beer drinkers in parts of the country.

In addition, to tell your story at the state and federal level, we’re hoping to learn about the effects the slowdown has had on brewery employment, and your confidence level about your business surviving this year and over the next year.

In addition to publishing the compiled results, we’ll be using these results to estimate revenue and sales losses, and building a model of total jobs loss (including suppliers and other connected industries) for the craft brewing industry.

Please take a few minutes and fill it out.