The disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic may be in the rearview, but 2026 is still a year in which the supply chain will be an existential topic for small breweries.
The scarcity of raw materials doesn’t loom as menacingly as it did a few years ago, but costs continue to rise significantly: The Brewers Association’s biannual benchmarking survey found that the average cost of materials to produce a barrel of beer jumped from roughly $138 in 2018 to $164 in 2023, the most recent year for which data is available. That’s a rise of almost 20 percent over just five years, and it doesn’t yet include the most recent two. Without growth in overall craft-beer sales, these increases further squeeze margins in an industry with an already-narrow range of profitability.
In short, the cost of raw materials is a pressure that nearly every brewery feels more acutely today than just a few years ago. It demands commensurate dedication from breweries to mitigate—or at least control—those costs.