Buzz kill: US breweries shutter as fanfare over craft beers appears to fade
In the early 2000s, Chris Bell, then a student at University of Colorado Boulder, followed a common path among people interested in brewing beer.He started doing so at home, then spent years working at established craft beer makers Long Trail Brewing in Vermont and Avery Brewing in Colorado before opening Call to Arms Brewing Company in 2015 in Denver.In a crowded market, the business was successful.Its More Like Bore-O-Phyll beer won a gold medal in the fresh or wet hop ale category at the 2018 World Beer Cup.A local outlet called it one of the city’s best breweries, and it had a 4.
7 rating from more than 400 reviews on Google.In 2019, the business had its best year, Bell said.“We felt very good about the future,” he said.But then, of course, the Covid-19 pandemic hit and, like many breweries, Call to Arms’s sales decreased and its costs increased.People started spending more time at home and consuming less alcohol.
In December 2025, Bell and a co-owner closed the business,“It was heartbreaking,” Bell said,“I put my entire career into it,”Call to Arms was one of 100 breweries to close in the state over the last two years, according to the Colorado Brewers Guild,That is part of a national trend.
After the industry boomed in the late aughts and 2010s, the once-intense cultural buzz over craft beers appears to have faded.“Craft beer is part of the culture and the definition of Colorado, and so I don’t think craft beer is going away, but it might just look a little different,” said Shawnee Adelson, executive director of the Colorado Brewers Guild.In 2009, there were about 500 microbreweries in the United States, according to the Brewers Association, a trade group.In 2018, there were 4,500, an 800% increase.“We were providing people with something brand new to like,” said Garrett Oliver, who in 1994 started as brewmaster of the Brooklyn Brewery, one of the most successful craft breweries in the United States.
“Craft beer offers unlimited flavor in every direction you could imagine, and if you think about it, why would people not love that?”Stuart Keating was a home-brewer for many years and especially interested in “experimental beers, botanical, herbal kind of stuff, really historic styles”, he said.In 2014, he opened Earthbound Beer in south St Louis, which, as the home of Anheuser-Busch, has a rich history of beer-making.In 2017, Earthbound expanded into a historic building that housed a 19th-century brewery.He and his business partners discovered a cave beneath it with lagering cellars.They used the space to produce and store beer – and allowed customers to tour it.
“We used a lot of ingredients that you wouldn’t have found in beer at that time, things like oak leaves, cardamom,” Keating recalled.“The attitude and the vibe we brought towards craft beer was very welcoming and open and non-serious.”But like other bars and breweries, the pandemic led to a “terrible downturn in sales”, Keating said.In 2019, US microbreweries produced 4.9m barrels of beer, according to the Brewers Association.
In 2024, the breweries produced 3.7m barrels.There were also only about 2,000 microbreweries in the United States in 2024, less than half the number six years earlier.“It was a shift away from alcohol consumption for health and societal reasons.Some of it was a downturn in the economy.
Our customers were all younger and weirder, and they are the ones that got hurt the most by the economic shocks post-Covid,” said Keating, who decided to close the brewery in 2024.Bell, of Call to Arms, said the increase in the cost of labor, property taxes, maintenance and insurance hurt the business too.Plus, low interest rates led to a “real estate purchasing frenzy” in the surrounding neighborhood, he said.“It turned our entire neighborhood over, so we lost a lot of regulars,” Bell said.Despite the closures of many beloved breweries, people at the remaining breweries are still optimistic about their industry.
Oliver sees the market contraction as part of a cycle and points to a downturn in craft beer sales that occurred in the late 90s, when an administrator of the Institute for Brewing Studies told the New York Times: “‘A lot more people are jumping into the pool, and it’s getting crowded.A lot of people are treading water, and some people are just drowning.’’The Brooklyn Brewery owners are preparing to move into a larger building just four blocks away from its space in Williamsburg.In 2024, the brewery released Fonio Rising Pale Ale, made from “an ancient super grain that supports smallholder farmers in Africa”, according to its website.“As craft brewers, we have not done a great job – we haven’t done any job – of speaking to the 40-plus per cent of people in the United States that are not of European background,” said Oliver, who is African American.
Fonio “has a hook to it that other beers of ours might not have”.Adelson thinks more of gen Z, who drink less than older generations, could also start coming to breweries.“As they enter the workforce, and they are able to have maybe more disposable income, they will find those spaces that are outside of their traditional home or workspaces,” she said, “and hopefully, you know, put down their phone and go have a beer with their neighbor.”
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