Identifying American Beer Geographies: A Multiscale Core-Cluster Analysis of U.S. Breweries

The beer garden state: Neolocalism and clustering of craft breweries in New Jersey

“…This pattern speaks to the agglomeration of craft breweries in that breweries seemingly attract other breweries at a distance of a kilometer or less beyond what one would expect given the population of the area. Local communities are attracting craft breweries and forming statistically significant clusters over time (see the years 2016, 2018, and 2020), a result that could only be found by this study's use of annual data, a feature that distinguishes this study from prior ones of craft brewery clustering, such as Carr, Fontanella, and Tribby (2019). Because Carr, Fontanella, and Tribby ( 2019) is a study of the entire United States, they focus on one time period (i.e., craft breweries opened in 2014) in which craft brewery clusters are similarly found at shorter distances as in this study, albeit the size of the clusters is larger given the scale of Carr, Fontanella, and Tribby (2019).…”

“…Local communities are attracting craft breweries and forming statistically significant clusters over time (see the years 2016, 2018, and 2020), a result that could only be found by this study's use of annual data, a feature that distinguishes this study from prior ones of craft brewery clustering, such as Carr, Fontanella, and Tribby (2019). Because Carr, Fontanella, and Tribby ( 2019) is a study of the entire United States, they focus on one time period (i.e., craft breweries opened in 2014) in which craft brewery clusters are similarly found at shorter distances as in this study, albeit the size of the clusters is larger given the scale of Carr, Fontanella, and Tribby (2019). This study builds on the foundation of Carr, Fontanella, and Tribby (2019) to show that craft brewery clustering gets stronger over time, and that is accompanied by a converse pattern of even dispersion (significantly negative z-scores) at longer distances, which is also shown in Carr, Fontanella, and Tribby (2019).…”

“…Porter’s diamond model is applicable to craft breweries, but craft brewery clustering also has unique characteristics. Craft breweries benefit from neolocalism, but they also often cluster within reasonably close proximity to each other for strategic reasons (see Carr, Fontanella, and Tribby, 2019; Nilsson, Reid, and Lehnert, 2018). First, they can build a stronger culture of craft beer, what is known as social terroir (see Sjolander-Lindqvist and Skoglund, 2019).…”

“…In our study, we use Ripley’s K -function to measure craft brewery clustering, where K ( r ) is the expected count of breweries within distance r of breweries randomly distributed relative to population. The general approach applied here amounts to a “simulation” following that of Carr, Fontanella, and Tribby (2019) in comparing observed brewery locations to those of the same number of brewery locations randomly distributed by population a total of 99 times (this is the simulation part). The simulated brewery locations are distributed based on the United States Census Bureau American Community Survey five-year 5 tract estimate of population, in which the probability of a tract receiving a brewery is proportional to its share of the population following a multinomial distribution.…”

Revenue Management Perspectives in Small-Farm Winery Operations

“…According to all participants in the study, the most significant competitor to small-farm wineries is the micro-breweries. Researchers reported that craft beverage breweries and distillers in the U.S. had grown dramatically in recent decades with a large concentration of breweries in the Northeast Corridor (Carr, Fontanella, & Tribby, 2019;Nilsson, Reid, & Lehnert, 2018). All study participants disclosed the difficulties of competing with local breweries for several reasons.…”