Oregon Beer Sales in 2019: Churn Continues Apace
The Oregon Liquor Control Commission has their latest figures out for the amount of beer Oregon breweries sold in Oregon. As usual, it’s full of fascinating detail. One big change is that Widmer/CBA is back on the list, and have (maybe?) displaced Deschutes as the best-seller. (My guess is that this includes the full range of CBA products, and it’s difficult to know what the brand breakdowns are—but it’s notable that the OLCC lists the brewery as “Widmer Brothers.”)
I’ll post the top twenty, along with their year-over-year performance, but first some possibly interesting numbers:
Foreign-owned (outside OR) companies with breweries in Oregon (CBA, Hop Valley, 10 Barrel, Portland Brewing) sold 184,000 barrels in Oregon, or 27.4% of the total. That is if you consider all Widmer’s barrelage foreign-owned for the year.
Among top-20 breweries, this is how the barrelage broke down by region: Central Oregon: 24.3%; Portland: 22.4%; Eugene area: 15.7%; Hood River (population 8k): 6.5%.
The top twenty breweries sold 74% of all the beer in Oregon. The top four sold a third of the beer, and the seven largest sold half the beer in Oregon.
The top 20 breweries grew 1.5%, while the state was basically flat (+.6%) on the year.
Top 20 Breweries founded before 2000 shed 24,000 barrels and only one (Pelican) was in the black.
pFriem posted the biggest gains of the year and now sells more beer in Oregon than its cross-town rival Full Sail. (Guess the decision to put IPA and PIlsner into cans worked out all right.)
With that, I’ll leave you with the OLCC’s numbers. Again, these are the barrels of beer sold in Oregon by Oregon-based breweries (whether locally or foreign owned). Note further that while Full Sail is independent, it is owned by a private equity firm.