After two years of elevated focus on social and racial justice issues, ownership within the craft beer industry remains nearly monolithically white, according to a new demographic benchmarking report from the Brewers Association (BA).
Brewery owners are 93.5% white, and 92.2% of breweries have entirely white ownership, according to the survey of 500 randomly selected breweries.
BA chief economist Bart Watson adjusted the survey methodology to account for “response bias.”
“Response bias — a type of sampling bias — is when some group of respondents is more likely to respond than other groups,” he wrote. “Given the nature of American conversations about race/ethnicity and gender, I’ve been worried about the potential for this type of bias in our results. By randomly selecting the breweries before we send out the survey, and filling in the results for those who don’t respond, we can control for that bias.”
This year, 500 breweries were selected, 136 responded and the BA sought information about and filled in answers for the remaining 364.
Only 0.4% of brewery owners surveyed are Black, 0.4% are American Indian or Alaska Native, and 0.5% identified as other. Two percent identified as Asian, and 2.2% identified as Hispanic, Latino, Latina or of Spanish origin. There were no brewery owners identifying as Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander; 1.1% preferred not to answer.
Watson cautioned these results should not be compared to the 2019 benchmarking survey due to evidence of response bias. In that survey, 88.4% of brewery owners who responded identified as white, 1% identified as Black, 3.7% identified as American Indian or Alaskan Native, 2.4% identified as Hispanic or Latino, 0.6% identified as other, and 2.1% preferred not to answer.
“Digging into the data, within the 500, those that responded were 86.6% white, versus 97.0% for the people we coded. If you add in people outside the 500 who responded (people may have found the link or the page), our total percentage of white owners for responses was 88.5% — a very similar percentage to the last time we benchmarked (also by free response),” Watson wrote. “I won’t show you the statistical tests, but it’s very unlikely we’d get a gap between responses and coded data that large without response bias.
“Basically it appears that people more invested in these efforts are more likely to respond, and those people are a higher percentage [Black, Indigenous and people of color],” he continued.
In the 2021 survey, nearly a quarter of brewery owners (23.7%) were women; 0.2% identified as non-binary and 0.6% preferred not to answer. More than three-quarters (75.6%) of owners are men.
The majority of breweries (58.6%) have no female ownership; 41.4% of breweries have at least one female owner. More than one-quarter (28.3%) have 50-50 male-female owners, and 10.2% have a combination of owners that is not 50-50. Only 2.9% of breweries surveyed have 100% female ownership.
In the 2019 survey, 2% of breweries had all-female ownership, 31% were split 50-50, and 14.8% had a different mix of men and women. The majority (52.3%) of breweries were entirely male owned.
Watson encouraged readers to explore a report by Rabobank beverages analyst Bourcard Nesin that examined the demographic shifts in alcohol consumers. That report found that women now outnumber men in drinkers younger than age 25 and those consumers are becoming less white.
“For craft to continue growing and moving more in the larger beer and beverage alcohol consumer market, it will need to connect better with that diverse customer base,” Watson wrote. “While there’s nothing that says white and male owned businesses can’t connect with that more diverse customer base, it’s going to require additional work in building diverse organizations and shoring up blind spots. The BA is working to build those resources, but our industry has to see the value and want to use them. These results should underline why they are needed.”