Late last month, I received a comment from a reader about my column on the American brewing industry’s collective overcapacity problem. Well, more of a request, really.
“Dave can you put out a piece that’s happy?” they asked. “Love your journalism, I believe their [sic] are winners out there though. You do ask the tough questions which I appreciate.”
I saw it as a teachable moment. “Generally speaking, I don’t consider it a columnist’s role to produce coverage designed to evoke a specific emotion,” I responded. “That said, you’re always welcome to send me pitches and tips about the ‘winners’ you’re seeing in the market (which, I agree, certainly exist!)” I never heard back. Maybe that’s for the best, though, because this week’s column hangs on a tough question, too. Namely: How have beer sales been looking now that both college and professional football are back in full swing?
The answer is hardly happy. Data from the market-intelligence platform BeerBoard indicate beer sales took a beating in the on-premise over the National Football League’s opening weekend (Sept. 4-7), fumbling 7.3 percent on draft and 8.3 percent in package compared to the same frame last year. “Much of that decline fell on beer and seltzers,” noted chief marketing officer J.C. Whipple in a press release. “[W]hile RTD and NA options do not claim as much share as Light Lager and Lagers in package sales, they continued to outperform with impressive growth of +37.6 percent and +39.7 percent, respectively.” As is often the case in the contemporary beer market, if you’re looking for silver linings, you’ll strictly find them shining in small denominators. Beer proper used to be capable of delivering those sorts of gains on gameday, too, and not so long ago: BeerBoard tracked a 21 percent bump in on-premise draft sales during the NFL’s opening weekend in 2022, and 19 percent in 2021. Those are sobering stat lines compared to this year’s tackle for loss.
Of course, for every jersey-clad jabroni yelling at a flatscreen in America’s sports bars, there are several more doing the exact same thing at home. But off-premise sales figures coming out of the NFL’s opening weekend are looking pretty gritty, too. According to off-premise scan data from the market research firm Circana, the category’s 3.4 percent dollar and 5 percent volume year-over-year declines for the week through Sept. 7 outran those of total beverage alcohol (-2.6 percent and -4.3 percent). “Upcoming, the data is likely to remain rangebound for [the] next several weeks and perhaps until Halloween when we may see [a] small spike in the data,” wrote Circana’s executive vice-president of BevAl, Scott Scanlon, in a depressing dispatch reported by Brewbound. Translation: Don’t expect supermarket and convenience store sales to come blitzing back in Week Two, or thereafter.
No one factor fully explains beer’s loosening grip on the pigskin. But from my spot on the sideline, a few loom particularly large. Let’s draw this up together. (All right, that’s my last football pun.)
First, foremost, and football-agnostically: To the extent that the category has had a “typical” year since the pandemic, 2025 certainly hasn’t been one of them. Between the Trump administration’s disastrous, deeply unpopular tariffs, its reign of terror on immigrant communities, and its performative militarization of American cities more generally, there are a lot of new headwinds gusting forth from the White House and buffeting national beer sales apace.
Constellation Brands, with its industry-leading exposure to both Mexican imports and Hispanic consumers, is an obvious bellwether here, and just last month, it revised down its guidance for the current fiscal year, projecting a 2 to 4-percent decline in its beer division’s net sales growth and a 7 to 9 percent decline in that division’s net operating income. (Both metrics had previously been projected to land just barely in the black.) “Over the last several months, high-end beer buy rates decelerated sequentially, as both trip frequency and spend per trip declined,” wrote Constellation chief executive Bill Newlands in a note to investors. “Notably, high-end beer buy rate declines for Hispanic consumers were more pronounced than general market declines, which has an outsized impact on our Beer Business compared to the broader beer category.”
That’s certainly true, but there’s no reason to assume the broader beer category isn’t getting dragged down with it. Research from the multicultural consumer insights firm Collage Group reported by beverage journalist Kate Bernot in October 2024 — shortly before the election that would send Trump back to Washington — showed that 77 percent of Hispanic drinkers reported drinking beer in the prior three months, 12 percent higher than non-Hispanics. Between its taste for beer and its rapid-until-recently population growth, this is a key demographic for the category (not to mention for the NFL itself). That beer sales would be suffering as Hispanic drinkers suffer — because Hispanic drinkers suffer — makes sense.
Meanwhile, restaurant receipts in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. absolutely cratered during Trump’s illegal deployments of the National Guard to those cities, which has done on-premise sales performance no favors. The administration threatened a similar deployment in Chicago, and now says it will do likewise in Memphis. It’s still too early to understand whether this will suppress general turnout from the American drinking public on Saturdays and Sundays beyond the limits of the targeted cities, or in the long term. But from these acute pressures, neither the NFL nor the American beer industry is immune. So add all that in there.
Even if Trump hadn’t been reelected, though, there are also more specific, long-ranging challenges to beer’s once-dominant position as the go-to refreshment of the 53 percent of adults in the United States who call themselves football fans. That relationship was forged in the mid-20th century, when there were barely any breweries still operating and High Noon wasn’t even a glimmer in Ernest Gallo’s eye. It was consummated during the Light Beer Wars, when pre-InBev Anheuser-Busch (A-B) and Philip-Morris-backed Miller Brewing spent pornographic sums to dominate national sports broadcasts — all sports, yes, but especially football — with unrelenting commercials touting singular, straightforward brands. In the late ‘80s A-B struck a deal with the NFL to be the exclusive beverage-alcohol advertiser of the Super Bowl’s national broadcast, only finally giving up that ghost in 2023.
In the intervening three decades, everything changed for the industry, and barely anything for the better. Spirits firms broke their self-imposed, half-century-long moratorium on TV advertising in 1996. Bud Light’s sales peaked in 2008, by which point craft brewers had already begun to open drinkers’ palates to more full-flavored beers — delicious, sure, but not the sort the average consumer could knock down 11 of between the first kick-off and the final two-minute drill on any given Sunday. White Claw hit shelves in 2016; High Noon, 2019. Diageo landed the NFL’s first-ever spirits sponsorship in 2021. Gallo slid Barefoot into the slot previously occupied by ABI’s erstwhile canned wine brand, Babe, in 2022. And so on.
Mind you, football itself hasn’t gotten any less popular in this period, at least as appointment viewing. (Youth participation rates are another story.) New data from Nielsen, published in May of this year by Comcast, shows the NFL’s “Sunday Night Football” broadcast leading the pack in virtually every available metric for the 14th year in a row, and college football viewership was up a staggering 21 percent year-over-year through the second week of its season, also per Nielsen data. But beer has certainly gotten less popular thanks to all the usual suspects, from increased competition, to changing tastes, to flagship reshuffling.
None of this means beer isn’t still America’s preferred alcoholic beverage for enjoying America’s most watched sport. It is! But these small losses add up, and you can see them pencil out in myriad data. In 2023, for example, the consumer-research firm Numerator found that 47 percent of people were planning to buy beer to watch that year’s Super Bowl, per Brewbound; in 2025, it was down to 40 percent. Still leading wine and spirits, but losing ground.
With Modelo getting hammered by the Trump administration’s immigration policies and the Big Three light beers all in decline, the category’s biggest football-aligned brands are badly positioned to overcome these longer-range cultural shifts every Saturday and Sunday. It’s not a death spiral, but it’s not a tight spiral either.
Sorry, sorry: that’s my last football pun.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
Your humble Hop Take editor is old enough to remember how the adjunct craze late last decade led some craft breweries to cut corners on quality control in order to get big fruity India pale ales and kettle sours to market… which led to some of those juice bombs actually exploding on shelves when the fruit within refermented in the cans. Not great! But look-ee here: Just last weekend, Costco issued a recall of a Kirkland brand Prosecco in 10 states because the glass bottles in which it’s packaged might go ka-pow! in your pantry. Which is definitely worse. I mean, obviously we’d live in a world where no beverage-alcohol containers were going boom at all. But… uh… take that, wine industry!!!
📈 Ups…
Bucking industry malaise and the “doom loop” narrative, East Brother Beer Co. has opened up a big ol’ biergarten in the supposed cesspool of San Francisco… Senate Democrats are trying to block draft legislation that they say would destroy the hemp industry… Speaking of which, the Hemp Beverage Alliance continues its march to legitimacy, announcing a new data partnership with Vermont Information Processing this week…
📉 …and downs
Island Brands USA, a Southeastern “LiFeStyLe pLaTfOrM” that raised $1.5 million from retail investors in 2022, appears to have gone belly-up in May and is now facing an investor lawsuit… Iron Hill Brewery, the fourth-largest brewpub in the country, shut down three of its Delaware locations last week… Reuters reflected on the legacy of the ABI-SABMiller merger on its 10th anniversary, and the upshot is “bad call, Carlos Brito”…
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