US craft brewers, already contending with a hunch in gross sales, are set to be impacted by President Trump’s commerce tariffs.
America’s craft brewers have already got sufficient issues. Laborious seltzers and cocktails are muscling into beer gross sales. Millennials and Gen Z don’t drink as a lot as their elders. Brewpubs nonetheless haven’t totally recovered from the shock of the Covid-19 pandemic 5 years in the past.
Now there’s a brand new menace: President Donald Trump’s tariffs, together with levies of 25% on imported metal and aluminium and on items from Canada and Mexico.
“It’s going to value the business a considerable amount of cash,” mentioned Matt Cole, brewmaster at Ohio-based Fats Head’s Brewery.
Trump’ commerce struggle “can be crippling for our business if this carries out into months and years”.
The tariffs, a few of which have been suspended till 2 April, might impression brewers in methods massive and small, Bart Watson mentioned. Watson is the president and CEO of the Brewers Affiliation, the commerce group for craft beer.
Aluminium cans are in Trump’s crosshairs. And practically all of the metal kegs utilized by US brewers are made in Germany, so a tariff on completed metal merchandise raises the price of kegs. Tariffs on Canadian merchandise like barley and malt would additionally enhance prices. And a few brewers rely on raspberries and different fruit from Mexico, Watson mentioned.
At Port Metropolis Brewing in Alexandria, Virginia, founder Invoice Butcher worries that he’ll have to boost the value of a six-pack of his best-selling Optimum Wit and different brews to $18.99 (€17.55) from round $12.99 (€12.01), and to cost extra for a pint at his tasting room.
“Are folks nonetheless going to return right here and pay $12 a pint as an alternative of $8?’’ he mentioned. “Our enterprise will decelerate.’’
For Port Metropolis, the largest menace comes from the looming tariff on Canadian imports. Each three weeks, the brewery receives a 40,000-pound truckload of pilsner malt from Canada, which works right into a 55,000-pound silo on the brewery’s grounds. Butcher mentioned he can’t discover malt of comparable high quality anyplace else.
Trump’s tariffs additionally hit Port Metropolis in a round-about method. The levy on aluminium, which went into impact on 12 March, is inflicting massive brewers to change from aluminium cans to bottles. Port Metropolis, which bottles 70% of its beer, discovered itself unable to get bottles.
“Our bottle provider is reducing us off on the finish of the month,’’ Butcher mentioned. “That caught us unexpectedly.’’
Fats Head’s Brewery will get its barley from Canada. Cole mentioned it might shift to sources in Idaho and Montana, however the delivery logistics are extra difficult. And Trump’s tariffs, by placing Canadian barley at a aggressive drawback, would permit US producers to boost home costs.
Fats Head’s is making an attempt to mitigate the impression of the tariffs. Anticipating larger aluminium costs, for example, the brewery stockpiled beer cans — which it will get from a US provider — and now has 3 million cans in its warehouse, 30% of what it wants yearly. It has additionally shifted manufacturing to painted cans, that are cheaper than these with shrink-wrapped movie sleeves.
In Arizona, some brewers are already eliminating or decreasing the beers they provide in aluminium cans to chop prices, mentioned Cale Aylsworth, the director of gross sales and relations at O.H.S.O. Brewery and Distillery and president of the Arizona Craft Brewers Guild.
“This can be a blow to Arizona craft. I hate to see much less native choices on the shelf,” Aylsworth mentioned.
Some brewers have additionally misplaced entry to retailer cabinets from one massive buyer: Canada, which is the highest international marketplace for US craft beer, accounting for nearly 38% of exports.
However Canadians are livid that Trump focused their merchandise, and Canadian importers have been cancelling orders and pulling US beer off retailer cabinets.
Altering client tastes
The tariffs come at an already troublesome time for brewers.
After years of regular development — the variety of US breweries greater than doubled to 9,736 between 2014 and 2024 — the business is struggling to compete with seltzers and different drinks and to win over youthful clients. In 2024, brewery closings outnumbered openings for the primary time for the reason that mid-2000s, Watson of the Brewers Affiliation mentioned. He estimates that US craft beer manufacturing dipped 2% to three% final yr.
“Craft brewing had a interval of phenomenal development, however we aren’t in that period anymore,” he mentioned. “We’re in a extra mature market.”
Port Metropolis’s manufacturing peaked in 2019 at 16,000 barrels of beer — equal to 220,000 circumstances. Then the pandemic hit and hammered the corporate’s draft beer enterprise in bars and eating places. The comeback has been sluggish. Butcher expects Port Metropolis to provide 13,000 barrels this yr.
The brewery seeks to set itself aside by emphasising its award-winning brews. In 2015, Port Metropolis was named small brewery of the yr on the Nice American Beer Pageant. Nevertheless it isn’t straightforward with import taxes threatening to boost the price of substances and packaging.
“It’s onerous sufficient to run a small enterprise when your provide chain is in intact,’’ he mentioned. And the erratic method that Trump has rolled out the taxes — saying them, then suspending them, then threatening new ones — has made it much more troublesome to plan.
“The unpredictability simply injects a component of chaos,’’ Butcher mentioned.
Aylsworth, in Arizona, mentioned massive brewers have complete groups of individuals to calculate the impression of tariffs, however smaller brewers should stretch their sources to navigate them. That is on prime of the opposite complexities of operating a brewery, from zoning legal guidelines to licensing permits to labor shortages.
However for a lot of brewers, the heaviest burden proper now’s decrease gross sales as clients reduce on beer, Aylsworth mentioned. That is why many brewers try onerous to not increase costs.
“In immediately’s world, with the economic system and the excessive stage of uncertainty, individuals are spending much less,” Cole mentioned. “Beer is an reasonably priced luxurious, and we wish to be sure that we don’t lose that.’’
