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The Next American Job-Creator? Beer.

This article is more than 8 years old.

Americans looking to beat the heat now have even more reasons to feel good about cracking open a cold beer.

According to "Beer Serves America," a report released earlier this week by the Beer Institute and National Beer Wholesalers Association, the industry is responsible for about 1.75 million jobs. (By comparison, registered nurses, one of the ten largest professions in the U.S., numbered 2.7 million in 2014 according to the Bureau of Labor statistics.)

The industry's economic impact--including jobs, wages, and output--rang in at nearly $253 billion, 1.5% of overall U.S. GDP.

"The brewing industry has a presence in every congressional district in the U.S., and family names appear on most beer packages sold in the United States," states the report. "Brewers and beer distributors are responsible corporate citizens who care deeply about the responsible use of their products."

According to the report, roughly 50,000 Americans working for brewers and beer importers, and each job in the brewing industry creates 34 full-time equivalent jobs in related fields, specifically wholesaling, retailing, manufacturing, and farming.

Suppliers--who create everything from bottle caps to marketing displays--employ more than 383,000.

Jobs with distributors, meanwhile, top 130,000 and have grown 20% over the past decade, largely due to a preponderance of new malt beverage products, growth in imported beers, and greater regional and national reach from smaller producers.

Large brewers like Anheuser-Busch and Pabst Brewing company, and regional brewers such as Lagunitas Brewing Company and Sierra Nevada Brewing Company still account for 70% of overall employment -- and have since 2012.

The majority of new brewing facilities--up 2,290 in two years--is being seen among small brewers and brewpubs, with the report noting that "these firms produce beer for a limited market – sometimes only for their own restaurant or retail establishment." One fifth of overall brewery employees now work in microbreweries.

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