How Many Meaderies Are There in the United States?

There are 310 meaderies trading in the United States, across 49 states. That count was last verified on September 19, 2026.

It is lower than nearly every figure currently in print, and the gap is the reason this page exists.

Why every published figure is different

Articles published in the last two years have put the number at 412, at 450, at 500, at "fewer than 500", at "about 400", at "close to 300" and at "over 700". Those figures appear in national business press, in magazines, in local news and in trade publications, and almost all of them cite the same source: the American Mead Makers Association.

The most repeated line, that meaderies grew from around 60 in 2003 to 450 in 2020, is still being printed in 2026. It describes a count that stopped six years ago.

Why the published number only ever goes up

A trade association counts its members and it counts openings. It has no mechanism for counting closures, because nothing obliges a business to tell anyone it has shut. That is why the widely quoted line about a new meadery opening every three days has no matching rate of loss attached to it, and why the published total can only rise.

Closures are the harder half of the number, and they are the half nobody publishes.

How this count is made

1. Every meadery with a Google Business Profile in all 50 states was pulled into a single dataset: 380 businesses.
2. 70 of them carried Google's permanently closed status. That was confirmed a second time by an independent re-pull matched back to all 380 records by place ID, with no unmatched rows.
3. The remaining 310 are trading.
4. 23 of the 310 are marked temporarily closed and are kept in the count, because a seasonal winter closure is not the same as a business that has gone. Those listings say so on their pages.

The closure rate nobody is accounting for

70 of 380 is a closure rate of 18.4%, spread across 31 states. Nothing in the published record accounts for it, which is the single largest reason a count built only from openings drifts high.

<a href="https://www.meaderymap.com/guides/how-many-meaderies-in-the-us/">
  <img src="https://www.meaderymap.com/charts/us-meaderies-by-state.svg" alt="US meaderies by state, top 15. 310 trading meaderies verified September 19, 2026. Source: Meadery Map." width="480" height="493" />
</a>
<p>Source: <a href="https://www.meaderymap.com/guides/how-many-meaderies-in-the-us/">Meadery Map</a></p>

The distribution matters more than the leaders. The median state has 4, 24 states have three or fewer, and 6 have exactly one. Nebraska has none. This is not an industry concentrated in wine country. It is a thin national scatter with a handful of clusters.

What this count does not include

Being clear about the edges is the difference between a number worth citing and another estimate.

• Businesses with no Google Business Profile are invisible to this method.
• Home producers, contract brands and anyone making mead without premises of their own are not counted.
• At least one operating meadery is known to be absent from the source database, so 310 should be read as a floor rather than a ceiling.
• Mead made and sold inside a winery or brewery that does not present itself as a meadery is not counted.

Citing this figure

This page is rebuilt from the dataset itself, and the date on it is the date the data was collected rather than the date the page was last edited.

Meadery Map, 310 US meaderies, verified September 19, 2026.
https://www.meaderymap.com/guides/how-many-meaderies-in-the-us/

Questions about the method, or a meadery we have missed: get in touch.