Who cares who owns your beer? It’s a simple enough question – really, if a beer tastes good, why does it matter who’s making money off of it?

Well, for the simple reason that people seem to want to know. For a beverage that’s over ten thousand years old, it has changed a lot in the past few decades, and the driving force behind that change? Corporations. In 1870, there were 3,286 breweries in the united states, but by 1978 that number had dropped to just 89. Consolidation and anti-competitive business practices had reduced beer to a thin, fizzy commodity, and so consumers began to fight back by demanding more choice. So craft options began to emerge, which led to a boom of small producers making beer for just their community.

But booms lead to busts, and what we have now is a landscape of thousands of different beer options and no discernible way to understand whether that “mom and pop” they talk about on the back label is really who’s steering the ship, or whether they are a fiction created by a marketing committee of a publicly traded behemoth.

So we created this website to cut through the noise. Who Owns My Beer was created to separate the fact from fiction, and help you understand who really owns the beer that you’re drinking. Because you have a right to know whether your beer is owned by a Certified B corp, or (and we can’t make this stuff up) the Russian mercenary organization known as the Wagner Group. It should be easy to find out if that beer is owned by public shareholders or by its employees. And most importantly, you should be able to see if your beer is truly independent… or if that’s just what the big guys want you to think.

We’ve scanned through hundreds of sources – financial disclosures, incorporation records, trademark filings, press releases, and much more – to find out who is really behind the labels. But there will always be more info out there to dig through, so if you have a tip, a correction, or an addition – please contact us and we’ll be sure to incorporate it into our database.