I’m old enough to remember a time when celebrating the Fourth of July didn’t feel like an inherently partisan act. The United States was never perfect, maybe never even good, but I can kinda-sorta remember feeling like everybody was pulling in the same general direction. Like they could still “share a beer together” despite their differences. I used to think Budweiser’s AmeriCans were cool! But then I grew up and recognized that premise for the treacly bullshit it is. The national mood has shifted apace: Poll after poll suggests Americans are less and less proud to be American. Not Republicans, though. They’re stoked about the direction this country is headed.
For the past half-decade or so, I’ve been reporting on how the United States’ political polarization — this has become a catchphrase, but I mean it literally here — shapes the beer industry. From the Bud Light fiasco to craft brewery disaster relief, the upshot is “a lot, and not for the better.” But this Independence Day, with a radical right-wing government trying to drown the constitutional order into the dish pit of history, I want to take a closer look at a very literal outgrowth of this hothouse dynamic. Namely, the rise of beer brands that pander to conservative drinkers with marketing and packaging that affirms and celebrates a right-wing worldview.
Depressingly, there are quite a few of these! And there’s quite a tradition behind them, too. A key factor in contemporary conservative grievance politics is the notion that conservatives have been unfairly snubbed and condescended to by American culture-producing institutions. This (not entirely unfounded, but wildly overblown) grudge traces back a long way, and has occasionally manifested in the upper echelons of the beer industry. For example, before he wrote the check that launched the conservative ur-think tank the Heritage Foundation, Joseph Coors spent years getting red-assed at the University of Colorado’s supposedly permissive philosophy on campus anti-war protests and academic freedom as a regent of the school in the late ‘60s. By the end of the 20th century, direct-mail grifters had honed in on this conservative insecurity, selling all manner of snake oil to angry rubes on the Republican voter rolls. Supplements, movies, stock tips… an entire shadow economy of products to spend money on instead of the analogs peddled by liberal corporations.
Eventually, once all those veins of conservative angst had been tapped, partisan opportunists turned to perishable consumer packaged goods. Black Rifle Coffee Company really paved the way in this category, launching in 2014 and cashing in on the conservative id before it eventually became a victim of the beast it’d created. Some beer brands have followed: Armed Forces Brewing Co. in 2018, Happy Dad in 2021, Ultra Right in 2023, and Real American Beer in 2024. There are others, but these are probably the highest-profile brands of the bunch. Their differences in both marketing overtures to the nation’s aggrieved and staying power as actual brands offer a good window into the political economy of a pseudosegment I’ve taken to calling “suds for chuds.”
Let’s take these chronologically. As you may recall, things are not going great for Armed Forces Brewing Co. (AFBC) right now. As I reported in March 2025, the firm — which marketed its reportedly mediocre beers with pro-military imagery and capitalized its enterprise by selling Regulation A stock to unaccredited investors — had to beat a hasty retreat from the “local woke mob” in its adopted hometown of Norfolk, Va. after less than two years in business there. It’s currently shopping for a new site in Florida or Texas, but with what money, it’s unclear. Late last month, the Virginia Mercury reported that AFBC had fallen $1.5 million short of its emergency fundraising goal, perhaps because its latest filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission indicate it had been using previous investors’ capital to cover its operating losses for the past two years. Even Troop Respecters don’t like throwing good money after bad. Speaking of bad, AFBC’s sales are hurting. Off-premise scan data from NielsenIQ (NIQ) for the 12 months through mid-June 2025 show the company has declined 17 percent in volume and 15 percent in dollars. There are worse performers on craft brewing’s long tail, sure, but that’s a lot of red ink.
Opposite from AFBC in pretty much every way is Happy Dad, the upstart hard seltzer brand co-founded by the YouTube edgelords known as The Nelk Boys. Happy Dad’s simple, retro branding doesn’t scream MAGA, but its co-founders certainly do. As I reported in Fingers in November 2024, The Nelk Boys attached themselves to President Donald Trump as early as 2020, and in 2022 used their podcast, “Full Send,” to help him gain entree into the broader conservative “manosphere” that supposedly factored into his return to the White House. The very first video Vice President J.D. Vance posted to TikTok, in August 2024, was of him accepting a case of Happy Dad from the right-wing entertainers. Happy Dad has had remarkable success, leaping past much bigger firms’ flagging hard seltzer brands on the sales charts. Through mid-June, its core line — already a top-five player in the segment — grew 18 percent volume and 16 percent dollars; its hard tea extension is going gangbusters, up 177 percent and 158 percent in volume and dollars, respectively. Whether that has anything to do with The Nelk Boys’ ties to Trumpland is harder to say, but non-Nelk co-founder Sam Shahidi insisted to Brewbound earlier this year that the brand has transcended the conservative group anyway. “[W]e actually don’t have to rely on them to do any marketing at all,” he said.
Ultra Woke is… or was… man, what even was Ultra Woke? Launched by B-list Republican troll Seth Weathers as little more than a transphobic spoof video drafting off the early conservative backlash to Bud Light in April 2023, “Conservative Dad’s ULTRA RIGHT 100% Woke Free American Beer” has been plagued by careless operating snafus and an apparent ignorance of the three-tier system from the jump. After taking a bunch of orders from button-mashing Facebook philistines, Ultra Right struggled to deliver, eventually earning an F rating with the Better Business Bureau in early 2024 due to complaints of unfulfilled orders. On the heels of that resounding failure, the brand expanded into tequila for racists and swimsuit calendars for horny racists. Ultra Right still appears to be operating, but two and a half years later, I have yet to see product in the wild. If it’s making sales, they’re not happening in NIQ-tracked channels.
Then, there’s Real American Beer (RAB). Fronted and majority-owned by Terry “Hulk Hogan” Bollea, this brand was the subject of my Independence Day column last year. If you missed that one, the upshot is that he introduced the beer — wrapped in a stylized illustration of himself waving an American flag — as his project to “bring America back together” on Fox News, just a month or so before getting on national television at the Republican National Convention to do whatever this was in support of Trump’s candidacy. RAB’s apolitical pablum was always bullshit, of course. But the brand has started dropping the pretense lately, heralding its eight-state Walmart rollout earlier this year with a press release proclaiming, “Something’s changing in America. Pride is back. Flags are flying. And real people — the ones who keep this country running — are ready to be seen again.” It’s grievance all the way down, bay-bee! Because nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American drinking public. RAB has actually been doing pretty well in the off-premise, posting cartoonishly large growth on very small comps from its rookie year. And if RAB lands that Hooter’s licensing deal, just think of the merchandising revenues!
If there’s a lesson here — a Hop Take unifying theory of suds for chuds — it’s this: Partisan politics can be an attractive vehicle for beer marketing if there’s an actual strategy behind the brand trying to harness them. But even then, there are limits. Selling beer is hard, complex, low-margin work, and the competition is fierce. There’s no doubt conservative reaction is potent; Bud Light can attest to that. But it’s a destructive force, not a constructive one, and underperforming pander-brands that stoke culture-war grievances without a plan to leverage them into something more lasting — and less overtly right-wing — just wind up with a bunch of aggrieved customers. A fitting outcome, maybe, but nothing to be proud of.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
Concentration camps are a grotesque manifestation of the worst impulses of fascist dehumanization. Anybody with a soul can grasp this basic moral failure for what it is. Then, there’s the Florida Republican Party. As the Trump administration crows about using Federal Emergency Management Agency funds to build a so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” — in plain terms, a gulag for unconstitutionally detained nonwhite people — in the swamps north of Miami, the vile apparatchiks of the state’s GOP rushed to update its e-commerce page with a new koozie to celebrate the black stain on American history. At an absurd $15-per-pair price, not only is this authoritarian tailgate swag a dismal bid to capitalize on the most shameful appetites of the national id, it’s also clearly targeted at the biggest suckers in the United States. Two sides of the same coin, that.
📈 Ups…
Urban Chestnut is emerging from Chapter 11 bankruptcy with an acquisition of the brands of fellow St. Louis area firm O’Fallon Brewery, which closed last year… Leading hard kombucha “alternative alcohol” firm JuneShine says the THC seltzer it co-branded with Willie Nelson is its fastest-growing product launch yet…
📉 …and downs
Palmetto Brewing, the oldest craft brewery in South Carolina, shuttered last week due to a $7.4-million debt dispute between its current and former owner… Constellation Brands’ quarterly earnings were no bueno, with MAGA immigration crackdowns and metal tariffs dragging down sales… Peroni’s summer marketing stunt, “Italian Beer Ice,” looks delicious, but it’s not available in stores and costs $50 for a 6-pack through Goldbelly…
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