Untappd’s 758-brewery dataset is the best source I have for beer quality and check-in volume, but
it does not track whether a brewery’s doors are still open. So I added three more sources on top of
it, Google Places, Yelp, and Foursquare, to see what each one independently says about status and
reputation, then cross-checked all four against each other and against real news coverage. Here is
what turned up:
- 79 of 758 breweries came back flagged as possibly closed by at least one
platform, but only 18 of those (23 percent) held up once a second platform and real
news coverage confirmed it. A single “closed” flag from one directory is wrong more often than it is
right. - Breweries with a food or kitchen offering (pizza, gastropub, restaurant tags) skew toward staying
open, and the confirmed-closed breweries had noticeably lower review and check-in volume across every
platform, a first look at what separates breweries that last from ones that do not. - The confirmed closure rate here, 2.4 percent, sits below the Brewers Association’s national 4 to
5 percent annual rate for 2024 and 2025, the two years closures have outpaced openings industry-wide.
This is really three stories in one: which breweries hold up when four independent rating systems
all agree (and which small, low-check-in breweries are quietly outperforming names with a hundred
times the visibility), how much of a “this might be closed” flag turns out to be stale directory data
once you check it against something else, and what the data can tell us about why some breweries stay
open while others do not.
How I Actually Pulled This Together
I started from a seed list of 758 US breweries, 16 per state plus DC, sourced from Untappd’s own
rating and check-in data. From there I matched each one by name and location against Google’s Places
API, Yelp’s Fusion API, and Foursquare’s Places API, pulling each platform’s own rating, review count,
and (this is the important part) each platform’s own signal for whether the business is still open.
Google calls this businessStatus, Yelp has a simple is_closed flag, and
Foursquare tracks a date_closed field. None of these three overlap in ownership or data
source, so when two of them agree independently, that is a real signal, not a coincidence.
Match rates ended up strong across the board: 757 of 758 breweries matched on Google, 750 on Yelp,
and 749 on Foursquare, after a second pass that tried alternate spellings and city-only locations for
anything that missed the first time. A handful of very small or recently renamed breweries never
turned up cleanly on all three, which happens with data this granular.
The Highest-Rated Breweries When Four Platforms Actually Agree
To find breweries that are genuinely well-regarded, not just well-reviewed on one platform, I looked
only at breweries with a real rating on all four sources and at least 1,000 Untappd ratings, so the
list is not skewed by a brewery with five reviews and a lucky 5.0. Foursquare’s rating runs on its own
0 to 10 scale, so I converted it down to the same 5-point scale as the other three before averaging.
| Brewery | Location | Consensus (avg of all 4) | Untappd | Yelp | Foursquare (converted to 5pt) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cycle Brewing Company | St. Petersburg, FL | 4.67 | 4.21 | 5.0 | 4.9 | 4.55 |
| Fox Farm Brewery | Salem, CT | 4.62 | 4.18 | 4.8 | 4.8 | 4.70 |
| The Brimming Horn Meadery | Milton, DE | 4.60 | 4.01 | 4.9 | 4.9 | 4.60 |
| Lumen Beer Co. | Omaha, NE | 4.59 | 4.23 | 4.9 | 5.0 | 4.25 |
| WeldWerks Brewing Co. | Greeley, CO | 4.56 | 4.13 | 4.8 | 4.7 | 4.60 |
| Corn Coast Brewing Co. | Lincoln, NE | 4.55 | 4.10 | 4.8 | 4.9 | 4.40 |
| Hop Butcher For The World | Chicago, IL | 4.55 | 4.14 | 4.8 | 4.8 | 4.45 |
| Monkish Brewing Co. | Torrance, CA | 4.54 | 4.30 | 4.8 | 4.4 | 4.65 |
| The Alchemist | Stowe, VT | 4.53 | 4.32 | 4.7 | 4.4 | 4.70 |
| Listermann Brewing Company | Cincinnati, OH | 4.53 | 3.97 | 4.8 | 4.6 | 4.75 |
| Allagash Brewing Company | Portland, ME | 4.51 | 3.86 | 4.8 | 4.7 | 4.70 |
| Phase Three Brewing | Lake Zurich, IL | 4.51 | 4.13 | 4.9 | 4.6 | 4.40 |
Cycle Brewing Company in St. Petersburg tops the list, and it is a genuinely odd case: a 5.0 on
Google and 4.9 on Yelp, but only 4.21 on Untappd, which tracks with what I have heard from people who
have actually been there. It is a small, sour-focused taproom that locals rave about in person more
than they log check-ins for online. Fox Farm Brewery in Connecticut and Allagash up in Maine both show
the opposite pattern from what you would expect: consistently strong across every single platform,
which is a much harder thing to pull off than one great review score.
The Quality vs. Visibility Gap
This is the part of the dataset I find genuinely useful. I plotted every operational brewery’s
consensus rating against its total Untappd check-in count (a rough stand-in for how much attention
a brewery gets), and there is basically no correlation. Some of the best-reviewed breweries in the
country have barely any online visibility at all.
Filtering down to breweries rated 4.3 or higher across all four platforms but sitting at the bottom
of the check-in count turns up a genuinely good travel list, not just statistical noise:
| Brewery | Location | Consensus rating | Untappd check-ins (visibility proxy) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Palmer Brewing Company | Palmer, AK | 4.39 | 768 |
| Daft Badger Brewing | Coeur d’Alene, ID | 4.43 | 16,892 |
| The Brimming Horn Meadery | Milton, DE | 4.60 | 17,688 |
| Devil’s Club Brewing Company | Juneau, AK | 4.34 | 26,078 |
| Folklore Brewing & Meadery | Dothan, AL | 4.35 | 28,907 |
| Lumen Beer Co. | Omaha, NE | 4.59 | 30,795 |
| The Seventh Tap Brewing Project | Shreveport, LA | 4.43 | 31,009 |
| Corn Coast Brewing Co. | Lincoln, NE | 4.55 | 42,412 |
| New Province Brewing Co. | Rogers, AR | 4.32 | 48,540 |
| Fossil Cove Brewing Co. | Fayetteville, AR | 4.41 | 53,410 |
Palmer Brewing Company in Alaska has fewer than 800 Untappd check-ins total and a near-4.4 average
across every platform that has an opinion on it. That is the kind of place you only find if someone
tells you about it directly, which is more or less the same gap I wrote about in
America’s Best-Kept Secret Beers,
just approached from a different angle this time. If you want a specific beer to start with rather than
a whole brewery, I already have a full tasting writeup on Wren House Brewing’s Pubber,
a Phoenix brewery that shows up in this same quiet-but-excellent bracket.
What It Actually Means When Two Platforms Agree a Brewery Is Closed
Untappd’s own data has no reliable “this brewery is dead” flag, which is the gap that got me looking
at these three APIs in the first place. Across the full 758-brewery set, 679 came back clean and
operational everywhere. 38 were flagged as closed by Google alone and 23 by Yelp alone, numbers I would
not trust on their own since a single platform can have a stale listing. But 18 breweries were flagged
as closed by both Google and Yelp independently, and I checked every single one of those 18 against
actual news coverage before including them here. All 18 held up.
| Brewery | Location | What actually happened |
|---|---|---|
| 405 Brewing Company | Norman, OK | Closed after 11 years in business (OU Daily, 2026). |
| Bad Beat Brewing | Las Vegas, NV | Closed after 12 years, per Las Vegas Review-Journal. |
| Beer On Earth | Providence, RI | Listed as closed across brewery directories. |
| Bosque Brewing Co. | Bernalillo, NM | Closed all six remaining New Mexico taprooms in December 2025 after a judge dismissed its bankruptcy case. |
| Brix City Brewing | Little Ferry, NJ | Closed its Little Ferry location and was seeking a new site as of mid-2025. |
| Crane Brewing Company | Raytown, MO | Closed after more than a decade, per the Kansas City Star. |
| Goodwood Brewing | Louisville, KY | Filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation in June 2026 after closing multiple taprooms. |
| HUDL Brewing Company | Las Vegas, NV | Closed its downtown Las Vegas location, citing a tourism decline. |
| Idiom Brewing Co. | Frederick, MD | Permanently closed in February 2026. |
| Laughing Dog Brewing | Ponderay, ID | Closed abruptly in 2025 after the building it occupied was sold. |
| LineSider Brewing Company | East Greenwich, RI | Closed, as reported by the Boston Globe. |
| Nebraska Brewing Company | La Vista, NE | Closed after 18 years in business. |
| Palmetto Brewing Company | Charleston, SC | Closed its Huger Street taproom for good in June 2025 after 32 years, the first licensed brewery to reopen in South Carolina after Prohibition. |
| Pike Brewing Company | Seattle, WA | Closed its Pike Pub and Pike Fish Bar near Pike Place Market after 35 years, though the brand keeps brewing and still runs its Summit Taproom. |
| Shades Brewing | Salt Lake City, UT | Closed its Ballpark location amid a legal dispute with its landlord. |
| Smug Brewing | Pawtucket, RI | Closed, per WPRI. |
| Stony Creek Brewery | Branford, CT | Closed after its facility was sold to New England Brewing Co. in mid-2025. |
| The Black Abbey Brewing Company | Nashville, TN | No longer running its own taproom; its beers are now poured at Jackalope’s space instead. |
A few of these are worth a second look if you know the names. Pike Brewing in Seattle did not
disappear, it closed its 35-year-old Pike Place Market pub in November 2025 but kept brewing and still
runs its Summit Taproom, so “closed” here means one specific location, not the brand. Goodwood Brewing’s
Chapter 7 filing is the most serious outcome on this list; it had operated six locations as recently as
March 2026. If you want the history on one of the other names here, I still have my
review of Bosque Brewing’s Elephants on Parade
from before its parent company shut down every taproom in New Mexico. And if a brewery closing its taproom
but keeping the brand alive sounds familiar, that is basically the same pattern showing up in
the wider shakeup happening across small breweries right now,
just for a different reason.
This kind of listing-based closure signal is not unique to the US, either. I have covered the same
pattern on the UK side too, most recently when
Park Brewery in Kingston upon Thames closed after 12 years,
and Nashville’s Black Abbey Brewing on this list is a similar story, its beers now pour at Jackalope’s
space instead of its own taproom, something I would update in my
Nashville brewery guide the next time I touch it.
How Much of the “Closed” Data Was Actually Noise
This is the number I did not expect going in:
- 79 of 758 breweries came back flagged as possibly closed by at least one
platform. - Only 18 of those (23 percent) were flagged by two platforms independently and
then confirmed by real news coverage. - The remaining 61 (77 percent) of every “possibly closed” signal in the dataset
did not hold up. That is most of the data, not a rounding error.
What that means in practice: if you check a single app and it tells you a brewery is closed, you are
more likely to be looking at a stale listing than an actual closure. Google’s own businessStatus
field and Yelp’s is_closed flag are each useful signals, but neither one is reliable enough to
act on alone, which is why I only treated a brewery as confirmed closed once two independent platforms
agreed and a real news source backed it up.
What Separates Breweries That Stay Open From Ones That Don’t
Untappd flags quality. Google, Yelp and Foursquare flag status. Layered on top of that with US
Census demographic data and a Google Places pull of what sits within two miles of each taproom, the
same 758-brewery set can answer a question none of the four platforms answers on its own: what do the
breweries that closed actually have in common? One caveat up front, only 18 breweries in this set are
confirmed closed, so treat the patterns below as directional, not a settled study.
What held up:
- A kitchen keeps the lights on. Just 1 of 18 confirmed-closed breweries (5.6 percent)
carried a food-related tag on Yelp or Foursquare, pizza, gastropub, restaurant, kitchen, versus 138 of
679 operational breweries (20.3 percent). A brewery with food has a reason for people to walk in on a
night nobody is drinking. - Reach runs at roughly half. Every engagement number sits noticeably lower for the
closed group: Untappd check-ins (147,000 median versus 299,000), Google reviews (385 versus 631), and
Yelp reviews (95 versus 173). A brewery running on a small, local following has less cushion when
something goes wrong. - Geography is not random. Rhode Island and South Carolina had the highest share of
breweries flagged as possibly closed by at least one platform (31 percent and 25 percent, against a
10 percent national flag rate), though 16 breweries sampled per state makes this a lead worth watching,
not a conclusion.
What did not hold up, tested and ruled out rather than left unanswered:
- Proximity to restaurants, bars, hotels and attractions. Pulled from Google Places
within a two-mile radius of each taproom. Closed breweries averaged 11.2 nearby restaurants and 3.8
nearby bars; open breweries averaged 11.7 and 4.0. Practically identical. Foot traffic density around a
taproom is not what separates the two groups here. - State-level demographics. Median age (39.1 for closed-brewery states versus 39.5
for open) and median household income ($79,157 versus $77,604, closed breweries actually sit in
slightly wealthier states) both come back with no real gap. Whatever is behind a closure, it is not
simply an older or lower-income state. - Social media following. Pulled Twitter/X, TikTok and YouTube handles and follower
counts for every brewery. Twitter is the only platform with enough matched handles in the closed group
to compare (15 of 18), and its median follower count is a near-tie, 3,811 for closed versus 3,884 for
open. TikTok and YouTube only returned matched handles for 4 and 1 of the 18 closed breweries, too thin
a sample to say anything real. Social following looked like a promising signal going in; the data does
not back it up yet.
Two more angles are worth their own pull rather than force-fitting into this dataset: whether a
brewery sells outside its home state, and the industry-wide shift toward higher production costs and
non-alcoholic beer that I already covered in Breweries Going Alcohol-Free.
Neither is a per-brewery number that Google, Yelp or Foursquare track, so folding either in here would
be a narrative, not a data point. Both are on the list for a dedicated deep dive.
How This Fits the National Picture
The Brewers Association tracks this at the industry level every year, and its last two annual
reports show the same direction this dataset does, just at a bigger scale:
- 2024 was the first year since 2005 that brewery closures outpaced openings nationally.
- 2025 was the second year in a row that held: 434 closures against 268 openings.
- By June 2026 the BA counted 9,344 operating craft breweries nationwide, down 1.8 percent
year-over-year.
Our own confirmed number sits underneath that. 18 of 758 breweries, 2.4 percent, came back as
genuinely closed once cross-checked, below the roughly 4 to 5 percent annual closure rate the BA has
recorded for US craft breweries in each of the last two years. That lines up with a point the BA itself
made in a piece published this year: closures get outsized headline attention relative to how many
breweries are still open and doing fine. This data backs that up from the ground up. Most of the “is
this brewery closed” alarm in directory data turns out to be noise, and the breweries that are actually
gone are a smaller slice than the headlines suggest, even if each one still matters to the people who
ran it and the community around it.
Where This Data Comes From, and Its Limits
This is not a claim that Google, Yelp, and Foursquare are always right on their own. Business listing
data drifts, taprooms move, and a single flagged status is genuinely unreliable by itself, which is
exactly why I only treated a brewery as confirmed closed here once two independent platforms agreed
and a real news source backed it up. The 38 Google-only and 23 Yelp-only flags are worth a phone call
before you drive out to one of them, not a hard “these are closed” claim.
The rating side has its own limits too. Untappd ratings lean toward people who log every beer they
drink, which skews toward heavier hobbyist users. Google and Yelp ratings skew toward the general public,
including people rating the food, the parking lot, or a bad server experience that has nothing to do
with the beer. Foursquare’s numbers came back thinner across the board, useful as a tie-breaker rather
than a primary signal on their own. None of these four sources is complete by itself. Together, they are
a genuinely useful cross-check.
See It on the Map, and the Top 10 Leaderboards
Numbers in a table only tell you so much, so I built an interactive map of all 757 mappable breweries
in this dataset. Each dot is color-coded by whichever of four data pillars that brewery scores strongest
on relative to the rest of the group: reach (Untappd check-ins), quality (cross-platform rating), social
following, or weekly hours open. Breweries flagged closed or at-risk by two or more platforms show up
grey. Click any dot for the underlying numbers, or click a pillar in the legend to isolate it.
Three leaderboards pulled straight from the same dataset:
Get the Raw Data
If you want to dig through all 758 breweries yourself, or check one specific state, here is the
full dataset as a CSV download:
brewery name and location, Untappd’s rating and check-in numbers, Google’s rating and business status,
Yelp’s rating and closure flag, Foursquare’s rating and popularity score, and my own consensus operational
status column for each of the 758 breweries.
Explore the Data Interactively
Hover any dot to see the brewery behind it: Untappd reach on the x-axis (log scale), cross-platform rating on the y-axis, colored by whether it’s flagged closed or still operational.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why not just use Untappd’s own rating for everything?
Untappd is where I start, since it tracks beers and check-ins specifically rather than a general
business listing, but it has no reliable signal for whether a brewery has actually closed, and its
user base skews toward people who log a lot of beers rather than the general public. Cross-checking
against Google, Yelp, and Foursquare fills both of those gaps.
How is the “consensus rating” calculated?
It is a simple average of whichever ratings a brewery has across Untappd, Google, Yelp, and a
converted-to-5-point Foursquare score. I only used it for rankings when all four sources had a rating
on file, and only counted a brewery for the top list if it also had at least 1,000 Untappd ratings, so
a brewery with just a handful of reviews cannot leapfrog to the top on a lucky score.
How confident are you in the “closed” list?
Very, for the 18 I listed. Every one of those was flagged independently by both Google and Yelp, and
I then checked each one against real news coverage of the closure before publishing it here. The
Google-only and Yelp-only flags are a different story: treat those as “worth confirming before you
visit,” not as confirmed closures.
How much of the “closed” data turned out to be wrong?
77 percent of it. 79 breweries were flagged as possibly closed by at least one platform, but only 18,
23 percent, were confirmed by a second platform plus real news coverage. That is the actual headline
finding here: a single platform’s closed flag is wrong more often than it is right, which is worth
knowing whether you run a beer blog or just want to know if your local taproom is still pouring.
Does this line up with the industry’s numbers?
Roughly, yes, in the direction that matters. The Brewers Association has recorded brewery closures
outpacing openings nationally for two straight years now, 2024 and 2025, with the decline continuing
into 2026. Our confirmed closure rate, 2.4 percent of 758 breweries, sits below the BA’s national
4 to 5 percent annual closure rate, which supports the BA’s own point that headline closure counts can
overstate how much of the industry is actually disappearing.
What do closed breweries have in common?
Based on the 18 confirmed closures in this dataset: a much lower rate of food-related listings
(5.6 percent versus 20.3 percent for operational breweries) and roughly half the median review and
check-in volume across Untappd, Google and Yelp. Proximity to restaurants, bars and hotels, and
state-level demographics like median age and income, showed no meaningful gap between the two groups.
Social media following was inconclusive, too few of the closed breweries had a matched TikTok or
YouTube handle to compare. Eighteen breweries is a small sample, so treat this as an early pattern
rather than a settled finding.
Will you keep updating this?
I plan to rerun the same three-API check periodically, since brewery closures happen constantly in
this industry and a stale “still open” listing helps nobody. If a state or region turns up something
interesting on a future pass I will fold it into this piece rather than starting a new one.
References
- Seattle Times: https://www.seattletimes.com/life/food-drink/pike-brewing-pioneer-in-craft-beer-industry-will-close-pike-place-shop/
- Post and Courier: https://www.postandcourier.com/business/palmetto-brewing-closing-charleston-sc/article_68f1e38c-89ed-4577-ab6e-ab7eb6ffcddc.html
- Courier-Journal: https://www.courier-journal.com/story/entertainment/dining/2026/06/23/goodwood-brewing-files-for-bankruptcy-liquidation/90665546007/
- WTNH: https://www.wtnh.com/news/connecticut/new-haven/stony-creek-brewery-permanently-closes-month-after-sale-announcement/
- Albuquerque Journal: https://www.abqjournal.com/news/bosque-brewing-announces-closure-of-all-its-taprooms/2949560
- Bozeman Daily Chronicle: https://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/news/bozeman-brewery-mountains-walking-moves-production-to-idaho/article_a177f09a-d976-4c20-b40d-4ee77c7dc734.html
- Brewers Association, 2025 Year in Beer: https://www.brewersassociation.org/association-news/the-2025-year-in-beer/
- Brewers Association, 2026 Midyear Report: https://www.brewersassociation.org/association-news/2026-midyear-report-pressure-persists-as-signs-of-stability-emerge/
Looking for a specific beer instead of a whole brewery to plan around? My
Best Beers hub and
homebrewing section are both good places to keep exploring
from here.
