The number of craft breweries in the U.S. contracted for the second year in a row in 2025 with a 2.9-percent year-over-year decrease, according to the Brewers Association’s (BA) annual production report for the craft industry. The BA recorded 9,578 operating craft breweries last year. The number of microbreweries showed the largest decline with a 4.4-percent drop. Taprooms and brewpubs trailed behind with 2.7 and 2.5 percent decreases, respectively.
In its annual craft brewing industry production report, the BA documents the craft segment’s total output by volume, number of breweries, market share, and workforce size. The report also ranks the country’s craft brewing companies by sales volume. The BA categorizes a brewer as craft if it produces fewer than 6 million barrels of beer or less annually and if 25 percent or less of the company is owned by another entity in the beverage-alcohol industry. Its data does not include flavored malt beverages.
Total production in the craft industry dipped by 5.1 percent last year, a less drastic drop than beer’s overall 5.7-percent decrease in volume. Craft’s less dramatic dip in volume than the entire category helped it lift its market share by 0.1 percent. Independently, 60 percent of all U.S. craft breweries reported declines in volume, 39 percent reported growth, and 1 percent reported no change.
Below is a table of the top 50 craft breweries of 2025.
The Top 50 U.S. Craft Brewing Companies of 2025
| Rank | Company | City | State |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | D. G. Yuengling and Son Inc | Pottsville | PA |
| 2 | Sierra Nevada Brewing Co | Chico | CA |
| 3 | Boston Beer Co | Boston | MA |
| 4 | Tilray Beer Brands | New York | NY |
| 5 | Duvel Moortgat USA | Cooperstown | NY |
| 6 | Athletic Brewing Company | Milford | CT |
| 7 | Gambrinus | Shiner | TX |
| 8 | Brooklyn Brewery | Brooklyn | NY |
| 9 | Monster Brewing | Longmont | CO |
| 10 | Deschutes Brewery | Bend | OR |
| 11 | Artisanal Brewing Ventures | Charlotte | NC |
| 12 | Garage Beer Co | Columbus | OH |
| 13 | New Glarus Brewing Co | New Glarus | WI |
| 14 | Matt Brewing Co | Utica | NY |
| 15 | Georgetown Brewing Co | Seattle | WA |
| 16 | Gordon Biersch Brewing Co | San Jose | CA |
| 17 | Fiddlehead Brewing | Shelburne | VT |
| 18 | Tivoli Brewing Company | Denver | CO |
| 19 | Rhinegeist Brewery | Cincinnati | OH |
| 20 | Narragansett Brewing Co | Pawtucket | RI |
| 21 | Allagash Brewing Company | Portland | ME |
| 22 | Tršegs Brewing Co | Hershey | PA |
| 23 | Barrel One Collective | Boston | MA |
| 24 | August Schell Brewing Company | New Ulm | MN |
| 25 | Three Floyds Brewing | Munster | IN |
| 26 | Great Lakes Brewing Company | Cleveland | OH |
| 27 | Hendler Family Brewing Company | Framingham | MA |
| 28 | Stevens Point Brewery | Stevens Point | WI |
| 29 | Creature Comforts Brewing Co. | Athens | GA |
| 30 | Great Frontier Holdings | Eugene | OR |
| 31 | Pittsburgh Brewing Co | Pittsburgh | PA |
| 32 | Odell Brewing Co | Fort Collins | CO |
| 33 | Maui Brewing Company | Kihei | HI |
| 34 | Abita Brewing Co | Covington | LA |
| 35 | BrewDog Brewing Co | Canal Winchester | OH |
| 36 | Alaskan Brewing Co. | Juneau | AK |
| 37 | Kona Brewing Hawaii | Kailua-Kona | HI |
| 38 | Saint Arnold Brewing Co | Houston | TX |
| 39 | Revolution Brewing | Chicago | IL |
| 40 | Summit Brewing Co | St. Paul | MN |
| 41 | Pizza Port | Carlsbad | CA |
| 42 | New Trail Brewing Company | Williamsport | PA |
| 43 | pFriem Family Brewers | Hood River | OR |
| 44 | Russian River Brewing Co | Santa Rosa | CA |
| 45 | The Florida Brewery | Auburndale | FL |
| 46 | Maine Beer Company | Freeport | ME |
| 47 | Surly Brewing Company | Minneapolis | MN |
| 48 | BJ’s Restaurants, Inc. | Huntington Beach | CA |
| 49 | Coronado Brewing Co | Coronado | CA |
| 50 | Fat Head’s Brewery | Middleburg Heights | OH |
VP Pro Take
““Happy BA production data report day to all who celebrate,” a colleague texted me this morning. For us ink-stained/pixel-pushing wretches in the beer press, it can feel a bit like Christmas, having all this new material to pore over. It’s here! It’s finally here!
I’ll have more analysis stemming from this annual cache — and the Craft Brewers Conference (CBC), which I’ll be covering next week in Philadelphia for VinePair — in the coming weeks, keep an eye on Hop Take for that. But off the rip, one thing that jumped out at me is the reshuffled top-three BA-defined craft breweries by volume. Yuengling is still in the top spot. But for the first time, Sierra Nevada has ascended to #2, displacing Boston Beer Co. (BBC), which now sits in third.
Nobody who’s paid any attention to this industry over the past decade could possibly be surprised by BBC’s descent from its penultimate perch. This was a long time coming. Beer Business Daily noted that as of BBC’s latest earnings call earlier this month, “beyond beer” holdings— Angry Orchard, Sun Cruiser, Truly, and Twisted Tea, among others — now make up some 85 percent of the firm’s overall offerings. “We knew that the rapid growth of craft beer over the past 20 years was unsustainable, and I’m happy to report that early on we hedged against that by continuing to diversify our portfolio,” co-founder, chairman, and then-and-now chief executive Jim Koch told analysts.
That’s the glass half-full way of looking at it. And despite ongoing and costly missteps with Truly, and getting ambushed by Surfside, it’s true that BBC saw the “fourth category” coming around the bend better than many others in its first-wave craft cohort. But the flipside is also true, which is that its flagship Samuel Adams brand has gone from one of the leaders of the segment to an utter non-entity in the past decade, and BBC’s 2019 acquisition of Dogfish Head has not borne much fruit — not for that company’s sales of “core beer,” at least. (Its canned cocktails do alright, and it has lately found a bit of a groove with Grateful Dead collabs.) There’s some symmetry in BBC rising to such great craft-brewing heights with Koch as CEO, then climbing down from them with him once again in that role. But for years, Sam Adams’ longtime slogan, “For the love of beer,” has been unrequited in the sales data. And here we are.
On the other hand, Sierra Nevada has stayed saddled on the horse that got it this far, with few exceptions. Strainge Beast and Tea West — a hard kombucha and a hard tea brand, respectively, both since discontinued — are the only two I can think of off the top of my head. (I guess you could toss Hop Splash, the serviceable hop water it launched in 2022, or Trail Pass, its successful nonalcoholic beer brand, into that column, if you insist.) Even its M&A misfire, Sufferfest, was a beer brand; it just didn’t pan out. At CBC 2025 in Indianapolis, its execs spent a lot of time talking about how focused it was on beer as such, rather than, say, looking for “white space.” Looks like that focus is paying off.” —Dave Infante, VinePair columnist and contributing editor
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