Austin, Caroline Graham

May, 2023

By: Brester, Gary; McCullough, Michael; Atwood, Joseph; Austin, Caroline Graham
In December 2017, the Craft Beverage and Modernization Tax Reform Act (CBMTRA) lowered federal beer excise taxes for a period of 2 years, and the Taxpayer Certainty and Disaster Tax Act of 2020 made the reduction permanent. We evaluate the ramifications of the CBMTRA on producers, consumers, and tax receipts and quantify potential differential effects among the micro, regional, and macro brewing sectors. Although the excise tax reduction was supposed to primarily support the micro brewing sector, we find that the CBMTRA provided a larger combined benefit to the regional and macro brewing sectors.