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The Closure Wave

314 breweries in this archive closed between 2020 and 2026 — 3.8× the whole of the 2010s — and the count has climbed every year since 2021. Directories delete a closure the day it happens. This page is built from the ones the archive kept.

Computed from the export at build · dated closures only · 573 closed breweries carry no year and are not counted

YearDated closures
202016
202111
202232
202341
202467
202570
202677
2010s82
2000s31

A closed brewery is the fact every other beer database throws away. A listing site exists to send you somewhere you can drink, so the day a taproom locks its door the row is deleted, and a year later nobody can say when it closed, or that it existed. This archive keeps the record (the closed ledger), which means it can do something a directory cannot: count.

The count is a floor, and it leans on the research. The archive holds 1,411 closed breweries and can date 838 of them; the other 573 are not in these figures at all. And 2026 is not over — 77 closures already carry this year, more than any year before it.

Read the direction, not the decimals. The rise from 16 in 2020 to 77 in 2026 is partly that more breweries closed and partly that the archive started asking the question properly in 2026 — the state passes of the last month dated hundreds of closures that had sat in the data as a bare CLOSED. Both are true. Neither makes the other go away.

Where the archive saw it

This is a map of the archive's attention as much as of the trade. A state with a recent research pass reports its closures; a state without one does not report them because nobody has asked yet. Idaho is not where breweries go to die — it is where a pass dated them.

By country

  • USA213
  • Canada43
  • Germany21
  • United Kingdom18
  • Hong Kong4
  • New Zealand4
  • Australia3
  • Switzerland2

By state or province (USA and Canada)

  • California34
  • Idaho32
  • British Columbia23
  • Alabama19
  • New York18
  • Rhode Island12
  • Nevada9
  • New Hampshire9
  • North Dakota9
  • Montana8
  • Texas7
  • Vermont7

Who closed

Of the 314, 253 carry a founding year, so their age at closure is known. The median is 8 years. 47 lasted three years or less — a brewery that opened into the pandemic and never found its feet — and 45 had been brewing for twenty years or more. The wave took both ends.

It is not the whole picture, and the archive can say so with the same data: 856 breweries founded since 2020 are open today, against 57 founded in the window that have already closed. The trade is still opening more than it loses. What changed is how many of the losses are old.

The oldest to fall is the one that should stop anyone: a Braunschweig brewery founded in 1627, gone in 2026, three hundred and ninety-nine years in. Each name at right is a record page with whatever the sources said — the archive records no reason for a closure that a source did not give.

The oldest to close, 2020–2026

What took the room

A brewery is a building with drains in the floor and a licence on the wall, and the building usually outlives the company. The archive's site layer holds 2,416 addresses; these are the ones where a brewery closed in the window and another brewery is open at the same address today. “Moved in” means the newcomer was founded on or after the closure; “already there” means the two overlapped, which is a shared building, not a succession.

14 addresses, from 2,416 — a small number that says more about the site layer than the trade. Most of the 314 closures have no site record yet, so their rooms are not on this list. That is a research gap with a name, and it is in the queue.

What this page cannot tell you

  • Why. The archive has no field for a closure reason and does not guess one. Where a source said rent, a sale, a fire or a retirement, it is on the record page and nowhere else.
  • The undated 573. Closed, year unknown. Every one is a question the next pass can answer, and the figures above will move when it does.
  • The world outside the passes. A country with no research pass since 2020 shows few closures here because nobody has looked, not because nothing closed.

If you know the year a brewery closed, or what stands there now, tell the archive — a dated closure is the one fact a directory will never give you back.

Method: closures are breweries with status CLOSED and a closure year in the export; ages use the recorded founding year; addresses are matched on normalised street and city from the site layer. Figures regenerate with every build.