I read financial analysts’ coverage memoranda about the beer industry as a matter of professional obligation. Most are deeply boring; some are repulsively cynical. Every once in a while, though, Wall Street’s information peddlers publish a real pearl. So it was back in 2022, when Credit Suisse’s Kaumil Gajrawala warned investors against biting on macrobrewers’ juicy dollar sales growth during the second year of the pandemic with a note entitled “Pricing is a Closet; Volume is the Skeleton.” An absolute banger, as these things go.
The upshot is that volume is a more reliable long-term indicator of a brewery’s overall health than pricing, which can be hiked in short-term inflationary environments to conceal slowing sales velocity. Frankly, I think volume is a more reliable signal of portfolio performance no matter the context. What better way to figure out whether a company is good at selling beer than to simply look at the amount of beer they’re selling?
By this metric, Anheuser-Busch InBev is simply not very good at selling craft beer. (And neither is Molson Coors.)
Each year around this time, the Brewers Association (BA) publishes the production volumes of the country’s breweries in its magazine, The New Brewer. This year, they did likewise. The May/June 2025 issue of The New Brewer hit the wire last week, finally giving us a look at the skeletons in the American brewing industry’s closet. Appropriately, the biggest single story within this trove of volume data was skeletal itself. In 2024, New Belgium Brewery (NBB), led by its mighty-if-moderating Voodoo Ranger sub-brand, overtook ABI’s craft brewing portfolio on volume, churning out 1.864 million barrels to the much bigger firm’s 1.79 million. Like Goose Island, Elysian, Golden Road, and the rest of ABI’s remaining craft breweries, NBB does not meet the BA’s definition of a craft brewery; its 2019 acquisition by Lion Little World Beverages, a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate Kirin, sealed that fate for itself and Bell’s Brewery, which it acquired in late 2021. Unlike ABI’s craft footprint, NBB eked out net volume growth in 2024 (the two notched -3 percent and 1 percent, respectively), and now sits in second place for the largest “big craft” producer in the country behind Molson Coors.
A question you might be tempted to ask is how two craft breweries backed by a mid-major multinational macrobrewer could beat nine craft breweries backed by the biggest multinational macrobrewer in the world. A better question, though, is how it even took this long for NBB to surpass ABI on the craft volume charts. And I’m not just talking about the fact that this flip-flop near the top was obviously baked into volume figures for the two firms for much of the past decade, either. This goes back further.
ABI has been developing a strategy for the segment since well before the “I” ever entered the picture in 2008. In all that time, it never found one that a) worked and b) it could stick with. From the “ignore, then crush, then copy” protocol of the ‘90s, to the half-assed stake it amassed (via Red Hook and Widmer Brothers) in the company formed in 2008 as the Craft Brewers Alliance (CBA), to the astonishingly expensive, almost manic brewery buying spree it went on throughout much of the past decade (which included over a dozen individual breweries, and the handful of brands held by the since-renamed Craft Brew Alliance), ABI’s tenure in the segment has smacked of impulsivity and braggadocio, not long-range corporate discipline.
What was it doing acquiring Northern Brewer Homebrew Supply and RateBeer? What was it doing launching a craft beer publication with Condé Nast? What was it doing opening Veza Sur in 2017 in Miami despite its terrible track record of homegrowing craft brands, and the option it had to acquire that city’s Wynwood Brewery along with the rest of CBA just two years later — which it ultimately did, after paying $20 million to hem and haw about it for a couple months?
At various points, some of ABI’s craft moves sorta looked strategic. If you squinted, I guess. But in hindsight, they never amounted to much, and as the segment slowed, those shortcomings showed. Cue the layoffs and reorganizations in its craft division in March 2023; cue the fire sale of about half that pricey portfolio to Tilray Brands in August of that year. The 2024 volumes that ABI’s remaining craft brands posted don’t amount to much, either. Four of the nine are in the black, with Golden Road and Wicked Weed leading that cohort at 5 percent volume gains. Not bad in a year when the segment was down 4 percent. But the other five are down: Goose Island and Elysian, ABI’s first- and third-largest brands, lost 3 and 8 percent volume, respectively, and it gets uglier from there. The fact that poor Platform Beer Co. was down a staggering 60 percent in 2024 doesn’t matter — the drop from 15,000 to 6,000 barrels is a rounding error at the mothership — but it does illustrate a lack of strategy and follow-through, given it was only acquired in 2019 and started losing volume almost immediately. The overall portfolio just barely beat the segment’s losses, notching a 3 percent volume decline.
Perhaps most alarming for the head honchos at ABI is Kona’s performance. The brand has been a public priority for the company since 2023, when the brass tapped its flagship Big Wave as a potential countervailing force to Modelo Especial, as Jerard Fagerberg reported for VinePair at the time. In the BA’s data, Kona is lumped in with Cisco Brewing because they both wound up in ABI’s portfolio via the CBA acquisition, so we don’t know its specific barrelage last year. But the pair was only up 2 percent in 2024, and Cisco ain’t that big. Big Wave’s off-premise scans in multi-outlet grocery, mass retail, and convenience stores tracked by market research firm Circana show it up 3.6 percent in volume in the 52 weeks through April 20, and 6 percent in the prior four, so it’s not like the beer isn’t selling. And its draft sales, unrepresented in the off-premise figures, are likely substantial. But the next high-volume “lifestyle platform,” this ain’t.
I should note here that the reason ABI was outstripped by NBB on craft volume has as much to do with the latter’s transformative Voodoo Ranger vision, smart single-serve/c-store strategy, and pretty darn good execution as it does with the former’s flailing. It’s true. It’s also true that NBB has struggled to figure out what to do with Bell’s; that portfolio has been delivering single-digit swings from red to black and back since the acquisition, closing out 2024 down 2 percent. And it’s not like Molson Coors is doing better in the craft segment than its forever foe! Blue Moon is still the segment leader, thanks to its colossal base, but it was down another 5 percent last year. Leinenkugel’s, treated more like an afterthought by MC’s c-suite now maybe ever since getting acquired way back in 1988, was down 9 percent. The firm is now just 83,000 barrels ahead of NBB, and falling. Another changing of the guard looms.
I should also note that some stuff ABI is doing in the craft segment is working. Namely its tighter focus on key brands — Big Wave, yes, but also Goose Island’s Beer Hug, Elysian’s Space Dust, and Golden Road’s Mango Cart. My eagle-eyed colleague at Brewbound, Justin Kendall, spotted a LinkedIn post from Andy Thomas, president of ABI’s craft division, touting how a “simpler, more focused approach” has helped those brands, as well as Devil’s Backbone’s vodka-based Crush canned cocktail line, break through. Those individual products can’t buoy ABI’s entire craft portfolio on their own, but they can help, and are.
A lot of craft breweries have learned the need for more discipline as the segment’s growth hit an inflection point earlier this decade, or are in the process of learning it now. (If they’re not already out of business because they never did.) Maybe ABI’s craft division has finally settled on a strategy that gives its remaining brands a shot at lasting success. We’ll see. But for now, it’s still paying the tab on a decade of half-baked ideas and overprojections in the segment, and its volumes tell the tale. No bones about it.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
As you may recall, Busch Light Apple is back on shelves after ABI pulled the brand in 2023 for reasons unclear. People loved Bapple then, and they love it now, so it’s selling at a healthy clip. In fact, it’s doing so well that ABI’s portfolio posted its best share gains in years, per NielsenIQ scan data from the four weeks through May 10 analyzed by Beer Marketer’s Insights. The firm’s overall footprint gained 0.6 share of volume and 0.3 share of dollars compared to the beer category writ large; in the same frame, Constellation Brands won only 0.3 share and 0.4 share, respectively. It’s Bapple driving those sweet sweet gains for ABI, up 0.9 share of volume and 0.6 share of dollars for that period. Of course, the fact that the portfolio of the country’s biggest macrobrewer is so responsive to share gains of a limited-time apple-flavored line extension isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of the rest of that portfolio.
📈 Ups…
Highland Brewing announced plans for a “celebration of life” in late June after Sunday’s passing of founder and industry icon Oscar Wong at 84… Pacifico and Quiksilver are doing a third merch line together, why not?… Montauk Brewing and Faherty debuted a collaborative clothing collection, fine go for it… Blake’s Hard Cider and Carhartt did a charity 12-pack, sure, I guess… Pabst Blue Ribbon and Timberland PRO are making co-branded boots, is everybody working off the same memo or… The United States Department of Agriculture is soon to release Vera, “the most aromatically intense public hop” that expert Eric Sannerud has ever smelled…
📉 …and downs
Conservative Texas lawmakers snuck a last-minute THC ban onto the governor’s desk… Oskar Blues Brewery is releasing Dale’s Pale Ale and American Light Lager in limited-edition “denim” cases, but they’re not made out of the actual fabric… Trump’s new-ish Federal Trade Commission officials dropped the authority’s price discrimination suit against PepsiCo… A big new study’s initial (i.e., not peer-reviewed yet) finding estimated cancer deaths linked to alcohol doubled between 1990 and 2021… Thanks to Trump’s gutting of the federal workforce, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau has lost 13 percent of its staff…
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