In a very timely article, New Yorker Magazine has compiled and published some interesting figures just this week about the meteoric growth of the craft beer industry over the last few years. There are currently 2,360 breweries (not including brew-pubs) in the U.S., up from just 79 in the 1980's. In a very cool interactive graph the magazine pulled together you can see that New Mexico is the home to 27 small brewer/bottlers, more than half of which will be at tonight's Summer Brew event. This collection of craft brewers ranks NM 26/50 states, and together they produced 48,000 barrels of hops flavored go-juice last year which ranks us 31/50 states. New Mexico's craft brewery to population ratio is even more impressive, 6.6 per 500,000 residents - which slots us 12th out of the 50 states.
Other interesting facts: The largest craft brewers by production are Sam Adams (Boston, MA), Sierra Nevada (Chico, CA), and New Belgium (Fort Collins, CO). A list of the 50 largest breweries by volume can be browsed in the click-through graphic.
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| Cool inter-active craft brewery figures by state. Disregard the unintentional focus on the state of Texas. |
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View New Mexico Craft Beer in a larger map
But by God we're number one in running biking blogging accounting craft beer authorities.
ReplyDeleteHave fun! Plenty of great beers in your state, for sure. I love that 2nd street brewery.
ReplyDeleteFrank - we've got a lot of bases covered over here, and if we get a bit more snow next year we'll get back to covering the ski scene a bit more.
ReplyDeleteBrian - New Mexico has a couple of old craft businesses which seem to be a terrific asset to the new crop of brewers & businesses getting started. They can focus on their product and not worry about re-inventing the wheel or creating local markets and distribution networks and such. I'm a big fan of 2nd Street myself, though it's not clear in that New Yorker article whether they're counting craft brands available at retail locations and brewpubs together or separately. 2nd Street as of yet only sells carry-out bottles from their restaurant locations.