Under-Tapped? An Analysis of Craft Brewing in the Southern United States

Over the last thirty years, the United States has experienced rapid growth in the number of operational breweries. The huge increase has been primarily in the form of craft breweries. We argue that craft brewery expansion fits well within resource partitioning theory in which firms that serve small niche markets challenge the monopolistic competition of the multinationals that dominate the brewing industry. Further, we suggest that a greater degree of resource partitioning is present in locales with more attractive and creative urban attributes, which helps to explain why large disparities in craft breweries exist at the regional level, with the South being the most poorly represented. The main focus of analysis is on metropolitan areas throughout the South and the country as a whole. Socio-economic, demographic, and situational characteristics that are argued to be relevant lifestyle attributes of the craft beer-consuming populace are entered into separate stepwise regional and rational regression models in an attempt to explain the per capita distribution of craft breweries. Neither the regional nor the national regression models produced a high degree of explanatory power, indicating that the spatial distribution of the craft brewing industry is one complicated by other issues such as legal, moral and religious ones. Southern MSAs still contain the lion's share of the region's craft breweries whereas diffusion down the urban hierarchy typifies the expansion of craft brewing in states outside of the South.