Тарифы на алюминий и торговые барьеры влияют на импортное пиво в США и Канаде

PHILADELPHIA — This past April, the Pennsylvania Convention Center filled with hop sacks, keg trucks and brewers comparing notes on canning lines, as the Craft Brewers Conference and BrewExpo America returned to Philadelphia. It was a fitting host city: Pennsylvania is the country’s third-largest state by brewery count, with 533 operating breweries, and its second-largest by volume, turning out more than 2.6 million barrels a year and contributing an estimated $5.2 billion to the national economy, according to Brewers Association data. The gathering wasn’t only a Pennsylvania story, though. Distributors and importers on the show floor were just as focused on what’s happening north of the border, where Canadian breweries are navigating their own reshuffling market. That back-and-forth is part of a bigger pattern: as cross-border leisure spending shifts, consumers are weighing options on both sides of the ledger, from a new can of Ontario pale ale to where to spend an evening online, whether that’s streaming a game or browsing reviews of Canadian Online Casinos before deciding where to spend their entertainment dollars. Beer, like so much else in the hospitality and leisure economy, doesn’t move in a vacuum. Pennsylvania’s Brewing Powerhouse Pennsylvania’s beer credentials go back further than most. Yuengling, founded in Pottsville in 1829, remains one of the oldest breweries in the country, and the state’s modern brewing scene has grown around that legacy rather than in spite of it. Hosting the Craft Brewers Conference this year put a spotlight on that scale: Pennsylvania now ranks second in the U.S. for production volume, trailing only California, and its breweries support a supply chain that runs from hop farms to can suppliers to the taprooms themselves. That scale matters for the wider business conversation, too. Craft beer nationally contributed roughly $72.5 billion in economic impact in 2024, and Pennsylvania’s outsized share of that figure — both in barrels produced and dollars generated — is part of why the industry keeps returning to the state for its biggest annual gathering. The View From North of the Border Canada’s craft beer industry is having a very different year. Total beer sales volume fell for an eighth consecutive year in the most recent reporting period, down about 4.5 percent, and the number of operating craft breweries has started to contract after nearly a decade of rapid growth, according to industry trackers and Statistics Canada figures. Rising input costs and shifting drinking habits are reshaping the sector, particularly in provinces like Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec, which together account for most of the country’s brewery openings and closures. It isn’t all contraction, though. Draught beer and microbrewery sales are projected to keep growing even as packaged sales soften, and recent interprovincial trade reforms have made it somewhat easier for smaller Canadian breweries to sell across provincial lines — a regulatory shift that mirrors, in miniature, the kind of cross-border friction American brewers and distributors know well. Tariffs, Cans and the Cost of Crossing the Border That friction shows up most visibly in the price of an imported can. Retailers who specialize in Canadian craft beer say tariffs on aluminum have made bringing bottles and cans across the border meaningfully more expensive, even as demand for those beers hasn’t gone away. Some independent shops have adapted by importing Canadian craft in kegs or glass bottles instead of cans, formats that currently sit outside the same tariff structure, according to reporting from the Rochester Beacon on the regional bottle shop trade. For a Pennsylvania brewery eyeing Canadian shelf space, or a Canadian brewery hoping to land in a Philadelphia bar, those same trade dynamics run in both directions: tariffs, provincial alcohol boards and state-by-state distribution laws all shape which beers actually make it across the border, and at what cost. Where Beer Meets the Broader Leisure Economy What the Craft Brewers Conference made clear, in its own hoppy way, is that beer is rarely just about beer. It’s a bellwether for a wider, interconnected leisure and hospitality economy that spans two countries — one where a Pennsylvania taproom’s fortunes are tied, however loosely, to tariff policy in Ottawa, and where Canadian drinkers’ choices are shaped by what’s happening in Harrisburg and Washington. As that economy keeps knitting itself together, the “business of beer” is increasingly a business of borders, too — one more reason Philadelphia’s turn hosting the industry’s biggest gathering felt like more than a local story.