A new UK brewery tracker has been launched today by SIBA, the Society of Independent Brewers, setting out the definitive number of actively trading breweries in 10 areas of the UK
The SIBA UK Brewery Tracker will be released on a quarterly basis throughout 2023 and beyond, giving an accurate and up to date brewery number for the UK, something which has often been difficult to track in the past in a consistent way.
The tracker shows the National total number of active brewers as 1828 as of the first January 2023. This comes after a tough 2022 for the industry, where brewery closures are estimated to have almost doubled those of new openings.
One of the issues which has made tracking accurate brewery figures in the UK tricky in the past was clearly defining what constitutes a brewery, something SIBA have tackled head on with a clear criteria and figures which represent active breweries rather than just registered beer businesses.
The SIBA UK Brewery Tracker defines a brewery simply as ‘An active business that makes beer and that has its own brewing equipment’ with further criteria defined for breweries with multiple sites, or which are now owned by a Global brewer.
SIBA UK Brewery Tracker Brewery Criteria
- Must be an active business that makes beer and has its own brewing equipment.
- A brewing business that is producing beer at multiple sites counts individually towards regional and national totals
- A brewery that is producing beer, even whilst being fully or partially owned by another brewery, is counted individually towards regional and national totals
