Texas Craft Brewery Rankings 2019 Survey Results From Hopalytics
Rating & Ranking Reports tend to get some controversy especially if the readers favorites are not listed. It happened to us when we posted our Top 10 Rated Craft Beers back in 2017.
The Hopalytics rankings were calculated using input from consumers and craft brewing professional in 4 categories: overall consumer perception (40%), reputation for producing the best beer (40%), excitement for the next 12 months (15%) and contribution to growth of the TX craft beer industry (5%).
1,070 survey responses (926 consumers and 144 brewing industry).
We reached out to Hopalytics for some more information.
Can you tell me a little more about Hopalytics?
We are a small team of folks who started this project about a year ago. We have all worked in data analysis or communications in different industries but all knew each other through our love for craft beer, so it was a natural fit.
Have you done any other cities?
This is the first report we have published – it took a long time to develop our surveys and understand what we wanted to measure and how we wanted to produce the report. We surveyed folks through September, October and November of this year and then plugged the data into our systems to create the output of the report.
When and how it got started?
The absolute first thing that started the project was when my wife and I traveled to Houston with our 1 year old and started trying to research online about which would be the most kid-friendly places. We realized quickly that there is not a place online for qualified information based on people who want the same thing out of the craft brewery experience (whatever that is for the individual) and so we started to think about how we could collect input from qualified people which we could aggregate to come up with some useful output. We spoke to a lot of breweries who had issues with Yelp, Google Review, Untappd etc because anyone could just post something and influence a score or what people read about them or a review was only based on one beer or one experience which wasn’t fair or representative. We set out to try and find people who were worth qualified to talk about things and ask them – which gave us great results.
As far as the Texas Craft Beer Report goes, we have had incredible response and feedback in the first 2 days. Of course the rankings part has been the most controversial – but even that has had great feedback for its methodology and the way it is calculated being fully transparent. And we have had great feedback from breweries about the other parts of the report – on beer styles, reasons consumers visit taprooms etc. We expect to have a lot more conversations with Texas breweries over the next few months about how they can use the output of the report in 2020 for planning or strategic purposes. We have also learned a lot to be able to make next year’s surveys and reports better and more representative of the entire state (not just the big 4 metro areas).
Key take-aways on Austin consumer behavior:
– 268 Austin area consumers fed-into the consumer report out of 926 total respondents.
– Austin consumers tend to visit more breweries per-person than consumers in other Texas cities.
– Austinites value traditional beer styles such as lagers and pilsners more than their peers in the rest of the State.
– 1 in 4 Austin beer consumers value live music and dog-friendliness as a criteria for visiting a craft brewery, and 1 in 5 value kid-friendliness.
The report includes the Texas Craft Brewery Rankings and Austin-area breweries are heavily featured:
– The top 2 breweries in Texas are Austin’s Jester King (#1) and Pinthouse Pizza (#2)
– Austin Beerworks is ranked #7 in the State
– 5 other Austin breweries make the top 25 (Live Oak, ABGB, Lazarus, Hops & Grain, Zilker)
– 13 out of the top 50 breweries in the State, and 32 of the top 100 are from Austin
– Austin’s favorite breweries for food are ABGB, Jester King, Lazarus, Pinthouse Pizza and St Elmo. The report also contains list for taproom atmosphere, live music, kid-friendliness and dog-friendliness.
Check out the Hopalytics report: Top Texas Breweries for 2019.
Best New Texas Breweries 2019
