2026 will be the best year in history, so why doesn’t it feel like it?
Here’s a stat that stopped me mid-scroll: 2026 is on pace to be the best year on record for total brewery visits in the U.S. Not to gloss over the troubling headlines we’ve all been reading about the craft beer industry, but genuinely, actually, statistically more people are walking through taproom doors this year than ever before.
As reported again and again, people, in general, are drinking less alcohol, and when they do drink, fewer are reaching for beer, but none of that changes the fact that visiting a brewery taproom is statistically more popular now than ever before. It is a paradox, but it is also a statistical fact.
I’m Not Making This Up
That statistic comes from Brewers Association economist Matt Gacioch, who ran the numbers after someone asked him a deceptively simple question: Is total brewery visitation at an all-time high? The Brewers Association doesn’t track that number directly, so Gacioch built a reasonable estimate by combining the number of legal-drinking-age Americans, the share of them who drink craft beer, and how often craft drinkers visit breweries each year. Filling in a few gaps with trend estimates, the resulting math points to 2026 as the high-water mark. (See Matt’s report.)
I’ll be honest: my first instinct was to be skeptical. If breweries, and the beer biz in general, are struggling so much, how can visitor numbers be increasing? However, Gacioch’s data stands up to scrutiny. The survey he is using is well-sampled, and even when we remove the “power visitors” — the regulars who visit frequently and skew the averages upward — the trend still holds. The typical craft drinker is simply visiting breweries more often than they did before the pandemic.
Fewer Power Visitors, More Casual Visitors
There’s an interesting wrinkle here, though. Those power visitors — the top 10% most frequent taproom-goers — used to account for 60% of all visits back in 2018. Today, that’s down to 47%. In other words, the surge isn’t being driven by a shrinking core of superfans visiting even more. It’s being driven by more casual drinkers showing up more often. That’s a meaningfully different — and honestly more encouraging — story than “our frequent flyers club has more members.”
It’s also not simply a case of more breweries splitting up the same visits. Brewery growth has actually slowed in recent years, and the total count even dipped slightly last year. Despite that, average visits per taproom have gone up for three straight years. The pie isn’t just being cut into more slices — it’s getting bigger.
Of course, this rising tide isn’t lifting every single boat equally. The data shows real variation by who’s visiting and where. Younger and middle-aged craft drinkers (21–54) are visiting more, while drinkers 55 and up are trending the other direction. Women are visiting fewer local breweries but more breweries while traveling. And regionally, the West and South are seeing gains while the Midwest and Northeast are seeing declines. So, depending on your demographics and zip code, your mileage may vary.
It’s Good News if You’re Listening
Here’s where I land on all this: it’s good news. Genuinely good news. But it only turns into good news for your specific brewery if you actually listen to what the data is telling you.
More people are out there looking for a great taproom experience — that much is clear. Whether they end up at your taproom or some random bar down the street depends entirely on what you do with that opportunity. Rising visit counts don’t automatically fix declining ticket sizes or climbing operational costs, but they do mean the door is open.
Breweries that lean hard into hospitality, atmosphere, and the overall experience of visiting are the ones positioned to actually ride this wave rather than watch it roll past. These days, it behooves a brewery to spend some time understanding what does and does not make a taproom pleasant and inviting for most people, not just the old-fashioned beer geeks.
No, the beer industry is definitely not out of the woods. But for once, here’s a piece of data worth feeling genuinely optimistic about. People still want to go to breweries. That’s not nothing.
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