In early 2007, with the American beer industry all a-froth with the yet-to-crest light lager boom, the world’s biggest brewer decided to launch a streaming television channel. Even for mighty Anheuser-Busch — which was near the zenith of its own cultural and corporate power in advance of InBev’s hostile takeover in late 2008 — the project, Bud.TV, was an audacious gamble that verged on “creative…
June is Pride Month, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at the social media feeds or press releases of the country’s biggest beverage-alcohol companies. Less than two years into the second Trump administration, they’ve mostly abandoned their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, cut back on their donations to queer organizations, and re-embraced a homogenous vision of the American drinking…
Generations are more or less made up. They’re a social construct, much like “time” and “the rule of law.” That doesn’t mean cultural norms aren’t shifting, and it certainly hasn’t stopped the beverage-alcohol industry from collectively freaking the hell out about it. But from Zoomer to Boomer and beyond, this generation stuff is kinda squishy. Seasons, on the other hand, are pretty real. In the…
It seemed like it wasn’t a question of if, but when, Voodoo Ranger’s parent company finally caught up to Blue Moon’s on corporate craft volume. And according to one long-running brewing industry magazine, the answer is now. But that answer appears to be wrong. And a miscommunication around New Belgium Brewery’s “total beverage” ambitions may be to blame. Every year around Memorial Day — that…
It’s been nearly three years since Sapporo USA (SUSA) unceremoniously shuttered Anchor Brewing Company, and two almost to the day since the billionaire founder of Chobani, Hamdi Ulukaya, scooped it off the scrap heap with the stated goal of returning the historic firm to its former glory. It has not yet reopened for business. But lately, there are definite signs of life at Potrero Hill’s beloved…
They say imitation is the highest form of flattery. But then again, they hadn’t yet seen Lytt. Lytt? That’s right: Lytt. Spelled like that and everything. Lytt is the latest product launch from Boston Beer Company (BBC), which really isn’t much of one these days. The firm’s Lytt-erature touts this line as “the newest single-serve beverage to light up the growing ready-to-drink space.” In plain…
Earlier this week, Narragansett Beer took to social media with a mea culpa for the generative artificial intelligence (AI) age. It read (all sic throughout): CANNED! we saw the feedback, yall were right. Robots are dumb. Plz like this so we can beat the bot content and its fancy analytics. The image attached to the post was a deliberately low-fidelity collage showing the “prohibited” symbol…
It was easy to be outrageously optimistic about the craft-brewing industry midway last decade. Too easy, in fact. Thanks in part to greater San Diego’s status as a bona fide first-wave craft-brewing hotbed, many of the trade’s toughest cautionary tales from the Terrible Tens/Teens started there. Constellation Brands’ November 2015 announcement of plans to acquire Ballast Point for a cool billion…
PHILADELPHIA — As the economy struggles through a vibecession and the internet gets enshittified by vibecoding, the craft brewing industry has been grappling with an unfamiliar vibe of its own this week at its largest annual conference, too. Is that… could it really be…? It could be, and it was. Bona fide optimism was in the air during the 2026 Craft Brewers Conference, which concluded Wednesday…
Miles Teller made two big beverage-alcohol moves to kick off 2023. In January, the actor upped his ownership stake in The Finnish Long Drink, the gin-based canned cocktail brave enough to ask “What if High Noon had a personality?” And in February 2023, he appeared in a nationally televised Super Bowl ad for Bud Light, a coveted casting that has often signaled the beginning of a lucrative…
The smell of fresh cut grass wafts on the spring breeze. March Madness is over, baseball season has just begun. How many Major League stadiums have adopted Anheuser-Busch InBev’s daft rebrand of “domestic beer” this year? If you don’t call it “American beer” you’re woke and communist and probably don’t even Respect The Troops™. For shame!!! Ahem. Where was I? Oh, right. As American taxpayers…
From the outside looking in, Big Beer can appear like a lager-spewing monolith. This seemed especially true during the heady days of the craft-brewing industry’s second boom, during which scrappy beardos and reformed Boston Consulting Group executives alike smeared “corporate beer” as a bland, homogenized scourge upon the American drinking public. But while the Big Three’s flagships — Bud Light,…
It wasn’t always the case that beer’s middle tier featured the best mergers-and-acquisitions action in the beverage-alcohol industry. Far from it. The world of wholesalers, cloistered by culture and statute, was for much of the 20th century a fairly stodgy one. While suppliers and retailers bludgeoned each other with big-dollar advertising campaigns, cutthroat price wars, and consolidation…
For years, we endured the plight of the Casamigos bro. You know the type. Follows CNBC on Instagram, owns enough Yeti to be a shareholder, sense of personal style contained entirely within the Vuori catalog. He would show up at bars and parties — who invited this guy? — and order a tequila and soda, and loudly call for Casamigos. Which would have been fine. There are better-tasting tequilas, more…
A funny way to explicate the colossal tectonic shifts currently rocking the American drinks industry’s middle tier is to consider the sundry capacities for bribery exhibited by the country’s various beverage-alcohol mega-wholesalers. A trade truism is that beer distributors mostly protect and expand their interests through fearsome and disciplined political contributions at the state and federal…
When we last checked in on the Good Ship BrewDog midway through last month, it was in rough seas. Leaking cash and drifting further from a long-promised public listing with each passing year, the Scottish craft brewery’s board hired a restructuring firm in January known for its mop-ups of General Motors, Enron, and the Bernie Madoff scandal. Hundreds of millions of dollars, hundreds of thousands…
“The fourth category,” as Boston Beer Company (BBC) co-founder and recently reappointed chief executive Jim Koch is fond of saying, is “where the growth is.” This is an expedient thing for the leader of a company whose fortunes have long depended more on non-traditional products like Twisted Tea and Sun Cruiser than beer-flavored beer. The logic has a self-affirming circularity to it, too.
The…
This past Saturday, Sky News reported that BrewDog had hired a bank to help it sell itself off, with the British broadcaster reporting the company’s board was hoping to set “a quickfire deadline for indicative offers” from would-be buyers. Among the many questions this bombshell brewing-industry news has triggered, one looms large for your humble Hop Take columnist. What took so long? Five years…
It can feel at times like we’re living through the Twilight of the Macrobrewing Gods. Anheuser-Busch InBev is selling off Gussie and The Third’s hard-won national brewing empire. Molson Coors is slashing jobs, closing legacy plants, and nursing a hangover from the here-and-gone gains of the Bud Light fiasco. Constellation Brands is reeling from the Trump regime’s full-on assault of Modelo’s core…
Last August, the tech journalist Charlie Warzel filed a column at The Atlantic exploring a dismal middle-road future shaped by generative artificial intelligence programs like ChatGPT. What if generative AI isn’t God in the machine or vaporware?” he wondered. “What if it’s just good enough, useful to many without being revolutionary?” This was a disturbing vision to my colleague. Warzel…