No true Scotsman would drink White Claw, but that didn’t stop the Mark Anthony Brands brand from trying to glom onto the viral tale of the Tartan Army’s unquenchable thirst last month in Boston. Was there a beverage-alcohol brand that didn’t? Boston Beer Company’s (BBC) publicists, perhaps giddy with good fortune after years of pitching into the void, were flogging that story hard the first week of the World Cup. That it’s so unusual to see people drink Boston Lager at volume the local news might pick up the story is not the flex the flacks probably figured it to be. But the real punchline of the story was Bud Light, because apparently no Scotsman, true or false, wanted anything to do with Anheuser-Busch InBev’s (ABI) flailing former flagship.
While it’s fun to consider macrobrewers’ microhumiliations, the reality is that the beer industry is a scale business. Occasionally, one must zoom out to appreciate the full scope of its situation. So as has become tradition, let’s get into Hop Take’s Quarterly Beer Business Report Card for the second frame of 2026.
Subject: Government
Grade: A
Man, what ever happened to “neo-Prohibitionism,” huh? Halfway through the second year of the second Trump administration, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Dr. Mehmet Oz, and the rest of the high-ranking Make American Healthy Again acolytes tasked with gutting the federal public-health apparatus have demonstrated an astonishing disinterest in regulating beverage alcohol, one so conspicuous that it’s actually quantifiable. It’s a big win for the trade’s “Science Over Bias” coalition, if not for science over bias as such. Reyes Beverage Group’s ascent to “total beverage” behemoth was abetted this past quarter by both Republic National Distributing Company’s collapse and, less obviously, by the collapse of anything resembling a federal anti-trust regime. Meanwhile, just to give you a sense of how much the GOP-oriented political economy is in the tank for the trade’s priorities, Jeff Bezos’s handpicked free-market humpers on The Washington Post editorial board are agitating against beer taxes — not new beer taxes, mind you, just, y’know, the concept of taxes, generally — based on trade-group literature, with nary a dissenting opinion in sight. Things are going about as well for the American brewing industry in the halls of power as they could be at the moment.
Subject: Fluid (Sales) Dynamics
Grade: C-
Of course, the nation’s halls of power are not where John and Jane Q. Guzzler do their shopping. That would be the nation’s beer aisle. And the situation there continued to be a real mixed bag for the trade last quarter. After a hot start in Q1, softening sales returned in Q2, especially for the struggling craft segment. Memorial Day 2026 wasn’t a total disappointment, but it did not deliver any meaningful reversal of the trend. The Beer Institute tracked a 6 percent decline in taxable removals for May 2026, and revised its initial (slightly) positive estimate for April into the (slightly) negative, too. If companies were waiting on the World Cup to kick sales into high gear, well, there’s little evidence it did through the end of Q2. One bright spot is that distributors’ outlooks don’t seem to be dampened nearly as much as the scan sheets might have you believe: In June, the National Beer Wholesalers Association indexed positive buying intent among its respondents for the fourth straight month.
Subject: Innovation Lab
Grade: D-
What is there even to say here, man? It is a bad quarter for creativity when the most innovative thing a major brewer does is acquire a spirits-based canned cocktail brand. It’s even worse when that “brewer” is Mark Anthony Brands, which is technically a top-five supplier in the category despite not making anything that looks or drinks like beer. I don’t think you can really count Molson Coors’ (MC) belated Bapple challenge from Keystone Light as an “innovation” per se, but it was obviously a smart move, and the firm finally did it last quarter. So. I was encouraged by Long Trail’s 168-pack gimmick, which was fun and funny. I was amused by Four Loko’s decision to license its brand to a company called Chuck It, LLC for a hemp-derived THC spinoff called Nine Loko even as the market hurtles toward the Trump administration’s de facto ban deadline in November 2026. I was deeply depressed by basically everything I have seen from beer marketers World Cup-wise. Heineken’s confusing ketchup collaboration with Heinz may have briefly caused me to dissociate. BBC’s BuzzBallz ripoff, Lytt, is pure loser shytt. If there was something genuinely exciting and compelling happening in beer over the past three months, I must have missed it.
Subject: Social Studies
Grade: D
Speaking of creativity, the American drinking public, like the American public writ large, does not like artificial intelligence. They hate it, in fact! But that didn’t stop Narragansett from giving it a whirl last quarter. (To the company’s credit, it quickly reversed course after getting screamed at on social media.) The consensus in the broader craft-brewing industry on AI is harder to suss out, which is weird, because fervent and vocal opposition to slop should be an easy win for the segment. (MC decided to do an all-AI rollout for Kapple — are we calling it Kapple? — but since nobody has strong feelings about that brand, nobody seemed to care.) Big brewers continued their cowardly retreat from Pride Month this past quarter, which would have been bleak enough. But ABI really lowered the bar by remaining silent on violent, AI-abetted transphobia in Bud Light’s name, as well as gutter racism in front of its logos on the South Lawn of the White House. That partnership with Ultimate Fighting Championship continues to pay disgusting dividends. Shocker! Anyway, here’s more heartland slopulism for all you Busch Light fans out there.
Subject: Craftology
Grade: C
Neither the summer boost nor the World Cup boon seems to have meaningfully juiced the segment’s sales this past quarter, with Circana-tracked off-premise sales down a bit in May and a bit more in June, and some really streaky performances in the early World Cup returns. Anchor Brewing Company showed its most meaningful signs of life since getting acquired by Mr. Chobani himself over two years ago. Hey, that’s nice! Less nice: The new boss has been studiously avoiding the San Francisco icon’s erstwhile workers as they call for their old jobs back, a routine that continued through Q2. Meanwhile, ABI retook the throne on corporate craft volume from Kirin-owned New Belgium Brewery last quarter in the Brewers Association’s annual volume report. This was both unsurprising, in the sense that its pared-back portfolio has been doing damn well with newly-ish found focus, and surprising, in the sense that the BA’s volume data were initially wrong and required a lot of digging to verify. Never a dull moment. Sapporo’s unceremonious sale of Stone Brewery to Firestone Walker last quarter was sort of a rise-and-fall redux of Rogue’s abrupt closure in late 2025; this is no country for old breweries, and increasingly, for middle-aged ones, either. Wait a second. Remind me who owned Anchor before yogurt mogul Hamdi Ulukaya bought it off the scrap heap? Hmm.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
How is the World Cup treating the American beer industry? By the ebullient tone of this press release Monday from the Beer Institute, the trade group of choice for the country’s macrobrewers, you might guess the answer is “pretty well!” But the actual words — and worse still, the numbers — complicate the narrative. The org cited data from a Morning Consult poll indicating that 67 percent of party hosts said they’d stock beer instead of other alcoholic beverages, and that 45 percent of people planning to watch the games said they’d drink beer while doing so. That’s… what, man?! Massive sporting events used to be a lead-pipe lock for beer! NOBODY USED TO DRINK VODKA WHILE WATCHING SOCCER IN THIS COUNTRY! Less than half of respondents reaching for a beer seems like more of a red alert than a cause for celebration! Anyway, as I was saying…
📈 Ups…
Maine Beer Co. owner Dan Kleban said he’s ready to jump back into the state’s Senate race following new allegations against Democratic candidate Graham Platner… Imports are once again picking up momentum, with Circana-tracked off-premise dollar sales growth outpacing even the superpremium segment for June… ABI’s stock price was up an astonishing 29.34 percent year-to-date at the halfway mark for 2026… Congratulations to Voodoo Ranger whiz Dave Knospe on his new gig as New Belgium’s chief marketer…
📉 …and downs
Wine was sliding worst of all in NIQ scans from the previous four weeks (i.e., the bulk of World Cup matches), but beer, like spirits, was also in “stable” decline in the off-premise… Denver brewery Copper Kettle is soliciting donations to help it meet its lease-termination obligations and “close with dignity”…
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