Late last week, right as the American drinking public was cracking its first cold one of Labor Day weekend, a federal court ruled that a raft of President Donald Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs were illegal. The decision isn’t the final word. The case is headed straight to the Supreme Court, where Trump’s toadies will be forced to decide what they love more: protecting capital’s interest in free markets, or prostrating themselves before the executive branch. But as I noted at the time, the decision marked an emotional victory — scored in part by a small, family-owned wine importer in New York, the suit’s lead plaintiff — for the United States’ beleaguered beverage-alcohol business after a tough summer made worse by Trump’s trade war.
While we wait to find out just how low our robéd wizards will stoop to smooch the president’s ass, those tariffs remain in place: The court set its ruling to take effect mid-October to allow SCOTUS time to hear the case. And even if the highest court in the land upholds the decision, it doesn’t affect the many other levies currently pummeling the beer business with higher prices and more uncertainty. Chief among them, the 50 percent tax on aluminum imports, which the Commerce Department clarified also includes lids and ends in mid-August. “Aluminum remains the single largest input cost for most breweries’ packaging operations,” warned the Brewers Association (BA) in a blog post about that latest turn of the executive knife.
I know how this works. You know how this works. As Trump’s tariffs make breweries’ inputs more expensive — and distributors’ and retailers’ — they will be forced to pass those costs along to you, the consumer. Like so many other basic facts, Trump has repeatedly denied this one, but he’s a lying liar who lies. Even The Wall Street Journal editorial board, one of MAGA’s strongest soldiers in the fight for mainstream public opinion, isn’t buying this whopper. The costs of tariffs haven’t “shown up in consumer prices so far because many companies entered the Trump tariff era with large cash reserves or wider margins, so they can absorb these costs for the time being,” wrote the opinion-havers atop Rupert Murdoch’s masthead in a mid-August editorial. “But these companies can’t do this forever.” They’re right, and they should say it.
Beer prices are going to get higher. They already have been, in fact. Trump’s tariffs aren’t the only factor. The housing crisis — which he promised to fix “on Day One,” by the way — is helping to drive up the cost of labor, while the increase in the cost of fuel and other key brewing inputs is more attributable to the general shitshow into which he’s thrust global trade, rather than any one of his levies. Hispanic consumers are staying home from stores and taprooms out of well-founded fear of being violently kidnapped by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) thugs, not aluminum taxes per se. The administration has caused craft brewers all sorts of headaches up- and downstream of its dismal trade policies, in other words. But Trump’s tariffs are hurting small, independent brewers, and many of them have spoken out about this to the media in general and this column in particular. They’re right, and they should say it.
I hope they continue to. (My inbox is always open: [email protected]!) The craft brewing industry needs its small businesses — sacred cows on the congressional campaign trail that rarely command the same attention and clout when lobbying at the Capitol — to continue making the populist case against Trump’s tariffs. Our federal lawmakers may be cowardly clowns on balance, but sustained pressure from taxpaying constituents will be a factor in any future reclamation of the national purse strings. Keep it up. In the meantime, here’s another idea, courtesy of Brian Alberts, a historian, writer, and consultant specializing in American beer history and culture.
“I will immediately buy a six-pack of the first brand that I see print how much tariffs add to the cost of said six-pack,” he posted on Bluesky the other day.
America’s brewers: Brew protest beer. Advertise the cost increase of your aluminum cans on your aluminum cans. Sell an India Pale Ale called Trade War Casualty. Print your next run of 12-pack cartons with a callout that reads “Tariffs Are Killing Craft” right next to the alcohol-by-volume statement and the phone number for the Capitol switchboard. Dipshit right-wingers have been trying to smuggle their politics into the beer aisle for at least half a decade. It hasn’t really worked, because the liquid inside the cans tends to suck as much as the ideology on the labels. But the general thesis is sound. Beer can be a vehicle for relaying political messaging directly from brewers to drinkers, with neither journalistic interlocutors, costly advertising, nor billionaire-controlled algorithms in between. It has been before, and with Trump’s tariffs walloping the struggling craft beer segment, it can be again.
Last month, this column took a trip down memory lane to revisit the excise tax battles of the early ‘90s, when the mighty National Beer Wholesalers Association dialed up a rolling protest — literally, distributors’ trucks emblazoned with 1-800-BEER-TAX — to beat back a threatened hike to fund then-President Bill Clinton’s proposed healthcare reform. But that’s just one protest story among many.
“I can’t think of an exact precedent in this case, but there are historical candidates,” says Alberts, who graciously granted me license to turn his post into the column you’re now reading. “In terms of political engagement and activism, there are lots of examples from Prohibition and the earlier temperance movements. Brewers of course used industry org[anizations] and allied social groups to put out quite a bit of propaganda.” (In fact, he and I spoke about this very subject for a June 2023 column.) He also mentions Pabst Brewing Company’s rumored gambit during Prohibition itself, when the country’s then-leading “shipper” conducted a brisk mail-order business selling malt syrup. Depending on the version of this apocryphal tale you hear, the firm either packaged the non-alcoholic syrup with a label “warning” buyers not to follow precise instructions lest they “accidentally” fermented beer, or followed up shipments of the stuff with unmarked envelopes containing those same instructions. Whether this actually happened is up for debate: The authoritative “The Pabst Brewing Company: The History of American Business” makes no mention of such flagrant federal subversion from the country’s first million-barrel macrobrewer. But smaller players in the sector did play similar tricks, expanding the political messaging possibilities for beer as they did.
More recent history offers more direct proxies for any brewers interested in turning their medium into a message. “In addition to the excise taxes spat you mentioned, I think the 2000s/2010s campaigns to change barrel capacity limits at the state level might also be helpful” to consider, says Alberts. “In Indiana, for one, the two largest breweries (Three Floyds and Sun King) put out a collab beer called ‘Slacktivist’ and had a notice posted in their brewpubs.” The goal, as the latter’s founding brewer told Indianapolis Monthly back in 2015, was to generate political support for the industry from enthusiasts who “are active in a cause, but from their comfort zone.” The bills up for consideration at the time ultimately became law, tripling Hoosier State brewers’ volume cap with a stroke of the governor’s pen.
(Of course, there were also a bajillion “lockdown”-themed beers during the early days of the pandemic. But on memory and Untappd search, I think those were more tongue-in-cheek jokes and/or gnashing of teeth than meaningful attempts to shape policy. Ditto, the spate of generic anti-Trump stunt beers that appeared during his first term, and the “Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself” New England IPA from Michigan’s Rusted Spoke Brewing Co. in 2019. Not the same thing, really.)
To anticipate an obvious counterargument here: The political economy around provoking the federal government has shifted tremendously in the past decade, and not for the better. It’s reasonable to imagine brewers could face criticism for selling protest beers that oppose Trump’s tariffs, even if they resist the urge to mock the president himself. I’m not particularly sympathetic to the chief executives of major corporate macrobrewers for tiptoeing around the basic reality that Trump’s trade war is bad for the beer business, but craft brewers with a fraction of the legal resources of, say, a Constellation Brands would do well to proceed cautiously with protest beers. Criticizing the President of the United States is constitutionally protected speech, but this particular POTUS has been trampling the Constitution. He’s also demonstrated no reservations about weaponizing the federal bureaucracy against foes. While the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau has no rule on the books that would block this sort of label-borne dissent (that I’m aware of, at least; this is not legal advice!), and has lost a big chunk of staff to enforce its rules thanks to the administration’s Elon Musk-abetted evisceration of the administrative state, the craft brewing industry remains subject to the agency’s oversight. I certainly don’t begrudge struggling craft breweries that opt to keep their heads down on the tariff troubles in favor of shoring up their balance sheets and protecting their local communities.
For the willing, there’s also a question of efficacy. Will protest beers undo the damage Trump’s trade war has done to the American craft brewing business? No, of course not. Just as cause beers are completely outmatched by the scope of climate change, this is not a catastrophe from which the segment can count on mere consumer choice to deliver it. (Especially not at a time when consumers have more choices than ever.) But that’s not really craft brewers’ job, either. It’s Congress’s responsibility to act as a check on the lawless president, and it’s Democrats’ responsibility to persuade American voters to restore the party to institutional power there in 2026. That’s the only scenario — barring the mythical GOP “come to Jesus” moment on Trump that some delusional Democrats insist is just around the corner — in which the industry, and the broader U.S. economy, get out from under Trump’s arbitrary tariffs and future threats thereof.
Craft brewers’ project right now is to stay afloat amid flagging sales and galvanize support among rank-and-file drinkers. Trump’s tariffs are deeply unpopular, and despite the segment’s aggregate struggles, people still love their local breweries. There’s a lane here for compelling direct-to-consumer political messaging that calls Americans to action. Tell rank-and-file consumers what Trump’s tariffs are costing you, brewers. And then tell them to call Congress.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
All politics are local, as the saying goes. You know what else is? Craft brewing, bay-bee. I don’t know how to segue this, so: Dan Kleban, co-founder of Maine Beer Company, threw in for the Democratic nomination to challenge Susan Collins (R-Concerned) for her seat in the U.S. Senate come 2026. There’s some recent-ish precedent here, what with John Hickenlooper, the co-founder of Wynkoop Brewery out in Colorado, currently cruising towards\ a second term in the upper chamber of Congress. (Though, he also did time as Denver’s mayor and then the Rocky Mountain State’s governor before becoming a senator in 2020.) On one hand, with the craft brewing business so tough these days, it seems like a bad moment for a brewery owner to focus on what’s sure to be a grueling primary. On the other, everybody loves Lunch. Can Kleban pull off a Hick-trick? Stay tuned.
📈 Ups…
Garage Beer — the lawnmower beer for millennials that can’t afford yards — announced new investment that values the brand at $200 million… After an impasse in Gov. Greg Abbott’s post-veto special legislative session, THC beverages live to fight another day in Texas… Congratulations to this year’s recipients of Diversity in Beer Writing grants from the North American Guild of Beer Writers… Xul Beer Co. out of Knoxville will take over Southern Grist Brewing and its two Nashville locations…
📉 …and downs
Constellation Brands revised its financial guidance down and is now projecting a 2 to 4 percent decline in net beer sales in the face of Trump’s trade/race war… The National Beer Wholesalers Association’s monthly Beer Purchasers’ Index showed all segments contracting in August… In a reversal of last week’s statement that they’d lined up a new CEO, 21st Amendment Brewery’s original co-founders now say they’re shuttering the 25-year-old business entirely…
This story is a part of VP Pro, our free platform and newsletter for drinks industry professionals, covering wine, beer, liquor, and beyond. Sign up for VP Pro now!
