Beer contributes 28,000 jobs and over $1 billion in wages to Washington’s economy
Nationwide, the beer industry provides 2 million jobs and contributes $328 billion to the U.S. economy annually. These stats and many others unveil themselves in an economic report recently released by the Beer Institute and the National Beer Wholesalers Association. The report, compiled from 2018 industry data, measures the impact of the entire beer industry, not just the craft beer industry, on the nation as well as individual states.
Below, we share a chart showing all of the numbers as they relate to Washington directly. For more information like this, see the story we posted in April about a similar economic report conducted on behalf of the Washington Beer Commission.
Beer Serves America is a biennial report outlining the economic contributions, jobs, and taxes the beer industry provides in every state and congressional district. According to the recently released report, the beer industry in Washington provides the state with nearly 28,000 jobs and over $1 billion in wages. These numbers include jobs in brewing, beer distribution, and beer retailing. If you expand the measurement to include beer-related activities like agriculture, manufacturing, and construction, beer is responsible for 53,000 jobs, $2.5B in wages, $8.2B in economic contribution, and $1.2B in tax revenue.
According to the report, America’s 7,000-plus breweries and 3,000-plus beer distributors directly employ more than 200,000 people, and every job in a brewery supports another 31 jobs in other industries. Again, the report measures the impact of the entire beer industry, not just the craft beer industry.
“Beer is more than America’s most popular alcohol beverage,” said Jim McGreevy, President and CEO of the Beer Institute. “Beer Serves America demonstrates how brewers, beer importers, and beer industry suppliers are creating jobs, providing wages and benefits to working Americans and supporting the economy in every state and every congressional district.”
Key findings from the Beer Serves America report include:
- Brewers and beer importers directly employ nearly 70,000 Americans. Large and mid-sized brewers and beer importers provide about 58 percent of brewing jobs.
- The number of distributor jobs has increased by more than 19 percent in the last decade, to nearly 141,600.
- Overall, the beer industry contributes about $328.4 billion in economic output which is equal to about 1.6 percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product.
- Suppliers to the brewing industry – enterprises that manufacture bottles and cans, cardboard case boxes, brewing equipment or marketing displays – generate nearly $102.0 billion in economic activity and are responsible for almost 436,650 jobs alone.
The Beer Serves America study was compiled by the independent economics firm John Dunham & Associates. It is the most comprehensive analysis of the industry available, using data collected directly from private companies, Infogroup, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Alcohol Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Now if only all the other bad actors when it comes to temporary employment, shit wage, and generally bad employment step up and become real places of employment. There’s a lot of good jobs in the industry; almost none of them are at these fledgling breweries.