Beverage Manufacturing (United States) — NAICS 3121

A Histometrics rollup primer for public-market and private investors. This is the industry-group (four-digit) level. It synthesizes the four child primers beneath it plus our ground-truth federal statistics for NAICS 3121.

NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) 2022 code 3121 is the industry group that gathers every U.S. plant that makes a drink you can buy in a bottle, can, keg, or bag: soft drinks, bottled water, and ice (31211), beer (31212), wine (31213), and distilled spirits (31214). It is a revealing level to study because the four children share one physical logic — liquid plus packaging plus tightly regulated distribution — yet split along a single fault line that governs almost everything about them: one child is non-alcoholic and the other three are alcoholic. That line sorts the group by growth, ownership, regulation, and how an investor can touch it.

1. Overview

At the factory gate this is a $124.1 billion U.S. industry group employing about 280,000 people across roughly 12,450 plants [1][2]. But the single most useful thing to understand about 3121 is that "buying the beverage-manufacturing industry" is meaningless. It is four loosely related businesses stapled together by a classification code, and they move on different clocks:

• Non-alcoholic drinks (31211) — soft drinks, bottled water, and ice — are the biggest child by money (~42% of receipts) and the group's relative bright spot: sugary soda is drifting down, but bottled water is now the largest U.S. packaged-beverage category by volume (16.4 billion gallons in 2024, up 2.9%) and Americans drink 47.3 gallons of it per person against 34.2 gallons of carbonated soft drinks [3][7].
• Beer (31212) is a large, cash-generative staple in secular (long-term, structural) volume decline — U.S. beer production and imports fell about 5.7% in 2025 — split between a few giants and thousands of tiny craft brewers [4].
• Wine (31213) is a farming-linked, capital-heavy business in a genuine generational demand slump: U.S. consumption fell from 1.06 billion gallons in 2021 to 870 million in 2024, now four to five straight years below the 2019 peak. It is almost entirely private [5].
• Spirits (31214) carries the highest value per liter and is the largest slice of U.S. alcohol by dollar (~42% of supplier sales), but it is digesting a whiskey glut: 2025 supplier revenue fell 2.2% to $36.4 billion even as case volume rose 1.9% [6][12].

Two themes run through the whole group, and a third has emerged since the last revision. First, the money is made in brands, packaging, and distribution — not in the liquid. Water is nearly free, grain and sugar are cheap, and the durable edge in every child is a trademark, a route, or shelf placement. Second, Americans are drinking less alcohol — Gallup's 2025 reading put the share of U.S. adults who drink at 54% and self-described abstainers at 44%, the lowest and highest readings in its series [6][11]. Third, and newest: premiumization, the defense every alcohol child leaned on, is showing strain — spirits sold more cases for less money in 2025, and wine's highest-margin channel shrank [5][6][12].

2. What's inside — the four children and how they differ

The reason to read this level is the divergence across the children. Start here [1][2][3][4][5][6]:

Read across the rows and the structure jumps out:

• Money and plant count invert. The non-alcoholic child and spirits are ~57% of the money but only ~22% of the plants — a few very large, capital-heavy factories. Beer and wine are ~43% of the money but ~78% of the plants — thousands of small craft brewers and wineries [1][2]. Revenue per plant (roughly $39M for non-alcoholic versus ~$5M for beer or wine) is the fingerprint of two opposite structures inside one group.
• Growth points in different directions, but the master split is alcohol. The one non-alcoholic child is the only one not fighting the moderation trend; all three alcohol children face the same structural demand headwind, differing mainly in how hard premiumization and a few bright spots (imports, non-alcoholic beer, ready-to-drink cocktails) offset it [3][4][5][6].
• Ownership runs from mostly public to almost entirely private. You can own the non-alcoholic chain many ways on the stock market; beer a handful of ways; spirits through one clean U.S. name plus foreign listings; and wine essentially not at all as a meaningful public pure-play [3][4][5][6].

Scope and the exclusions that matter most. Each child carves out neighbors, and two exclusions shape how you read the group's numbers:

• The soft-drink profit engine is booked outside 3121. Flavoring syrup and concentrate — the secret formula Coca-Cola and PepsiCo sell to bottlers, the fattest-margin activity in all of beverages — is classified in NAICS 311930, not here. So 3121 captures the capital-heavy bottling half of soft drinks while the profit half is reported elsewhere [3].
• Grape growing is agriculture, not here. Vineyards sit in NAICS 111332; only the winery (fermentation and bottling, including its own tasting-room and wine-club sales) counts in 3121 [5].
• Also excluded: industrial/fuel ethanol (325193, chemistry not beverage), tap-water utilities (221310), juice and dairy drinks (311421/311511), dry ice (325120), beverage wholesalers and liquor stores and bars/restaurants (424/445/722), self-serve ice vending (retail, 445132), and imported wine and spirits, which enter through licensed importers rather than these plants [3][5][6].

3. How big it is (rollup figures and undercount)

Our ground-truth federal statistics for the 3121 level:

Average pay works out to about $58,000 per worker (annual payroll ÷ employees). CBP = County Business Patterns; the CR ratios and HHI measure market concentration (the HHI is the sum of every firm's squared market share — higher means more concentrated).

The rollup reconciles almost perfectly with its children. Plants and employment sum exactly: 1,325 + 5,218 + 4,560 + 1,349 = 12,452 establishments, and 89,441 + 98,647 + 65,478 + 26,177 = 279,743 employees. Annual payroll adds to $16.1 billion and receipts to about $124 billion [1][2]. Firms do not sum cleanly (863 + 4,857 + 4,373 + 1,230 = 11,323 versus the reported 11,304) because a company operating in more than one child — a drinks conglomerate that both brews and distills, say — is counted once at the parent, not multiple times [2].

A concentration paradox worth pausing on. The group looks strikingly unconcentrated: a CR4 of just 27.1% and an HHI of only 263 — a level antitrust agencies treat as effectively unconcentrated [2]. Yet every child is more concentrated than the parent: beer's CR4 is 63.6%, spirits' 45.3%, soft drinks' 43.5%, wine's 37.8% [3][4][5][6]. The same holds on the HHI where the Census publishes one — 695 for the non-alcoholic child and 699.8 for spirits, each roughly 2.6× the parent's 263 — while beer's and wine's HHIs are suppressed in the federal source, so their CR ratios are the only comparable measure for those two [2][3][4][5][6]. This is not a data error. Pooling four businesses whose leaders do not compete with one another — Coca-Cola does not compete with Anheuser-Busch or E&J Gallo — mathematically dilutes measured concentration. The 3121 aggregate makes beverage-making look far more competitive than any market a buyer actually shops in. Read concentration at the child level, not here.

Undercount caveats (large at this level — three of four children badly undercount the number of operators):

1. Beer: the manufacturing code shows ~5,200 brewery establishments, but the Brewers Association counts 9,724 total U.S. breweries in 2025 (9,578 of them craft), down from 9,922 in 2024 — the gap is brewpubs and taprooms coded as restaurants/bars (NAICS 722), and small owner-operated taprooms dominate that missing half [4][8].
2. Wine: trade sources counted about 11,450 wineries heading into 2025, slipping toward ~11,100 in 2026 (a ~3% drop) versus ~4,560 federal establishments, because CBP counts only businesses with paid employees while thousands of wineries are nonemployer sole proprietors, "virtual" brands, or custom-crush and alternating-proprietor clients sharing one bonded facility [5][15].
3. Spirits — but read this gap carefully. The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) recorded 5,069 active domestic beverage-alcohol permits at year-end 2024 versus ~1,349 employer establishments. Of the 5,192 permits active at any point in 2024, however, 2,746 reported no taxable removals at all, and just 50 permits accounted for roughly 91% of the 340.7 million proof gallons removed. The craft trade group's own count fell from 3,069 (August 2024) to 2,282 (August 2025) after it purged inactive producers [6][13][14]. So the federal count understates the number of businesses holding a still, while permit counts overstate the number actually producing.
4. Soft drinks/ice miss hundreds of tiny local ice makers, captive in-house ice, and ice vending classified as retail [3].
5. The soft-drink concentrate engine is booked in 311930, so the group's headline receipts exclude the highest margins in beverages [3].
6. Factory-gate, not retail. The $124.1 billion is what plants ship, not what consumers spend. Retail markup, hospitality margin, distributor cut, and excise taxes push the consumer beverage economy far higher — U.S. beer is ~$113B at retail [4]; bottled water is ~$28.2B at the producer level and ~$50.6B at retail [3][7]; spirits supplier sales were $36.4B in 2025 [6][12]. On wine the sources genuinely disagree: Silicon Valley Bank puts the 2025 U.S. wine market at about $74.3 billion (329 million nine-liter cases), while Forbes/Wine Institute–based estimates run $107–115 billion. The methodologies differ; we report both rather than pick [5][16][17].

Net: the federal counts capture the group's economic mass (payroll, shipments, employment) well, but understate the number of businesses that make beverages — probably by roughly half. Where small and owner-operated activity dominates (craft beer, small wineries, craft distilleries, local ice), treat the establishment count as a floor for businesses and permit or trade-association counts as a ceiling — the spirits data show how many licensed operators ship nothing at all.

4. The investable universe — where value concentrates

The defining fact: public, directly investable value skews to the non-alcoholic child and to a handful of scaled alcohol brand-owners, while most of the alcohol side is private or foreign-listed. Reserve tickers for this and the next section.

• Non-alcoholic (31211) — abundant, whole-value-chain access. A public investor can pick the seat: concentrate/brand owners The Coca-Cola Company (KO), PepsiCo (PEP), Keurig Dr Pepper (KDP); growth challengers Monster Beverage (MNST), Celsius Holdings (CELH), National Beverage (FIZZ), Zevia (ZVIA); the pure bottler Coca-Cola Consolidated (COKE); and the one bottled-water pure-play Primo Brands (PRMB, ~$6.7B revenue in FY 2025). Private capital owns the rest — Niagara Bottling, Red Bull, Polar, the ice roll-ups (Reddy Ice, Home City Ice), and contract bottlers like Refresco (KKR-owned) [3].
• Beer (31212) — moderate. A few large brewers trade publicly: Anheuser-Busch InBev (BUD), Molson Coors (TAP), Constellation Brands (STZ, whose profit is mostly its Mexican beer imports), craft pure-play Boston Beer (SAM), and foreign major Heineken (HEINY) via depositary receipts. The rest — Yuengling, Sierra Nevada, and the ~9,580 craft breweries — is private [4][8].
• Wine (31213) — very thin. You essentially cannot buy the U.S. wine industry publicly. Pure-plays Willamette Valley Vineyards (WVVI, $37.2M of 2025 revenue, down 6.5%, and a loss year) and Crimson Wine Group (CWGL, ~$85M market cap) are micro-cap and thinly traded; STZ is ~91% beer, with wine and spirits down to ~$824M of $9.1B in FY2026 net sales. Value sits with private/family houses (E&J Gallo, The Wine Group, Trinchero, Jackson Family, Delicato, Bronco) and private-equity portfolios (Butterfly's Duckhorn, Sycamore's Ste. Michelle) [5].
• Spirits (31214) — narrow. One clean U.S. pure-play, Brown-Forman (Jack Daniel's); a "picks-and-shovels" contract distiller, MGP Ingredients, whose Distilling Solutions sales fell 45% in 2025 on barrel oversupply; foreign-listed majors Diageo, Pernod Ricard, Suntory Global Spirits, Campari; and large private families (Sazerac, Bacardi, Heaven Hill) [6].

Where value concentrates. For a public-equity investor, the deepest, most liquid menu is in the non-alcoholic child plus a short list of scaled alcohol names (BUD, TAP, STZ, Brown-Forman) — and there is no dedicated U.S. beer, wine, or spirits ETF (exchange-traded fund); passive exposure comes only inside broad consumer-staples funds. For a private-market investor the picture inverts: wine and spirits, most craft beer, and the bottling/ice/vending assets of the non-alcoholic side are where private and PE capital actually operate — precisely because those assets are not already public.

5. How the money works

Across all four children the profit sits in the same place — volume × price × mix, minus packaging and distribution cost — but the shape differs:

• Non-alcoholic splits into two economies: concentrate makers (KO) earn ~60% gross margins on formula and little physical capital, while bottlers run heavy plant, fleet, and packaging and absorb input spikes first (Coca-Cola Consolidated posted a 39.7% gross margin in FY 2025). Bottled water adds a subscription-like home-and-office delivery annuity — though Primo shows what leverage does to it: a 30.3% gross margin and 21.7% adjusted EBITDA margin in 2025 became net income of just $80.4 million, 1.2% of sales, after $326.5 million of interest and financing expense. Ice is pure route logistics with a sharp summer seasonality [3].
• Beer is capital-intensive, so capacity utilization drives margins; the growth lever is premiumization and mix (imports, light beer, non-alcoholic beer) rather than volume, and a brewery that pours its own beer in a taproom keeps the distributor's and retailer's cut — far better per-barrel economics [4].
• Wine ties up cash in real assets and time: vineyard land takes ~4–5 years to reach full yield and wine ages months to years before sale. Margins widen sharply up the price ladder (value under ~$11 a bottle, premium $11–25, luxury $25+), and direct-to-consumer sales are the highest-margin channel — 53% of the average participating winery's sales in SVB's sample, up to 78% regionally. But the industry is not converting that into profit: in SVB's premium-winery benchmark the 2024 gross margin was 59.1% while the pretax margin was negative 2.6%, and only about half of sampled wineries were profitable, down from 76% in 2021 [5].
• Spirits is a working-capital machine: aged whiskey sits in barrels for years, tying up cash and losing a few percent a year to evaporation (the "angel's share"), while un-aged vodka and gin turn cash fast. Brand equity is the asset — the liquid costs little next to the name — so established brands carry the group's highest gross margins [6].

The common lever across the whole group has been premiumization — in flat or declining categories, sell less liquid at a higher price. That lever is now under visible strain on the alcohol side. Spirits supplier revenue fell 2.2% in 2025 while case volume rose 1.9%, which is adverse mix or discounting, not premiumization [6][12]; wine's highest-margin channel shrank, with direct-to-consumer shipments down 15% by volume to 5.4 million cases in 2025 [5]. Beer's version of the trade still works, carried by imports and non-alcoholic lines [4]. The common tax is the three-tier distribution wall on all three alcohol children (below), which forces producers to book revenue at the first, lowest price point and caps their take.

Metrics that matter at this level: unit/case (or barrel, or gallon) volume and organic growth; price/mix; input costs (aluminum, glass, PET resin, grain, hops, grapes, sweetener, diesel); capacity utilization and route/plant density; and — for aged spirits and wine — inventory age and working capital tied up in barrels.

6. What drives demand

• The alcohol-moderation trend is the master force on three of the four children. Gallup's 2025 survey found 54% of U.S. adults drink and 44% describe themselves as abstainers — the weakest reading in its series [6][11]. Per-capita beer consumption fell from about 36.7 gallons per adult in 1981 to roughly 26.5 by 2021 [4][10], and wine fell from 3.16 gallons per resident in 2021 to 2.54 in 2024 [5]. This pressures beer, wine, and spirits alike; it does not touch the non-alcoholic child.
• Health and "better-for-you." Zero-sugar, sparkling, and functional formats take share within soft drinks (PepsiCo said 60% of its beverage volume in major markets was low- or no-sugar by mid-2025); bottled water keeps gaining on soda; and non-alcoholic versions of beer, wine, and spirits are the fastest-growing edge across the alcohol side (NA beer volumes rose ~23% in 2024 and were forecast to pass ale in volume) [3][4].
• Category rotation, and it has changed direction. Within flat-to-declining alcohol, dollars still rotate toward Mexican imports and ready-to-drink cocktails — RTDs grew 16.4% to $3.8 billion in 2025 — but the tequila/agave story that carried the last cycle has turned: vodka, tequila/mezcal, and American whiskey all declined in 2025 [4][5][6][12].
• Substitution wars. The categories increasingly compete with one another and with newcomers — spirits versus beer versus wine versus hard seltzer versus RTD cocktails versus cannabis/THC drinks versus water.
• Exports matter most to spirits, and turned down with trade friction: a record $2.4 billion in 2024 fell 3.8% to $2.37 billion in 2025 [6].
• Income, weather, and away-from-home traffic set the baseline; ice and beverages generally tilt to a hot summer.
• Wildcards: GLP-1 weight-loss drugs (a still-unproven but plausible drag on both calorie-dense drinks and alcohol), tariffs and trade policy, and — for water — plastics and microplastics concern [3][6][19].

7. Regulation

The group splits cleanly into two regulatory regimes along the alcohol line:

• Non-alcoholic (31211) is regulated as food by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) — ingredient, labeling, and good-manufacturing-practice rules, plus bottled-water standards at least as protective as Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) tap-water rules. Its live fights are soda taxes, SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) purchase restrictions — USDA's March 2026 listing showed approved food-restriction waivers in 22 states, most of them limiting soda or sweetened beverages — sweetener/dye reformulation, and, for water, packaging law (California requires 25% post-consumer recycled content in plastic beverage containers from January 2025, rising to 50% in 2030) plus PFAS ("forever chemicals") scrutiny [3].
• Alcohol (31212 / 31213 / 31214) shares one heavy regime. The TTB issues producer permits, approves every label, and collects the federal excise tax, which is deliberately tilted to help small producers via the Craft Beverage Modernization Act (CBMA): beer is $3.50 per barrel on the first 60,000 barrels for brewers under 2 million barrels versus $16–18 for the majors [4][18]; still wine is about $1.07 per gallon with roughly a $1 per-gallon credit on the first 30,000 gallons [5]; spirits are $13.50 per proof gallon, cut to $2.70 on the first 100,000 [6]. The post-Prohibition three-tier system (21st Amendment) forces most producers to sell through licensed distributors to retailers, with 17 "control states" running spirits wholesale/retail directly; state franchise laws make it costly for a small producer to leave a distributor [4][6]. Two cross-cutting risks: a January 2025 U.S. Surgeon General push for cancer-risk warning labels on alcohol (not yet law), and tariffs — the July 2025 U.S.–EU framework's 15% U.S. tariff on EU wine and spirits has since taken effect [5][6][20].

8. Consolidation

Every child is a barbell or is actively consolidating, and the common thread is that scale, brand, and distribution compound — so downturns accelerate the shakeout:

• Non-alcoholic consolidates on two axes: the soft-drink majors continually refranchise bottling (Coca-Cola to independents like Coca-Cola Consolidated and Refresco) and buy high-growth challengers (PepsiCo–Poppi, 2025); bottled water crystallized around the November 2024 Primo Water + BlueTriton merger into Primo Brands; and packaged ice combined its two largest players when Reddy Ice closed its acquisition of Arctic Glacier in February 2026 — but the Department of Justice required divestitures in Washington, Idaho, California, Oregon, and the New York City and Boston metros, capping how far one national player can roll up [3].
• Beer is two domestic giants plus imports at the top (the 2016 AB InBev / SABMiller merger, ~$79B) and a craft boom at the bottom that has now cracked for two years running — 2024 was the first year since 2005 that the total number of craft breweries fell (434 openings against 501 closings), and the decline continued through 2025, with total U.S. breweries down from 9,922 to 9,724 [4][8][9].
• Wine is a barbell in accelerating shakeout: Constellation exited mainstream wine (selling to The Wine Group for $846.5M in 2025), Duckhorn went private ($1.95B), Vintage Wine Estates went bankrupt, and California growers pulled out ~38,000–40,000 acres of vineyards (~7% of state acreage) in 2024–25 to work off a grape glut, with an estimated 30% of the 2025 crop going unsold. Volume is far more concentrated than revenue: Gallo alone holds ~32.6% of U.S. supplier volume and the top five suppliers over 58% [5].
• Spirits is a barbell whose thinning middle is now visibly under pressure: the craft trade group's active-producer count fell from 3,069 to 2,282 in a single year, Suntory paused Jim Beam production at Clermont, Kentucky for a full year from January 2026, and MGP's contract-distilling segment shrank 45% — the glut is taking capacity offline, not just prices [6][14].

What is new at this level is that the shakeout is running in all three alcohol children at the same time — brewery, winery, and craft-distillery counts are all falling together, which they were not in the last revision. Because the four leaders don't compete with one another, this within-child consolidation still leaves the 3121 aggregate looking benign — reinforcing the Section 3 point that concentration must be read at the child level.

9. Risks

• Secular alcohol decline — the biggest structural risk, hitting three of four children at once; moderation and generational shift shrink beer, wine, and spirits volumes, and premiumization softens but does not reverse the trend [4][5][6][10][11].
• Premiumization losing its grip — the group's standard defense; spirits' 2025 revenue decline on rising volume and wine's 15% drop in direct-to-consumer shipments show it can fail just when it is needed most [5][6][12].
• Sugary-soda decline on the non-alcoholic side — offset (water, energy, sparkling) shifts the mix rather than growing the whole [3].
• GLP-1 weight-loss drugs — an unproven but plausible drag on both calorie-dense soft drinks and alcohol, a rare risk that spans the entire group [6][19].
• Input-cost, freight, and tariff inflation — aluminum, glass, PET resin, grain, grapes, sweetener, and diesel hit the capital-heavy plants first; the 15% U.S.–EU tariff and retaliation threaten spirits and wine both as import cost and as an export barrier, and U.S. spirits exports already fell 3.8% in 2025 [5][6][20].
• Regulatory and tax pressure — soda taxes, SNAP restrictions in 22 states, and plastics rules on the non-alcoholic side; excise, three-tier franchise law, and the proposed cancer-warning label on the alcohol side [3][4][5][6].
• Oversupply and shakeout — a record 16-million-plus barrels of whiskey aging in Kentucky at the start of 2025 with American whiskey production down ~28% through August, the California grape glut, and falling brewery counts all point to distressed capacity and price pressure [4][5][6].
• Capital intensity and illiquidity — wine and aged spirits tie up cash in land, barrels, and multi-year inventory that is slow to sell in a downturn; roughly half of SVB's premium-winery sample was unprofitable in 2024 [5][6].
• Access, concentration, and leverage risk — for public investors, the best alcohol assets are private or foreign, narrowing the menu; for PE-legacy and post-merger balance sheets (packaged ice, Primo's $326.5M of 2025 interest expense), debt service can consume most of the operating profit [3][5][6].

10. How to invest, and the outlook

Match the route to the child, because access differs sharply:

• Public investors get the richest, most liquid menu in the non-alcoholic child — the concentrate compounder (KO) for defensive quality, the diversified staple (PEP), the pure bottler (COKE) as a leveraged volume bet, the water pure-play (PRMB), or growth challengers (MNST, CELH, FIZZ, ZVIA). On the alcohol side the public options narrow to a short list: BUD and TAP for mature beer cash flows, STZ for Mexican-import growth, Brown-Forman as the one clean spirits pure-play, MGP as a cyclical supplier bet, and foreign majors (Diageo, Pernod Ricard, Suntory Global Spirits, Heineken) via depositary receipts. There is no dedicated U.S. beer, wine, or spirits ETF; passive exposure comes only through broad consumer-staples funds [3][4][5][6].
• Private investors own the parts the stock market doesn't — contract and private-label bottling, regional water and ice routes and vending, founder-led craft breweries and taprooms, wineries and vineyard land (including farmland REITs like Gladstone Land for the land, not the winery equity), established spirits houses, and craft distilleries. Deal logic across all four favors either lowest-cost regional scale or a differentiated premium brand; the squeezed middle struggles, and the exit is usually acquisition by a strategic or a roll-up sponsor. Treat barrel and cask investment schemes with particular caution given the glut [3][4][5][6].

Outlook (forward-looking judgment). Treat 3121 as a low-growth, high-cash-generation industry group whose four children move on different clocks around one axis: alcohol versus not. The non-alcoholic child should keep grinding out low-single-digit growth as bottled water and functional formats offset sugary-soda decline. The three alcohol children face the same structural headwind and will lean on the same defenses — premiumization, non-alcoholic line extensions, and consolidation — but the last revision's assumption that premiumization reliably converts flat volume into rising value no longer holds everywhere: spirits sold more cases for less money in 2025, and wine's premium channel shrank. Beer stays propped by imports and NA beer; wine is the most challenged, with Silicon Valley Bank not expecting a bottom before 2027–2028; spirits must digest its whiskey glut, and capacity is already coming offline, before scaled brand-owners with pricing power resume compounding. The common near-term swing factors are input/packaging costs, tariffs, and regulation (sweetener politics, plastics, and the alcohol cancer-label debate); the common structural direction is more consolidation, because in every one of these businesses the durable edge is brand and distribution, and both reward scale. For company-level depth, read the four child primers.

---

Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns 2023 (NAICS 3121 and children 31211/31212/31213/31214: establishments, employment, payroll). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
2. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census — Concentration by Largest Firms (NAICS 3121: receipts, firms, CR4/CR8/CR20/CR50, HHI). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/economic-census.html
3. Histometrics child primer, Soft Drink and Ice Manufacturing (NAICS 31211) — federal figures, soft-drink/water/ice structure, investable universe, economics, regulation, consolidation.
4. Histometrics child primer, Breweries (NAICS 31212) — federal figures, giants-plus-craft structure, beer economics, excise/three-tier regulation, craft shakeout.
5. Histometrics child primer, Wineries (NAICS 31213) — federal figures, private/family ownership, real-asset economics, generational demand slump, grape glut, market-size dispute.
6. Histometrics child primer, Distilleries (NAICS 31214) — federal figures, spirits economics, whiskey glut, three-tier wall, tariffs, exports, private/foreign ownership.
7. International Bottled Water Association / Beverage Marketing Corporation, "2024 U.S. bottled water statistics" (16.4B gallons, +2.9%; 47.3 vs 34.2 gallons per capita; producer revenue $28.2B, retail $50.6B). https://bottledwater.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/BWR_BWstats_June2025_FinalwithBMCad.pdf
8. Brewers Association, National Beer Statistics (9,724 total U.S. breweries in 2025, 9,578 craft; 9,922 in 2024). https://www.brewersassociation.org/statistics-and-data/national-beer-stats/
9. Brewers Association, "Brewers Association Reports 2024 U.S. Craft Brewing Industry Figures," 2025 (first net decline since 2005; 434 openings, 501 closings). https://www.brewersassociation.org/association-news/brewers-association-reports-2024-u-s-craft-brewing-industry-figures/
10. National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), "Surveillance Report #122: Apparent Per Capita Alcohol Consumption," 2024. https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/surveillance-reports/surveillance122
11. Gallup, U.S. Drinking Trends (2025: 54% of adults drink, 44% abstain — lowest/highest in series). https://news.gallup.com/poll/467507/percentage-americans-drink-alcohol.aspx
12. Distilled Spirits Council of the U.S. (DISCUS), Annual Economic Briefing 2025 ($36.4B supplier sales, 318.1M nine-liter cases, revenue −2.2% on volume +1.9%; RTDs +16.4% to $3.8B). https://distilledspirits.org/news/distilled-spirits-council-annual-economic-briefing-2025/
13. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), Distilled Spirits Permit Counts and Average Removals 2012–2024 (5,069 active permits at year-end 2024; 2,746 with no taxable removals; 50 permits ≈ 91% of 340.7M proof gallons). https://www.ttb.gov/system/files/2025-06/2012-2024_Report_DistillersProduction_13-JUN-2025_JSON.json
14. The Spirits Business, "US craft distillery numbers drop 25%," 2025 (3,069 → 2,282 active craft distillers). https://www.thespiritsbusiness.com/2025/10/us-craft-distillery-numbers-drop-25/
15. Vinetur, "U.S. Winery Count Drops by 3% in 2025 as Closures Hit Nearly Every State" (Wine Business Monthly data), 2026. https://www.vinetur.com/en/2026031197407/us-winery-count-drops-by-3-in-2025-as-closures-hit-nearly-every-state.html
16. Silicon Valley Bank, 25th Annual State of the U.S. Wine Industry Report, January 2026 (market size $74.3B, 329M cases; bottom forecast 2027–2028). https://www.svb.com/news/company-news/silicon-valley-bank-releases-25th-annual-state-of-the-us-wine-industry-report/
17. Liz Thach / Forbes, "$115 Billion U.S. Wine Market Enters 'Reset' Amid Shifting Consumer Trends," 2026. https://www.forbes.com/sites/lizthach/2026/05/12/115-billion-us-wine-market-enters-reset-amid-shifting-consumer-trends/
18. Beer Institute, "Federal Excise Tax" ($3.50 / $16 / $18 per barrel; CBMA made permanent in 2020). https://www.beerinstitute.org/policy-responsibility/policy/excise-tax/
19. EY, "GLP-1 shifts alcohol market dynamics," 2025. https://www.ey.com/en_us/insights/consumer-products/glp-1-shifts-alcohol-market-dynamics
20. Vinetur, "U.S.–E.U. Trade Pact Takes Effect With 15% Tariff on European Wine and Spirits," 2026. https://www.vinetur.com/en/20260701103617/us-eu-trade-pact-takes-effect-with-15-tariff-on-european-wine-and-spirits.html

Federal business statistics (establishments, employment, payroll, firms, receipts, concentration ratios, HHI) are from the U.S. Census Bureau County Business Patterns 2023 and 2022 Economic Census (Concentration), as ingested into Histometrics. Where a value is suppressed in the federal source it is not reported here.