Texas Brewery Update | January 2020

I got around to running the numbers for the number of breweries/brewpubs in the state of Texas. Before we go into the data, here are the a couple of notes on the numbers:

All data is coming from the TABC licenses
Duplicate entries have been removed (meaning, if a place has two licenses for the same location, it counts as one. If a place is contract brewing while having another actual location, I used their actual location. Places, like Cigar City, who just contract brew here were not counted in as an actual brewery)
I removed anything that I deemed was not a craft brewery (this means macros were removed, places that are focused on seltzers, or places that do not appear to actually brew beer)
Places that have licenses and are working on opening are on the list
Places that have shut down, but still have a license, were removed from the list

These numbers may not be exact, meaning, I may have left a brewery on that may not actually be making beer still. But, they should be relatively close.

The first area I looked at was the general metro areas. In this assumption, I took all neighboring counties around the cities and included that as the “metro” area. For DFW, all counties around Tarrant and Dallas county were included. In certain cases, an extra county was added in that did not necessarily border the main “city’s” county, but does have a large metro area population residing in it.

The metro Austin area continues to be the area with the most breweries, while DFW has been steadily growing (and closing in that gap). Houston and San Antonio still trail behind, but just like DFW, Houston’s numbers have grown a lot in the last couple of years.

Austin gets a lot of help from the Hill Country area with Hays county representing almost 1/4th of the total numbers.

84 counties currently have a brewery/brewpub licensed to operate in Texas. There are a total of 254 counties, so definitely vast sections of Texas remain without any brewery. 39 of those counties have just one brewery, while another 8 counties have over 10 breweries.