If you’ve been outside recently you may have noticed one thing, it’s weird. It’s a strange time we find ourselves in and some of that is on purpose. Some of that is by chance. Some of it “is what it is,” as Cam’ron would say.
What is not on purpose is a brewery’s aim to sell less beer. But the world is buying less beer, the world is drinking less beer, and sadly some brewers are making less beer. But not all brewers. Some are making more!
The Brewers Association (BA), the trade group representing small and independent craft brewers, reports that craft brewers’ collective production dropped 4% in 2024. Not great news for dozens of brewers in and around DC!
The BA shared this news in their annual craft brewing production report release 10 days ago. More news is contained therein, but we wanted to take a moment to look at the new strange we currently find ourselves in. Tippling around town, some things have come to light, and some things remain obfuscated. Clearly, beer has taken a hit in the last six years. Beer will continue to take a hit. How big is the hit going to be and how bad is it going to get? Well, that’s less clear. Since hindsight is 20/20, let’s look to the last brewery owner we spoke to and what he is saying about beer, sales, and the state of the market.
DC Brau turned fourteen on April 15. To date myself, I was there for the release of DC Brau’s first beer, the still-tasty Public Pale Ale, debuted on April 15, 2011. This release was at a restaurant, Meridian Pint, that no longer exists. The line to get in the bar was out the door, to the right, and literally around the block. There were no cans and all of the beer was draft. You couldn’t buy a pint at the brewery and when DC Brau opened, the first production brewery in the city since 1956.
Fast forward fourteen years and DC proper has a dozen breweries, some with only one location, like DC Brau, some with several locations, like Other Half (while born in Brooklyn, Other Half’s biggest production facility is its Ivy City location). For over a decade DC Brau was DC’s biggest brewer, today that distinction belongs to Other Half.
We spoke to DC Brau owner and founder Brandon Skall on our last DC Beer Show episode 213, “14 Years of DC Brau.” Amongst many gems dropped by Skall, this one stood out:
“[T]he competitiveness that we’re seeing out there it’s twofold because it’s not just from there being a lot of breweries, but it’s there being a drop in consumption as well. And just to sort of illustrate that point, you know, Washington, DC was always a 6,000,000 case market…But 6,000,000 cases total for all of the beer that was consumed in DC. And that means, you know, the macros, the micros, everybody. And when the pandemic hit, that number went from 6,000,000 cases down to 4,000,000 cases. And it never really came back. It just sort of flatlined. There was, like, a little pop of lights here and there, but, you know, what would be gained one month would then be lost the next.”
Using tax data from the city, about 420,000 barrels of beer were sold in both 2018 and 2019, but in 2020 there were about 303,169 barrels sold. In 2021, that number was 324,618. As you can see there was a massive downshift in the number of barrels of beer consumed in the District. Who knows how long it will take–ever?–to get the city buying and/or consuming an additional 2 million cases of beer. Certainly a playoff run, a World Series win, a Stanley Cup,… professional sports post-season successes will help beer sales, but these are circumstances far beyond the average Washingtonian’s control.
In 2020, nearly all of DC’s breweries took hits to their overall output of barrelage. If they’re alive today, that’s no small feat! Go support them please. If you don’t drink beer, buy a shirt, a snack, a non-alcoholic beer, a hard seltzer, or something to help keep dollars in the District and support our local economy.
A few weeks ago I was having a meal at China Chilcano. I was delighted to see not one but two local beers on draft. The locals were Right Proper’s pale ale Raised by Wolves, and Atlas Brew Works’ Ponzi, an IPA. In addition to the locals was the international Japanese lager, Kirin Ichiban. I noticed that the tap tower could accommodate eight beers, but only three had draft handles and were pouring beer.
I asked my server, “do you ever pour all eight drafts at the same time?”
“We do sometimes,” they said, “like for Oktoberfest.”
I felt both happy they poured all eight draft lines at once, but sad that that wasn’t the norm for the restaurant. In the words of Daniel Tiger, sometimes we feel two feelings at the same time. And that’s okay. I felt as though if a restaurant can only really afford to pour three beers from its draft system, so be it. Best that two-thirds of the drafts (in my anecdotal sample size) are local and made in DC and only one brewed by a multinational conglomerate. Also, it’s better for the restaurant to have three beers that move than eight in total with five kegs not selling.
“I think that the economic landscape has changed for a lot of breweries, and we’re finally starting to see that really catch up to the industry as we’re starting to have years where we’ve got more closings than openings,” Skall told us.
“And as we’re dealing with that, you know, we’ve got tariffs sort of coming into play as well, which are no doubt going to sort of be another struggle when we’re already still sort of recovering from the pandemic,” notes Skall, pointing out the “still recovering.” I am reminded of my nice cold draft at China Chilcano. How I was both grateful for it, but also disappointed there was no dark beer on draft. And just yesterday we heard of the closure of Duck Rabbit, a North Carolina brewery who dubbed themselves “the dark beer specialist.”
Skall told us “our industry, I’ll say, is very interlaced with hospitality in many ways, way beyond just having a tasting room here.” He mentioned that over 60% of DC Brau sales comes from off premise accounts, so bars, restaurants, bowling alleys, movie theaters, you name it. “[T]hey’ve been struggling as well. And we’ve been riding that roller coaster with them for the past five years.”
“And in DC right now, you know, if you’re local here, you may be aware, but, if you’re not local, you might not know. The hospitality industry is in peril. In fact, this year, the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington (RAMW) is predicting, over 40% of the restaurants in Washington DC will close,” Skall laments.
I hope, perhaps naively, that the hospitality industry will bounce back. But of course for my glass-half-full outlook there is always the opposite opinion. I cannot afford to do a comprehensive fact checking of the RAMW Study (though maybe with enough commercial support I can) I can add context to the RAMW study.
I asked Jessica Sidman, Washingtonian editor and reporter, about the 40% figure. Sidman seemed to agree that the headline “40% of DC restaurants likely to close by the end of the year, survey shows” is perhaps misleading. She noted that the data is for only full-serve casual restaurants and it includes operators who said they were “somewhat” likely to close, which seems ambiguous. She noted that “very likely” was 11% and though she did add she thought it will be a bad year for restaurants, she seemed dubious of the high 40% closure statistic. DC has over 2,500 restaurants, but in the interests of easy numbers, 40% of 2,500 would mean 1,000 restaurants would close. If that seems like a lot, it’s because it is. But even if only 500 restaurants close, isn’t that too many?
Those closures are “a huge loss culturally, to the restaurant industry of this town, but also to all of the businesses that are interlaced with them in success,” Skall says. The effects felt from economic hardships by restaurants will affect not only the staff of the restaurant but can and will ripple across many industries. “How can we bring awareness to this issue and how can we help boost it? Because the restaurants that will survive… it’s gonna be hard for them to be the mom and pops. It’s gonna be hard for them to be those chef-driven concepts that really care a lot to have local products like ours on and to feature them,” Skall tells us.
He is of course right that every restaurant closure is another paper cut to the death-by-a-thousand-cuts situation that is brewing. Will a cultural loss to the unique nature of DC’s hospitality industry, of which DC’s brewing scene is a part of, ever be regained? That depends on how you see the glass.
