A free archive of 10,700 breweries records what the beer trade forgets — including the breweries that closed

Coleman, Alberta — 14 September 2026 — Tally's Beer Universe, a one-person archive of the world's breweries built over three years by an Alberta homebrewer, now holds 10,732 public brewery records across 156 countries, every one carrying a confidence grade and most a source a reader can follow. It is free to read, carries no advertising, and — by written policy — no brewery can pay to change its record.

The archive's founding rule is that a brewery keeps its record after it stops trading. Directories delete a closure the day it happens, which is why closures are so hard to research a year later; Tally's keeps them, labelled, with whatever could be established about how they ended. 1,546 closed breweries are recorded so far, 940 of them with a closure year.

For British readers the archive's oldest lineages are here: the City of London Brewery on Calvert's 1431 site, the Stag Brewery at Mortlake (1487), Barclay Perkins' Anchor Brewery (1616). 428 UK breweries are recorded, 99 of them closed, with 1,532 beers. The unusual material is the numbers: Barclay Perkins' public-bar prices for Best Stout from 1940 to 1950, pence per pint, cited to a London Metropolitan Archives reference; and the 1955 brewing records of Flower & Sons of Stratford — original gravities, hop schedules and grists for six beers, from the brewery's own books — recorded in the source's own units, never converted.

Beyond the records, the archive documents who owns what: 2,052 dated ownership events, from Interbrew's 1995 purchase of Labatt to Carlsberg's sale of Baltika in February 2025, each with the document behind it. Where sources disagree, the disagreement is published rather than resolved silently. Where nothing is known, the record says UNKNOWN.

A new breweriana section links 164 surviving objects — bottles, labels, brewing books, a 1914 Toronto beer bottle — to the brewery they evidence and the museum or archive that holds them. And Tally's Take, the archive's essays, has recently covered the London Beer Flood of 1814, the 162-year-old Guinness recovered off Dover, and the six breweries that own Oktoberfest.

"I started because I wanted to know who owned the beer I was drinking, and nobody would give me a straight answer," said Tom Roy, the archive's founder. "Three years on, the answer is usually in the archive with a source under it — and when it isn't, the record says so. I'd rather publish a gap than a guess. What I'm hoping for from the Guild is the thing an archive needs most: people who know the material telling me where I've got it wrong."

Corrections from outside the archive are applied, dated and credited on the record they fixed. The archive is at https://archive.tallysbeer.com.

Notes to editors

• 10,732 public brewery records · 156 countries · 27,548 beers · 35,048 sources · 2,052 dated ownership events · 1,140 sites · 164 objects · 84 laws · 359 dated measurements (prices, gravities, output).

• United Kingdom: 428 breweries, 99 closed (77 with a closure year), 1,532 beers. The UK is the thinnest of the archive's three most-researched countries per record, which is one reason this release is going to the Guild.

• The archive answers 14 standing questions per country (who owns it, who founded it, when did it close, how big is it…) and publishes the score: the UK answers 7 of 14, the USA and Canada 4.

• Editorial policy, including "Money and the record": https://archive.tallysbeer.com/editorial

• Breweriana: https://archive.tallysbeer.com/objects · Ownership: https://archive.tallysbeer.com/who-owns · Essays: https://archive.tallysbeer.com/tally

• Tally's Beer Universe is a trade name registered in Alberta. The archive is a Next.js site whose data is plain JSON in a public git repository — depositable with an institution as a folder, with no database behind it.

For more information:

Tom Roy, founder — info@tallysbeer.com — Coleman, Alberta, Canada

Third-party news items are published as received for informational purposes. Publication does not imply endorsement by the Guild. Please use the contact details within the post for any enquiries.