You don’t need a weatherman to tell you which way the winds are blowing in the beer industry today.
After years of a rising tide that lifted all craft-brewery boats, that surging popularity has ebbed. Headwinds are the prevailing force in the industry today, and the forecast for the near future looks just as windy.
Yet breweries that are nimble can trim their sails to reduce drag and increase margins, and sometimes small course corrections make the difference between keeping the wind in the sails and struggling to move forward.
Here we speak with a range of brewery operators—some producing just a few hundred barrels a year, others making upwards of 10,000—about their approach to keeping their businesses moving forward, their beers flowing, and their breweries going, even in these uncertain times.