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This story is a joint publication partnership between the Rochester Beacon and the Cleveland Prost.
Zeb Zimmerman didn’t have to guess. He pulled up the bills.
“Comparing last March, my electric bill was $364. This March it was $1,049,” said Zimmerman, who runs Nine Maidens Brewing (1344 University Ave., Rochester) on a 2-barrel system. “I’ve been on a warpath trying to save electricity here. If it costs two-and-a-half thousand bucks a month to have AC, I’m just not going to be able to do it.”
That single line item—not aluminum, not hops, not anything you’d usually blame for a pricier pint—is what finally pushed Nine Maidens to raise its price a dollar last month. It’s also a good example of why the question “why does beer cost more?” turns out to be much messier question than it looks.
I get some version of that question at almost every taproom I walk into these days. So, I asked around—three local brewers with three very different business models, and a regional distributor. What I got back wasn’t the tidy story I expected—not simply “tariffs did it” or “soaring ingredient costs.” Aluminum really is more expensive, but hops might actually be cheaper right now, depending on whom you ask. Utilities have quietly become one of the scariest line items in the industry. And the person setting your local beer prices probably is watching one Brooklyn brewery as closely as they’re watching their own spreadsheet.
When you ask brewers what actually scares them, few or none respond “costs”—they say traffic. Whether people are still showing up.
Here’s what’s actually driving your bar tab, piece by piece—starting with the part that gets all the attention, and ending with the part that doesn’t get enough.
The can, the cardboard, and the four-pack holder
Packaging is where the national headlines live, and it’s real: Roughly four out of five craft beers sold in the U.S. now come in aluminum cans rather than glass—78% of packaged volume in 2025, according to the Brewers Association’s own annual packaging report, up from 69% just three years earlier. And aluminum has been at the center of genuinely chaotic federal trade policy. A 25% Section 232 tariff took effect in February 2025, a June 2025 proclamation doubled it to 50%, and this past April the framework got restructured again to tax the full value of many aluminum derivative goods rather than just the metal content.
Dave Luckenbach, co-founder of Mortalis Brewing (5660 Tec Dr., Avon), is living that number in real time.
“The cost of cans is crazy,” he says. “We’re almost approaching COVID-level can costs now. During COVID it was just a scarcity thing. Now, the cost of aluminum is through the roof.”
He’s juggling three different can suppliers just trying to find the best price at any given moment—and it’s not only the can itself.
“Believe it or not, the cost of cardboard has gone up,” he says. Even the plastic four-pack carriers have gotten in on it: “Pak-Tech did a little bit of shrinkflation. They reduced the size of the box. I think you get 30 less in a box for the same price.”
Mortalis has held its four-pack price for its heavily fruited sours at $25 since it opened in Avon in August 2018—Luckenbach says it’s never gone up, though three years ago they started charging sales tax on top rather than absorbing it themselves.
“We were eating all of it, every tax,” he says. “We knew we can’t keep doing this. We posted about it. We had a good response from that, just being brutally honest.”
Not every brewery feels the can pinch, though, which is the first sign that packaging can’t carry this whole story. Nine Maidens barely touches packaging at all.
“We’re such a different model than a lot of people,” Zimmerman says, focused almost entirely on the taproom rather than canning and distribution. And Paul Guarracini, co-founder and brewer at Sager Beer Works (46 Sager Dr., Rochester), doesn’t do much canning either—which turns out to matter a lot for what comes next.
Here’s the part that surprised me most. The USDA’s National Hop Report shows the U.S. average hop price at $5.38 a pound in 2025—up 26 cents from the year before, even as total acreage fell 7%. That’s the topline national number.
But talk to local brewers buying hops right now, and you get the opposite story.
“The price of hops are actually flat to down,” says Guarracini, who’s spent nearly 15 years in the industry and works closely with the Brewers Association through various programs and initiatives.
“Building a hop yard takes years, and that pipeline of hops is still coming out even as demand is dropping off,” he says. “We’re not using contracts anymore, where we were obligated to buy a certain number of pounds at a locked-in price. Not that many years ago, if you didn’t contract Mosaic”—a dual-purpose hop cultivated in the U.S.—“you weren’t getting it. Now, it’s no problem, and at a good price.”
Luckenbach’s own hop and grain costs have come down the same way, he says. But unlike other local breweries, Mortalis does use hop contracts and typically goes to the Pacific Northwest every year to select the hop lots they want to use in their beers.
Guarracini mentions a real cost lever breweries are pulling on themselves.
“We just started noticing at the beginning of the year or so that there’s a shift away from hopped beers, IPAs, toward lighter beers—golden ales, Pilsners, lagers, Kölsches,” he says. “It’s very significant. Our (That’s My) Jam hazy IPA was our No. 1 seller for years. Now our Two Paisans Pils is the top seller, and our Kölsch is doing really well too.”
The upshot, cost-wise: “Those beers have a smaller hop load to them. So, they’re cheaper to make. Generally, if I step back, our costs of production aren’t going up—they’re holding in there. That’s good.”
Add in that Sager doesn’t do much canning, and Guarracini’s picture of direct ingredient costs is genuinely upbeat.
“We’re doing better than some others,” Guarracini says. “We actually feel pretty good about the direct costs.”
Where the real squeeze is hiding: utilities
If ingredients are a mixed bag, the fixed-cost side of the ledger is where brewers I talked to sounded most alarmed—and it’s the part readers probably think about least. Zimmerman’s electric bill jump is what finally pushed Nine Maidens to raise pint prices from $7 to $8 last month, seven years after opening at $6.
“Even at $7, our regulars were telling us we could raise it,” he says. “Everybody else is charging 8, 9, or 10 dollars. It’s not like I was getting extra traffic maintaining the $7 price.”
Guarracini describes the same pattern from a different angle.
“Our utility bill is 50% higher than it was maybe three years ago,” he says. “It’s insane.”
Beyond that, he points to something rarely discussed in beer-pricing conversations at all—the cost of running a small business generally.
“Professional services, technical services, trades—having your taxes done, a kitchen hood inspection, a fire alarm inspection, plumbing repairs,” Guarracini says. “Anything with a skilled component, those prices are way higher than inflation. It feels like death by a thousand cuts. And because we’re small, we’re paying the same for an inspection as anyone else, even a place twice our size.”
Sager’s own pint price reflects the restraint that runs through everyone I talked to: $6 when they opened in 2018, $7.50 on average now.
“Where costs have exceeded inflation, we’re eating them,” Guarracini says. “I still think it’s a value-luxury. We just cannot ask that much more for a pint.”
The distribution tier—and the ‘Other Half effect’
I also put the question directly to a distributor who covers the WNY market, who agreed to talk on the condition that neither he nor his company be named, given how sensitive pricing conversations are with the breweries he works with and competitors.
His account lines up with what the brewers described: Distributors, he says, aren’t the ones initiating price increases. Roughly 90% of the time, a price increase starts with a brewery coming to him squeezed by can tariffs or a hop-supplier switch—not with the distributor deciding it wants a bigger cut. His margin runs around 30% across most of craft, and stays there; when brewery costs rise, distributors pass along modest, specific increases—five dollars a half barrel, two dollars on sixtels—rather than padding their own take.
Then there’s the part of his answer I didn’t expect—a single brewery’s success reshaping what the whole market thinks a fair price looks like. Call it the Other Half effect. The Brooklyn hazy-IPA heavyweight, which moved into our market in 2018 and now has two satellite taprooms in the region (Canandaigua and Bloomfield), was the first brewery here to charge $20 or more for a four-pack of 16-ounce cans.
“Ever since Other Half, there’s an expectation that what people are willing to pay for has gone through the roof,” the distributor says. “I don’t think we’d be selling any cases for $80 if it weren’t for Other Half being able to get 20 bucks a four-pack. There’s an image, and you have to fall in line with cases being sold to Wegmans for 90 or 100 bucks.”
In other words, some of what’s pushing packaged beer prices up isn’t a cost input at all—it’s a ceiling one buzzy Brooklyn brewery redrew, and everyone nearby now prices against it.
If there’s one thing that came up with almost everyone, unprompted, it’s that ingredient and tariff costs aren’t actually the top concern—traffic is.
“We can bitch and moan about an increase of 5 cents a pound for something, but if people don’t show up, having a great margin doesn’t mean anything,” Guarracini says. “My concern is the overall malaise—inflation, things going on—that are keeping people at home and not coming out. We’re doing everything we can to bring people in: food, events, N/A drinks. We’re actually doing fairly well on cocktails—cocktails are up, but beer is down.”
That anecdotal worry lines up with the industrywide numbers. The Brewers Association’s 2025 year-end report shows total craft production down 4% for the year, with retail dollar value off 2.8% to $28 billion nationally, and 60% of breweries surveyed reporting production declines. A meaningful minority—about 39%—still grew, which tells you this isn’t a uniform collapse so much as a market sorting winners from everyone else.
Not everything is grim math, though. Nine Maidens keeps its 32-ounce crowler fills at $12 by buying in bulk through a small informal co-op with Swiftwater Brewing—a handful of local brewers pooling purchasing power instead of competing over it.
So: is your beer more expensive because of tariffs? Partly, if it comes in a can. Because of hops? Actually, maybe less than you’d think, for some breweries. Because distributors are squeezing margins? Not according to the distributor I talked to. If anything, brewery price increases are what’s pulling distributor invoices up. Because of a Brooklyn brewery that made $20 four-packs feel normal? Genuinely, yes, at least a little, if you’re buying cans. Because your neighborhood taproom’s electric bill nearly tripled? For at least two of the breweries I talked to, that’s the number that finally moved the needle. And because fewer people are walking through the door in the first place? That’s the one that worries brewers most of all—more than any single ingredient or tariff line ever could.
What ties all of it together is restraint: Every brewer I spoke with described eating costs rather than passing them fully along—Mortalis holding its four-pack price for going on eight years; Sager raising a pint by $1.50 over the same stretch; Nine Maidens holding at $6 or $7 for seven years before finally, reluctantly, going to $8. If you want to know where your money goes furthest, it’s still the taproom pour—no distributor tier, no case-pricing arms race with a brand three states away, just the brewery and you.
As Guarracini puts it: “It’s not just the product, it’s the experience. If you value the camaraderie, the things you can get in a brewpub that you can’t get at home, you get more for your dollar.”
Will Cleveland is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer. A former Democrat and Chronicle reporter, he writes about beer in the Finger Lakes region and Western New York on Substack.
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