Beer Institute

Good afternoon,

Linked below is the January 2018 State-by-State Shipments to Wholesalers Report. Please note changes to historical volumes as some state totals may have changed with newly released state-level data.

U.S. beer shipment volume, including domestic and import shipments, decreased by 3.9% during January 2018.
Although the month technically gained a selling day vs. January 2017, this did little to improve the month’s performance because the extra selling day was Monday, January 1 – New Year’s Day.
Distributor inventories normally increase by 15-20% in January, but this January distributors increased their net inventories by only 7-10%, resulting in beer shipment softness.
Also, among the negative drivers influencing beer’s performance in January was a sharp decrease in hard liquor’s off-premise CPI, which declined by 0.8% in January – much steeper than the series average for the last year (-0.5%).
The negative influence of liquor’s declining CPI is compounded by the consistency of the trend, and the resulting widening of the gap between the two categories. January marked the first time ever that hard liquor’s off-premise CPI decreased in each of 12 consecutive months (since the series has been tracked by the BLS starting in 1978).

If you have any questions, please contact me at either 202-737-2337 or muhrich@beerinstitute.org.