Understanding beer tourist motivation

•NC brewery visitors are male, single, and well educated.•Beer focused tourists tend to spend less time in a destination than other tourists.•5 motivational factors to visit brewery•All motivational factors were more important to the beer focused tourist.

Craft beer as an industry has been growing rapidly across over the past decade. This growth and interest has created an emerging market niche in tourism, beer tourism. Given the significant number of dollars spent on both craft beer and beer tourism, an understanding of the beer tourism niche is important in order to be able to market successfully to consumers who have this interest. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine motivations of beer tourists and to determine if beer tourists exhibit significant differences from non-beer tourists. A study of visitors to North Carolina craft breweries was conducted throughout the state during the Fall 2011. It was found that there were four main motivational factors for tourists to visit a NC brewery, which can be explained by the push and pull theory. These four factors were: craft brewery experience, enjoyment, socialization, and beer consumption.