How to Get Ahead in the Craft Industry: 3 Examples

Each and every craft brew is inherently unique. When trying the same brew twice, you can almost always notice slight differences.

From yeast profiles to the style of hops, that's the magic of craft beer—the art comes with the territor The difficulty with this perspective is that it's not always what makes the most profit.

As empty as that sounds, brewers are finding it difficult to preserve their craft when sales demand for the beer to be at large volumes and consistent.

2016: Year of New Standards

Today's booming craft beer movement was born from small businesses and hobbyists. According to the Brewers Association, those small-scale operations still pave the way for market trends as they now represent a 12% market share of the overall beer industry. 

Victory's Parkesburg facility showcases state of the art brewery automation

by Ryan Gerstel

A Growing Industry

The craft of brewing beer has been a human activity for thousands of years. For the majority of that time, human interaction was necessary to ensure the beer's creation. It was a science. The brewers were the scientists and the brewery was their laboratory.

As the popularity of beer has grown, the industry has had to adapt, turning to machines to keep up with the demand. And the use of automation has played an integral role in propelling the industry to become one of the more lucrative industries, with the global beer market expecting to be worth up to $688.4 billion by the year 2020. 

Machine automation hasn't only helped corporate macro giants such as Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors. It's helped the growth of smaller micro breweries, too. In 2015 it was estimated that micro breweries account for 14.3 percent of the $100 billion United States beer market. Just last November, San Diego's Ballast Point, one of the more renowned names in the craft beer spectrum, sold to Constellation Brands (aka Corona and Modelo) for $1 billion.