What's being counted
Every beer sold across state lines needs a Certificate of Label Approval from the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, and every approval is public. Hopgrail reads the registry daily and keeps the beer filings — malt beverages only; the Bureau also approves wine and spirits labels, which aren't counted here. One filing is one label: a new beer, a new package size, a revised can, a keg collar. So this is the pulse of beer paperwork, which runs a step ahead of the pulse of beer.
By month, since full coverage
The register has read every working day since late May 2026; June 2026 is the first complete month. Completed months only — the Bureau posts approvals a few days late, so the current month always looks light until it fills in.
| Month | Labels approved | Breweries filing | Imports |
|---|---|---|---|
| June 2026 | 2,062 | 556 | 149 |
| July 2026 | 1,792 | 536 | 146 |
| August 2026 | 1,807 | 505 | 64 |
5,661 beer labels over 3 months, an average of 1,887 a month. Refreshed nightly from the register.
By working day
Spread over the days the Bureau actually approved something, that is about 86 beer labels per working day. Monday is the busiest day of the week. Weekends barely register: 13 of 5,661 approvals since June 2026 carry a Saturday or Sunday date. The registry is an office, and it keeps office hours. The single biggest day so far was August 31, 2026, with 148 labels.
What August 2026 was made of
| IPA | 627 | 35% |
|---|---|---|
| Lager | 474 | 26% |
| Stout | 153 | 8% |
| Specialty | 132 | 7% |
| Sour | 117 | 6% |
| Amber/Other Ale | 93 | 5% |
| Pale Ale | 89 | 5% |
| Wheat | 43 | 2% |
| Belgian | 37 | 2% |
| Porter | 15 | 1% |
| Strong | 14 | 1% |
Style families from the label's own words, read by the register's extractor and checked against the filing. Each family has its own page under Styles.
What the count doesn't say
A label isn't a beer. Breweries refile for a new can size or a corrected ABV, and a third of filings are keg collars for beer that never gets packaged. A month's count is also not the month's releases — the median beer appears about two weeks after approval, and some never do. What the count is: the earliest public measure of how much new beer is coming, read the day it clears, on the register.