Regional brewing equipment purchasing trends: Brewhouses, fermenters, kegs

What was on your brewery’s Christmas list this year? A fermenter? An expanded brewhouse? We were curious about what purchasing trends, if any, exist out there right now. Who is buying what? And where? To help us shed some light, we followed up with Kinnek, a brewery purchasing network. Kinnek combed through the numbers in its database and provided these handy heat maps to show us where the purchasing demand is these days.

Much of Kinnek’s requests per capita for brewery equipment and supplies come from the Northwest region of the United States, with Vermont and Delaware representing the East Coast. This isn’t too surprising, as the density of microbreweries, a core demographic of Kinnek buyers, are in a similar pattern across the country.

Brewery equipment and supplies

Equipment purchases, as opposed to supplies, can often be used as a measure of growth or expansion. Areas of product requests with the largest deviations from our overall industry activity, areas of outsized demand, are of particular interest. For brewhouses, one of our more popular types of equipment, we can see a “brewhouse belt” (or maybe more of a boomerang) from Montana down to New Mexico as well as an active corner in the northeast thanks to VT, ME, RI and NH.

Brewhouses

Fermenters, another popular equipment category on Kinnek, were most popular in WY, VT, AK, SD, and NV, with particularly outsized demand in NV and SD when compared to overall industry.

Fermenters

For larger equipment purchases such as these, many of Kinnek’s buyers are just getting started with their brew operations, so look to these areas for the craft brews of the future.

Supply purchases on the other hand are more of a signal of steady business and are strongest in the Pacific Northwest, the established craft corner of the country. No surprise there. But some supply product categories are unexpected. Kegs, for example, have outsized demand in MO, AK, WY and NM. Also of note is Montana’s undersized of demand for kegs, despite a strong demand for supplies overall.

Kegs

Other oddballs supplies of note, bottle fillers have outsized demand in North Carolina and Hawaii.