Tally's Beer UniverseThe Brewery Archive

When independence ended

The Acquired

Every acquisition in this archive that has a date on it. Individually each one was a news story for a day. Put in order, they are the shape of the last fifteen years of beer.

141
Dated acquisitions
138
To a conglomerate
3
Craft to craft
1915
Earliest
01

Acquisitions per decade

The acceleration

  • 1910s1
  • 1920s1
  • 1930s1
  • 1960s1
  • 1970s3
  • 1980s4
  • 1990s7
  • 2000s31
  • 2010s67
  • 2020s25

These are only the acquisitions the archive has established a date for. The real totals are higher — this is a floor, not a ceiling.

02

23 breweries

The 2020s

03

66 breweries

The 2010s

04

31 breweries

The 2000s

05

7 breweries

The 1990s

06

4 breweries

The 1980s

07

3 breweries

The 1970s

08

1 brewery

The 1960s

09

1 brewery

The 1930s

10

1 brewery

The 1920s

11

1 brewery

The 1910s

12

A different kind of sale

Craft bought by craft

These breweries were acquired too, and by the letter of the independence rules they are no longer independent. But the buyer was another brewer or a small group, not a multinational — Steam Whistle taking Beau's was explicitly framed by both sides as the alternative to selling to big beer. The archive currently has no category for this, which is a gap in the taxonomy rather than in the facts.

13

The exception

One got itself back

Of every brewery on this page, one reversed it. Eight Degrees of Mitchelstown sold to Irish Distillers — Pernod Ricard — in May 2018, largely so Jameson could age whiskey in beer casks. In January 2024 the founders bought the brewery back. It is the only reversal in the archive, and worth knowing about precisely because it is so rare.

Only acquisitions with a year established on the brewery's own page appear here — the archive holds more macro-owned breweries than this list shows, because a known owner is not the same as a known date. Find one we have wrong, or a date we're missing, and the brewery page has a suggest-an-edit link. To trace any brewery's current owner, use the ownership tool.