I just flew back from the Hemp Beverage Expo, and boy, are my arms tired! [Pauses for laughter that does not come.] No, but seriously folks, we’ve got a great crowd tonight, which is why it kills me to tell you that the vibes I was getting from those THC-slinging true believers were downright ebullient, even with the regulatory sword of Damocles dangling over them at both the federal and state levels! Meanwhile, back here in boring ol’ beer, it’s been a bummer of a summer, huh? I’d like to pull a Costanza and exit stage left before the bad news hits, but it’s my job to deliver it.
As is quarterly tradition here at Hop Take, today’s column will be a high-level recap of how the American beer industry fared over the past three-ish months. It didn’t bomb as badly as my weird little rhetorical stand-up routine above! But kill, it did not. Here’s your Hop Take Quarterly Beer Business Report Card for the second frame of 2025.
Subject: Government
Grade: A
Well, they finally did it, folks. After almost a decade of griping engaging with key stakeholders, the National Beer Wholesalers Association and its politically powerful constituency won the permanent 20 percent tax deduction on pass-through businesses they’d coveted ever since the first Trump administration created a temporary 20 percent deduction back in 2017. We appear to have our answer to the question of whether fêting noted MAGA creep Kellyanne Conway at the NBWA Legislative Conference earlier this year was worth it. More good news for the United States’s smol-bean brewers hit in mid-June, with Reuters reporting that the maybe-forthcoming Dietary Guidelines for Americans not only eschew the World Health Organization’s “no safe level” language about alcohol intake, but actually don’t even include a specific consumption recommendation at all. When you trust the science, the science trusts you. Oh, also, Missouri dropped its excise tax and gave Anheuser-Busch InBev a $4 million tax break for no reason. Besides patriotism!!! Big wins all around for my dear personal friends in the big beer trade groups’ lobbying shops, if not necessarily, y’know, the rest of us.
Subject: Fluid (Sales) Dynamics
Grade: D+
The conventional wisdom, derived from decades of sales data, is that the period between Memorial Day and Labor Day is the most important season for selling beer. There are all sorts of exceptions to this rule, but none of them are nearly big enough to offset what’s shaping up to be another rough summer for the American beer business. The category’s declines in Circana-tracked off-premise outlets outpaced those of total bev-alc for Memorial Day Weekend in both dollars and volume. The on-premise was also down for the unofficial kickoff of the summer selling season. The NBWA’s Beer Purchasers’ Index for June showed every single segment contracting, as well as beer overall. The Beer Institute reported a big honkin’ 14.9 percent decrease in imports in April (the numbers were published in June), and Constellation Brands missed its quarterly earnings projections and posted a net-sales loss at the beginning of the month. (Molson Coors fared much worse; ABI, slightly worse.) And even with “massive acceleration” in total bev-alc sales over the Fourth of July, overall sales were still down a bit in Circana scanner data, and beer outpaced those declines. These days, that counts as a pleasant surprise for beer distributors. We’ll see what summer’s back nine bring.
Subject: Innovation Lab
Grade: B+
I’m bullish on cartoonishly oversized drinks packages, because if there’s one thing the American drinking public loves, it’s a gimmick. (And if there’s two things, it’s a gimmick, and flavors fit for a child.) But this past quarter has also seen some smart new moves into smaller-than-normal beer vessels, with Goose Island announcing 4-packs of 10-ounce bottles of Bourbon County Brand Stout and Sierra Nevada putting its PILS in 8-packs of 8.4-ounce cans. Plus, New Belgium is sticking with Voodoo Ranger Mini Rippers despite a sluggish start; the 7.5-ounce hazecans are in 25,000 retailers and climbing. Cute lil’ containers in more flexible and sessionable serving sizes, we love to see it. More major players moved into hard juice to goose sales. I don’t think you can really call brands like Garage Beer and Outlaw “innovative” for trying to #disrupt the lagging light beer space, not when everybody up to and including Pabst Brewing Company is trying to do likewise, but it’s nice to see brands stress-test some of the received wisdom of that segment. Ditto Michelob Ultra Zero, which really started to hammer (soberly) in the most recent frame.
Subject: Social Studies
Grade: D-
You know what’s not so nice? The, ah, “innovative” new ownership model Anchor Brewing Company’s sugar lactose daddy is running out in San Francisco, where the beloved steam brewery is still shuttered a year after being acquired in liquidation. Even so-called “benevolent” billionaires have their own priorities, and don’t forget it! As distributors continue to consolidate, a lot of workers are going to get hosed, whether it’s Republic National Distributing Company (whose 1,700 soon-to-be-laid-off California employees didn’t really handle beer), or Ohio Eagle (whose 178 soon-to-be-laid-off Western Ohio employees certainly did). Trade war bad for the beer business; authoritarian kidnapping regime also bad for the beer business. On the litigation tip, we didn’t get anything quite as freewheeling as ABI and Constellation Brands’ Corona hard seltzer case, or Stone and Molson Coors’ Keystone spat, but earlier this month somebody sued the late Terry Bollea’s suds-for-chuds brand Real American Beer alleging intellectual property theft. Keep an eye on it. Meanwhile, at least a few craft brewers are “divesting” from social media and investing in email newsletters, which is both strategically sound and good news for me personally. Less corporate brewers were less susceptible to pressure from right-wing charlatans during Pride Month than their multinational counterparts, which was a low bar, but still bears mention.
Subject: Craftology
Grade: C
The “painful period of rationalization” continued apace this past quarter, with small independent breweries in first- and second-wave hotbeds like the Pacific Northwest, Colorado, and New England doing mergers and acquisitions with one another in hopes of weathering the “second shakeout.” Regarding that aforementioned middle-tier consolidation, Hand Family of Brands scooped up key Southern California craft houses Scout LA and Stone Distributing, which probably ain’t good news for the little guys. (There, or nationally; as goes California…) This was also the quarter we got the latest batch of Brewers Association production data, and while there were some real winners among the net volume loss in 2024, overall things stayed very tough for the segment last year. But! Just as I was about to file this column, the BA’s midyear report came in, with half of all respondents showing volume growth… despite 4.1 percent overall segment volume declines. So it’s a real mixed bag.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
We’re midway through 2025, and even as its chief executive Irwin Simon keeps cutting SKUs, closing locations, and shuffling the org chart, Tilray Brands is still throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. For example: Mountain Shot, a new mushroom-infused whiskey from Breckenridge Distillery. I wouldn’t normally write about full-bottle spirits, this being a beer column and all. But here’s the beer hook. Not only is the firm packaging the 69-proof whiskey in weird little Capri Sun-style pouches adorned with AI-generated slop, but via Breckenridge Brewery (which it also owns), it’s rolling out a malt-based version at 100 milliliters and 16.5 percent alcohol by volume. It’s an apparent bid to emulate Fireball’s placement arbitrage with Fireball Cinnamon “beer.” Which, yes, has been very successful! But was also predicated on Fireball’s initial success in the liquor category.
📈 Ups…
After flopping around for a few years under the Kirin/Lion banner, it looks like Bell’s Brewery has a hit with Oberon Light… Goose Island released its 2025 Bourbon County Brand Stout lineup… Really proud of everybody for kinda just ignoring that stale New York Times piece about kids in taprooms…
📉 …and downs
Big Booze firms are sniffing around the THC seltzer segment… The Financial Times dropped a big (grim) update on BrewDog’s dismal shareholder outlook, ah memories… Reyes Beverage Group marches deeper into “total beverage” territory, signing Four Roses in California…
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