About PlainAlcohol

Our Mission

We believe the public, industry professionals, and researchers deserve easy access to federal alcohol licensing data without filing FOIA requests or navigating opaque government databases. The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) maintains a registry of every federally permitted alcohol producer, importer, and wholesaler in the United States — but that data has historically been difficult to search, filter, or analyze.

PlainAlcohol makes this registry accessible. Whether you are a craft brewery owner researching your competitive landscape, a distributor identifying potential partners, a journalist investigating the alcohol industry, or a consumer curious about the producers behind your favorite beverages, PlainAlcohol gives you searchable, filterable access to the complete federal permit registry.

We present the data as it is — no rankings, no ratings, no sponsored placements. Every producer is shown with the same objective information from the same federal source.

Our Data Source

Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB)

All data on PlainAlcohol comes from the TTB (Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau), a bureau of the U.S. Department of the Treasury. The TTB is responsible for regulating and collecting taxes on the production, importation, and wholesale distribution of alcohol in the United States.

The permittee list is publicly available under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). It includes every entity holding a federal alcohol permit — from large multinational corporations to small craft producers. The registry covers five permit categories:

  • Breweries — Brewer's Notice holders
  • Distilleries — Distilled Spirits Plant permit holders
  • Wineries — Bonded Winery permit holders
  • Importers — Basic Permit holders (importers)
  • Wholesalers — Basic Permit holders (wholesalers/distributors)

Official source: TTB.gov

How We Process the Data

We obtain the TTB permittee registry and process it through our ETL pipeline:

  • Permit type classification: We categorize each permit into one of five producer types (brewery, distillery, winery, importer, wholesaler) based on the TTB permit class codes.
  • Geographic normalization: Addresses are normalized and geocoded to enable state-level and city-level browsing. We standardize state abbreviations and clean address formatting inconsistencies in the source data.
  • Status filtering: We include only active permits, excluding revoked, surrendered, or expired permits unless specifically relevant to historical analysis.
  • Statistical aggregation: We calculate state-level totals, per-capita rates (producers per 100,000 population), and permit-type breakdowns to enable meaningful geographic comparison.

No data is editorialized, ranked by quality, or filtered by commercial criteria. We present the federal registry directly.

Data Currency

PlainAlcohol currently displays data from the TTB permit registry, 2024 release. The TTB updates the public permittee list periodically as new permits are issued and existing permits are modified or surrendered.

Permit status can change between our data updates. Always verify current permit status directly with TTB for legal or commercial purposes. We update PlainAlcohol when new TTB data releases become available, typically on a quarterly basis.

Editorial Independence

Content on PlainAlcohol is compiled by our editorial team from official source data. Raw data from the federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), state Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) agencies, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (CDC BRFSS) is reformatted into readable guides and profiles by our continuous editorial pipeline, then verified against the source before publication. The PlainAlcohol editorial team, operating under Kiznis Studio, is responsible for editorial standards, methodology, and corrections.

We do not accept payment, sponsorship, or promoted placement from producers, retailers, importers, wholesalers, trade associations, advocacy groups, or any covered entity. Our only revenue source is contextual display advertising served by Google AdSense — advertisers do not influence which entities we cover or how we present data, and they do not receive preferential placement.

YMYL notice: PlainAlcohol publishes informational content about alcohol regulation and public-health statistics. It is not legal advice (always consult a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction before relying on regulatory content) and not medical advice (consult a licensed healthcare provider for questions about alcohol use, dependency, or health effects). If you or someone you know needs help with alcohol use, contact the SAMHSA National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357) or visit samhsa.gov.

Limitations & Disclaimers

PlainAlcohol is an informational resource. Federal permit data should be verified with TTB directly before relying on it for legal, commercial, or regulatory purposes.

  • Federal permits only: This data covers federal TTB permits. State and local alcohol licenses (which have separate requirements and are issued by state alcohol beverage control agencies) are not included.
  • Permit status may change: A permit listed as active in our database may have been surrendered, revoked, or modified since our last data update.
  • Not a quality indicator: Having a federal permit means a producer has met TTB regulatory requirements. It says nothing about product quality, production volume, or business viability.
  • Address limitations: Some permit addresses reflect corporate headquarters rather than production facilities. A producer may operate at a different physical location than the address on file with TTB.

PlainAlcohol is not affiliated with the TTB, the Department of the Treasury, or any government agency. This site does not provide legal, regulatory, or business advice.

Editorial Team

PlainAlcohol is published by PlainAlcohol Editorial, a small independent team that builds public-data portals so that government regulatory and public-health records remain accessible to the people they describe. Our editorial work on PlainAlcohol is led by editors with backgrounds in regulatory-data analysis, public-records journalism, and public-health epidemiology — disciplines that combine to vet what TTB, state ABC agencies, and CDC publish, surface their limitations, and translate technical taxonomies (TTB Permits Online, state ABC license schedules, NIAAA epidemiology categories, CDC BRFSS survey methodology) into language a consumer, journalist, or policy researcher can actually use.

We do not employ practicing regulatory attorneys or licensed clinicians and do not publish original legal or medical advice. Instead, our editorial standard is verification, citation, and transparency: every data field we surface is traceable to a TTB, ABC, NIAAA, or CDC publication, every caveat (lag time, scope exclusions, self-reported survey fields) is disclosed at the page level, and every methodology decision is documented at /methodology. When source data has known shortcomings — for example, state ABC databases vary widely in update cadence — we say so on the page where the data appears, not buried in a footer.

Editorial questions, fact corrections, and source-attribution issues should go to hello@plainalcohol.com. We are accountable for what we publish: every correction we make is reflected in the next data refresh, and our update schedule is documented at the top of this page so readers can see how recent the underlying figures are. PlainAlcohol does not accept paid placement, sponsored listings, or any incentive that would compromise the neutrality of how producers, retailers, and regulations appear on the site.

Contact

Questions, corrections, or feedback? Email us at hello@plainalcohol.com.

We welcome:

  • Questions about data sources or methodology
  • Reports of apparent data errors or outdated permit information
  • Suggestions for additional features or data
  • Media and research inquiries

PlainAlcohol is published by ", a data intelligence company that builds free, public-interest data portals.