Beer sales took a hit during the pandemic. Even though you may remember drinking lots of it at home in 2020, closures of restaurants, bars and sports venues were rough for the suds industry. People lost their jobs, unsold beer ended up spoiled.
But in 2021, overall U.S. beer volume sales rebounded, and today America’s beer industry contributes more than $331 billion to the U.S. economy and supports more than two million jobs, according to the Beer Institute.
The number of breweries in the U.S. has increased five-fold since 2010, thanks to an increase in the popularity of craft breweries, according to the Brewers Association.
It’s kind of a “golden age” for beer in the U.S., with more choices than ever before, the Beer Institute says. California alone has 1,466 breweries, more than twice any other state. New York has 680, Pennsylvania has 642, and Washington state has 633. But even with all those breweries, California isn’t even one of the 30 biggest drinkers of beer (and the most popular beer in the Golden State is Budweiser.)
So which states drink the most beer? Here’s the per-capita consumption of the 30 biggest beer-drinking states, according to 2020 data from the Beer Institute.
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