Geography of craft breweries in Central Europe: Location factors and the spatial dependence effect

This paper explores the geography of microbreweries in three countries in Central Europe: the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia. Each has a long, turbulent, and different history of brewing, but in the twenty-first century all of them have experienced the change in this market caused by the so-called craft beer revolution. First, in an exhaustive literature review, we present the reasons for the craft beer proliferation in the world and characterize the beer market in these three countries. We also identify the factors that might lead to the location and clustering of craft breweries. Second, we empirically test where the microbreweries tend to locate and what the driving forces are in the clustering patterns in the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia, using spatial statistical models (LISA and spatial lag) and data from Eurostat and collected by the authors. Our findings suggest that craft brewers cluster in Central Europe, for reasons related to income and general well-being, the education level, economic activity and creativity, the age of the population, and the distance from cities.