Published: August 21, 2024
If you are laser-focused on the brewhouse and its operations, you may get caught on your heels as consumer trends shift. Before you build out that brew calendar, gather intel on what the customers in your taproom and distribution locations consume.
Talking with your front-of-house staff or the operators of restaurants, taprooms, and retail stores that carry your beer helps to a point. But what if we told you there is a way to get pinpoint data that gives you all the information you need with the click of a button?
That’s precisely what you get with Untappd Insights, a part of the Next Glass family of brands that includes Ollie, Untappd for Business, Hop Culture, and BeerAdvocate, among others. Untappd Insights is home to droves of data within the craft beer industry. It compiles global distribution, trend, and sales data but can also narrow your data subset to nearby towns.
Whether your questions are limited to your specific taphouse, or if you want to gather more information about distribution channels, the Untappd app, with its more than eleven million registered users, provides the answers to any consumer trends within the industry that will put your brewery on the path to success.
Previously, we’ve covered the most popular beers in Pennsylvania, New York, California, Texas, North Carolina, Ohio, Illinois, and Massachusetts.
In this piece, we’ll show you the power of Untappd Insights by breaking down the most checked-in beers in Wisconsin over the past ninety days.
(Above illustration courtesy of Derek Campos, Next Glass)
What We’ll Cover in This Piece:
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Wisconsin: The Tenth Most Checked-in State Over the Last Three Months
Graphic courtesy of Untappd Insights
Nestled in the center of several Midwest states, Wisconsin is home to nearly six million people, making it the twentieth most populous state. According to the Brewers Association, its 266 craft breweries, accounting for six breweries per capita, ranked fourteenth and thirteenth, respectively. So there’s plenty of beer to go around, and Wisconsin beer consumers are checking in plenty of beer.
In the past three months, Wisconsin ranks tenth in the nation with 394,205 check-ins at 16,354 venues. That’s less than 10,000 check-ins shy of ninth-ranked Michigan, a state that has twice as many people and 152 more breweries. The bulk of Wisconsin’s check-ins are in the Milwaukee area, accounting for about a third of them—132,168, to be exact. No other city in the state has 64,000 check-ins.
Consumers have checked in more frequently in the past month, as Wisconsin ranks eighth nationwide over the past thirty days with 136,359 at about 9,300 venues—again, just shy of Michigan in seventh (139,276). Milwaukee and Madison are the only areas with more than 10,000 check-ins, with 43,048 and 26,285, respectively.
Throughout the year, Wisconsin remains in the top ten in the U.S. for check-ins at ninth with 864,804 at 22,453 venues, just ahead of Massachusetts (851,030) and Michigan (846,971) but a ways behind the next state on the list, Texas, which has nearly 1.1 million check-ins over that span. In the past full year, Wisconsin remains ninth with 1,472,533 check-ins at 29,212 venues—Milwaukee (527,932) and Madison (228,686) compiling the bulk of those.
If you look at the data as far back as the data goes, on the first day of 2019, Wisconsin recorded 11,759,770 check-ins at 85,652 venues, ranking thirteenth in the U.S.
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The Top 10 Beers in Wisconsin – Last 90 Days
Photography courtesy of New Glarus Brewing Co.
Wisconsin consumers are drinking a well-rounded blend of beers, including IPAs—a style regularly checked in at high rates, according to Untappd’s Year in Beer last year—and light lagers, a style on the rise according to latest trends.
For instance, the top beer on this list, Spotted Cow, is a farmhouse ale. It is well known in the industry that New Glarus proudly only distributes within its home state of Wisconsin. They’ve conquered their home market, proven by its flagship farmhouse ale taking the top spot.
Interestingly, the list also includes macro brew operations—such as Miller Brewing Company, Anheuser-Busch, and Pabst Brewing Company—and microbrewery operations like New Glarus and Lakefront, both of which appear multiple times on the list.
Half of Wisconsin’s top ten checked-in beers over the past ninety days are lagers. There are two IPAs, both hazies, and one each of farmhouse, pale ale, and shandy.
- Spotted Cow (Farmhouse Ale-Other) – New Glarus Brewing Company
- Miller Lite (Lager-American) – Miller Brewing Company
- Moon Man (Pale Ale-American) – New Glarus Brewing Company
- Summer Shandy (Shandy/Radler) – Jacob Leinenkugel Brewing Company
- High Life (Lager-American) – Miller Brewing Company
- Hazy Rabbit (IPA-New England/Hazy) – Lakefront Brewery
- Riverwest Stein (Lager-American Amber/Red) – Lakefront Brewery
- Pabst Blue Ribbon (Lager-American) – Pabst Brewing Company
- Busch Light (Lager-American Light) – Anheuser-Busch
- Chaos Pattern (IPA-New England/Hazy) – 3 Sheeps Brewing Company
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About The Author
Giovanni Albanese
Giovanni is a content writer for Next Glass, contributing to the Ollie blog. He is a writer by day and a brewer/business owner by night, owning and operating Settle Down Brewery & Taproom in Gilroy, California.
Giovanni is passionate about a number of things, including history, documentaries and sports, but none more than reporting/writing and brewing beer. After receiving a radio broadcasting degree then a journalism degree from Salem State College in his home state of Massachusetts, he relocated to California in 2008.
Then, his writing career kicked off – covering sports, business, politics and more along the way – while concurrently dabbling in home brewing. The home brewing turned pro in 2021 when he launched SDB Brewing Company. Settle Down Beer officially opened in February.
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