Aluminum bottles are unbreakable, portable, easy to run on your existing filler, and a great marketing tool. But are they a smart move for your brewery?

Craft brewers will find plenty to see, taste, and experience in the Emerald City when the Craft Brewers Conference converges on Seattle April 11-14.

Seven Boomers will turn 50 every minute from now until 2014. The question isn’t if Baby Boomers will change the businesses of those who produce and sell alcohol-based products, but how.

New tracking systems. New sizes of kegs and new materials. Kegs that don’t return at all. Kegs with self-contained tapping systems. Enter the brave new world of draft beer.

The Brewers Association presents the results of its first operational survey for packaging brewers in an effort to help members establish industry standards for operational costs.

Craft beer sales continue to climb, posting 9% growth in 2005. We take a look at the highlights of each segment of the skyrocketing craft brewing industry.

Brewpubs, along with most restaurants, took a hard hit after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, but average barrels per pub rose for the second year in a row in 2005.

The microbrewery segment is strong on its own, not just as a farm team for the regionals, and there are a lot more new breweries coming along quite well.

In 2005, regional craft breweries might have felt they were experiencing a flashback to the heady days of the mid-1990s, when annual double-digit growth seemed the norm.

Among the top companies in the large brewery segment, Anheuser-Busch, SABMiller, and Molson Coors all suffered declines in shipments, while imports gained market share.