Today, beer geeks flock to their local craft brewery to sit at picnic tables and sip small-batch brews — a culture that stems from the Great American Craft Beer Boom that gained traction in the 1960s and ’70s. However, the existence of craft breweries predates that sudden rise by over a century.
Pennsylvania is home to the country’s first craft brewery, D.G. Yuengling & Son, which opened in 1829. (For temporal comparison, that’s the same year William Austin Burt patented America’s first typewriter.) Yuengling is also the oldest standing brewery in the U.S. The country’s second craft brewery didn’t come until 1860 when August Schell Brewing Company opened in Minnesota.
Those were the only two craft breweries in the States before the industry went through a growth spurt in the later 1900s. The third craft brewery in the U.S., California’s Anchor Brewing Co., which opened in 1965, didn’t arrive until over 100 years after August Schell’s founding. Anchor had operated in San Francisco since 1896, but many consider the takeover by brewer Fritz Maytag, who is known as the “father of modern microbreweries,” to be the start of Anchor’s status as craft. California alone experienced a surge in openings in the 1970s and ’80s — including Ken Grossman’s Sierra Nevada Brewing Company in 1980 — before craft breweries appeared in most other states.
Boulder Beer, which opened in Colorado in 1979, and the now-shuttered William S. Newman Brewing Co., which opened in New York in 1981, were the fourth and fifth breweries in the country. The year that saw the most states gain their first craft brewery was 1984 when Arkansas, Idaho, Montana, Massachusetts, Washington, Virginia, Tennessee, and Oregon all hosted openings.
Mississippi and North Dakota were the final two states to have a craft brewery open and the only two whose openings fell in the 21st century. Lazy Magnolia Brewery sprouted in Mississippi in 2003, and Fargo Brewing Company opened in North Dakota in 2010.
The following year, the U.S. officially hit 100 open and operating breweries. Other nationwide milestones include passing the 1,000- and 5,000-brewery benchmarks in 1996 and 2016, respectively.
Below are a map and a table listing the first craft brewery in each state. For the purposes of this map, we looked to craftbeer.com, which sifted through historical documents in the Brewers Association’s archives. Craftbeer.com defines a craft brewery as one that is independently owned with an annual production of less than 6 million barrels of beer and led by a brewer that holds a Brewer’s Notice. Some breweries listed below are no longer in operation.
The Year Every State Got Its First Craft Brewery
| Year | State | Brewery |
|---|---|---|
| 1829 | Pennsylvania | D. G. Yuengling & Son |
| 1860 | Minnesota | August Schell Brewing Company |
| 1965 | California | Anchor Brewing Co. |
| 1979 | Colorado | Boulder Beer |
| 1981 | New York | William S. Newman Brewing Co. |
| 1982 | Michigan | The Real Ale Co. |
| 1984 | Arkansas | Riley-Lyon, Inc. |
| 1984 | Montana | Kessler Brewing |
| 1984 | Massachusetts | Boston Beer Co. |
| 1984 | Washington | Thomas Kemper Brewing Co. and Yakima Brewing & Malting Co. |
| 1984 | Virginia | Chesapeake Bay Brewing |
| 1984 | Tennessee | Bohannon Brewing Co. |
| 1984 | Oregon | Columbia River Brewery and McMenamins Hillsdale Brewery & Public House |
| 1985 | Iowa | Millstream Brewing Co. |
| 1985 | Texas | Reinheitsgebot Brewing Company |
| 1986 | Hawaii | Koolau Brewery, Inc. |
| 1986 | North Carolina | The Weeping Radish |
| 1986 | Maine | Geary Brewing Co. |
| 1986 | Louisiana | Abita Brewing Company |
| 1986 | Wisconsin | Sprecher Brewing Company |
| 1986 | Utah | Wasatch Brew Pub |
| 1987 | Connecticut | New Haven Brewing Company |
| 1987 | Alaska | Chinook Alaskan Brewing |
| 1987 | Kentucky | Oldenberg Brewery Company |
| 1987 | Illinois | Sieben’s River North Brewery and Tap & Growler |
| 1987 | New Mexico | Embudo Station Preston Brewery and Albuquerque Brewing & Bottling Co. |
| 1988 | Arizona | Big Stick Brewing Co., Electric Dave Brewing, and Christopher Joseph |
| 1988 | Florida | McGuire’s Irish Pub |
| 1988 | Idaho | Grand Teton Brewing |
| 1988 | Vermont | The Vermont Pub & Brewery |
| 1988 | Ohio | Great Lakes Brewing Company |
| 1989 | Georgia | Friends Brewing Co. |
| 1989 | Missouri | Boulevard Brewing Co. |
| 1989 | Kansas | Free State Brewing Company |
| 1990 | Indiana | Broad Ripple Brewpub |
| 1990 | Nebraska | Empyrean Brewing Co. |
| 1991 | Washington, D.C. | Capital City Brewing Company |
| 1991 | New Hampshire | The Portsmouth Brewery |
| 1991 | South Dakota | Firehouse Brewery |
| 1992 | Alabama | Birmingham Brewing Company |
| 1992 | Nevada | Holy Cow! Casino, Café, and Brewery |
| 1992 | Oklahoma | Bricktown Brewery |
| 1993 | Maryland | Oliver Ales |
| 1993 | Rhode Island | Union Station Brewing |
| 1994 | Wyoming | Snake River Brewing |
| 1994 | West Virginia | Cardinal Brewing Company |
| 1994 | South Carolina | Palmetto Brewing Company |
| 1995 | Delaware | Dogfish Head Craft Brewery |
| 1995 | New Jersey | The Ship Inn |
| 2003 | Mississippi | Lazy Magnolia Brewery |
| 2010 | North Dakota | Fargo Brewing Company |
*Image retrieved from Alex Marc Wagner – unsplash.com
