For beer—which has a vanishingly short shelf life compared to wine and spirits, making it impossible to hide in warehouses in hopes the market comes back around—the volume of shipments tends to tell the truth about where things stand. Still, a story is only as sound as the facts on which it stands. So when some of the Brewers Association’s annual barrelage figures started looking shaky under scrutiny from my colleagues at Brewbound, I started doing some digging of my own. Lo: this past Monday, the trade org issued a formal correction on its 2025 volume breakout, revising the BA-defined segment’s overall decline to -4%, up from -5%. Put another way, the trade group made craft brewing’s latest year-over-year losses look more than 20% worse than they actually were. What happened? Per an emailed statement:

As a trade group, the BA depends in part on the dues of breweries across the country to operate, which puts it in an awkward position if/when those members send it bad data that it then republishes as fact in its annual reports. I get that. But “committ[ing] to publishing the most accurate industry data possible” means that when D.G. Yuengling & Son, the country’s largest BA-defined craft brewer, files a number with you that represents an unheard-of 25% volume decline in a single year, you fact-check it, before the eagle-eyed editors at Brewbound wind up fact-checking you. (Turns out the Pennsylvania brewery was only down 4%, lol.) Coming off an annual conference in which president and chief executive Bart Watson gave “the media” a not-insignificant amount of grief for telling incomplete or misleading stories about the craft beer’s “reckoning,” it’s a tough look that the BA wound up penning one itself.

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