While canned cocktails and CBD-infused seltzers may be getting a lot of headlines lately, beer remains the social beverage of choice for consumers in Texas and across the United States.
The malt beverage industry contributed $34 billion in economic output to Texas in 2022, according to a report from the Beer Institute, and $409.2 billion in economic output to the U.S. Compared to that, wine is flat, with an economic impact of $276 billion last year, said Danelle Kosmal, the Washington, D.C.-based institute’s vice president of research.
“We like to say that it’s equivalent to 1.6 percent of U.S. GDP,” she said Friday. “Beer is that beverage, I think more than anything, that really helps to bring people together.”
This year’s edition of “Beer Serves America,” the institute’s annual look at the economic impact of the malt beverage industry, suggests that it has largely recovered from the tumult of the past few years, which saw bars and restaurants close during the pandemic. The report seeks to account for the direct impact beer has on the U.S. economy–through traditional metrics including sales, wages, and taxes–as well as the indirect impact, such as when a brewer buys building supplies from a local company, or a shipping company relies on revenue from a major beer distributor.
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The industry employed 2.4 million people across the country in 2022, the report said, and paid more $132.6 billion in wages and benefits as well as $63.8 billion in taxes. In Texas, beer accounted for 204,087 jobs, about half of those in retailing, distributing and brewing, which are considered the “three tiers” of the industry. But suds also supported some 4,000 agriculture jobs and 6,000 manufacturing jobs in the state.
“It starts from that hops farmer, the barley farmer, and goes to, who’s providing the keg? Who’s working specifically within the brewery?” Kosmal said. “When somebody is sitting down and enjoying a beer, either at your kitchen table or at your favorite local bar, so many hands across the country touched that beer in some way.”
While brewing jobs make up a relatively small share of beer industry jobs, the institute found that the number of brewing jobs across the country has risen by 36.4 percent since its 2020 study — a reflection, perhaps, of the explosion of craft brewing in cities such as Houston, which is home to several dozen brewpubs. Across the nation, there are about 90,000 full-time brewing jobs, with more than half of those at brewpubs and microbreweries.
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The beer industry, Kosmal said, includes all malt beverages, including the hard seltzers that began storming grocery store shelves about five years ago and the non-alcoholic or NA beers, which have become buzzy more recently. The latter development, Kosmal said, is not one the Beer Institute sees as a competitive threat.
“We are embracing that trend 100 percent,” she said, noting that the market for non-alcoholic beer is in part driven by the desire to enjoy socializing without alcohol. “We just see it as a growth opportunity, in terms of expanding those occasions.”
In the first quarter of 2023, she said, Texas led the nation in beer shipments, with 5 million barrels of beer shipped from breweries to wholesalers across the state — a 2.3 percent increase from the first quarter of 2022. There’s still room for growth in the beer industry in Texas, she said.
And that’s a reassuring thought with Texas’ blistering heat on the way.
“There’s nothing like that cold refreshing beer that you have in your hand for summer,” Kosmal said.
erica.grieder@houstonchronicle.com