Buying a Brewery
The Notice Does Not Come With the Building
A brewery is permitted to a person, not to a place. 27 CFR 25.63 is blunt about it: a person may not operate a brewery until the notice required by that subpart has been approved. On a change of proprietorship, 25.72(a) makes the outgoing brewer close out under 25.85 and requires the successor, before beginning operations, to qualify in the same manner as the proprietor of a new brewery. An asset purchase therefore starts the qualification from the beginning, and the tanks sit idle until it clears. Buying the entity instead collapses the problem: 25.74 treats a stock sale that changes control or management as a 30-day notification. That structural choice is worth more to the timeline than anything else in the deal.
What Breweries Trade For
Breweries trade inside the marketplace's own brewery class, where sold-business quartiles ran 2.06x to 4.32x SDE from 2021 through 2025, with a median near 2.77 and an average of 3.34. The publisher describes that population as primarily locally owned small craft breweries, usually including a restaurant, taproom or pub component, so the figures cover the hybrid the trade actually is, not a pure production brewery. Anchor at the SDE end, because a searcher buys the earnings the owner takes out. The quarter trading above the range is where the packaging volume and the distribution are; the quarter below is usually a taproom with one good year.
More Brewers Splitting Less Beer
The federal series tells one story twice. TTB's own annual report counted 2,782 industry members in 2012 and 8,213 at the 2023 peak, then 7,309 in 2025. Production over the same period went from 196.2 million to 149.3 million, down 23.9 percent, and taxable removals fell with it. So the number of brewers is up more than one hundred and sixty percent since 2012 while the volume they divide is down a quarter, and the brewer count itself has fallen eleven percent in two years. The Brewers Association counted 9,724 breweries in 2025, down 2.9 percent, with craft retail dollars of 28.0 billion, or 24.8 percent of a 113 billion dollar beer market.
Two Counts of the Same Trade, and They Disagree
The trade association counts 9,724 breweries and the Census counts 5,093, a gap of nearly two to one, and the difference is definitional; neither count is wrong. The Census index puts microbreweries without a restaurant or bar in the brewery class, and sends brew pubs primarily serving alcoholic beverages, and brew pub restaurants primarily serving meals, into the food service classes instead. The sold-listing population sits closer to the association's count, because it explicitly includes the pub component. Read any per-brewery figure with that in mind: a receipts-per-establishment number from the federal file is describing a narrower business than the one on the market.
What to Verify in Diligence
A brewery's value sits in a permission you do not yet hold and stock you cannot count from the doorway. Verify:
- The federal notice and the state permit, and which of the two the deal structure re-earns
- The excise rate the buyer will actually pay, and whether any commonly controlled brewery shares the reduced-rate quantity
- Distribution agreements, whose termination terms are set by state franchise law rather than by the contract
- Taproom revenue as a share of the total, and the permission that allows it
- Tank capacity against actual production, since idle capacity is the number sellers quote
- Keg float: how many are in the field, and what they are worth on the buyer's books
Financeability Notes
Breweries finance under SBA 7(a), and the qualification sequence is the part underwriting cares about: an asset purchase cannot operate until the successor's notice is approved, so the lender is funding a business that will be dark for a period nobody controls. Expect questions about the tanks as collateral, since brewing equipment is specialized and its resale market is thin and public. Model debt service against a market wage for a head brewer and a taproom manager if the seller works both, and against a volume line that the federal series says has fallen for three years running rather than a plan that assumes it recovers.
Terms in This Industry
Brewer's notice
The federal approval a brewery operates under, issued to a person and not to a site.
Reduced-rate barrels
The first sixty thousand barrels a year taxed at the low rate, shared across commonly controlled brewers.
Taxable removals
Beer removed from the brewery for sale or consumption, which is what the excise is paid on.
Taproom share
The portion of revenue sold over the brewery's own bar instead of through distribution.
Keg float
The brewery's kegs out in the trade, which are its property and rarely counted.
What the Data Says
TTB's annual beer report counts 7,309 industry members in 2025, down from a peak of 8,213 in 2023 and up from 2,782 in 2012, while production fell from 196.2 million in 2012 to 149.3 million in 2025.
The Brewers Association counted 9,724 US breweries in 2025, down 2.9 percent, and reports that craft retail dollar sales fell 2.8 percent to 28.0 billion, 24.8 percent of a 113 billion dollar beer market.
The 2022 Economic Census counts 5,093 brewery establishments across 4,857 firms, averaging 5.8 million dollars of receipts and about eighteen employees each, a narrower class than the association's because brew pubs are counted under food service.
Enter earnings to apply this industry's cited band.
A sanity check against asking prices, not a valuation.
Holding a live deal in this industry? Underwrite it with the comps, cited band, and charge-off rate pre-loaded.
Compare bands across industries in the cited multiple bands by industry.
Who Else Is Buying in This Industry
No consolidator is confirmed in this trade from a primary source. Silence means unverified, not uncontested: check the current list before assuming a quiet market.
Buyers is the shelf these come from, ordered by who closed something most recently.
What It Costs to Replace the Owner
The multiples above are quoted on SDE, which adds the owner's pay back into earnings, so they hold only if you do the owner's job. Hire someone instead and the going rate for the role comes back out. For this trade that is usually the plant supervisor over the machines and the crew, paid a median of $74,450 a year nationally. Subtract it from SDE before applying any multiple, because at a 3x multiple that wage also takes about $223,350 off what the business is worth to you.
First-line supervisors of production and operating workers, BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (2025), national, all industries, before payroll taxes and benefits. Every role, and the same arithmetic worked end to end, is in Manager Wages.
The Numbers That Run This Business
- Taproom revenue share
- Taxable removals by month
- Barrels against tank capacity
- Keg float in the field
- Distributor depletions