It was easy to be outrageously optimistic about the craft-brewing industry midway last decade. Too easy, in fact. Thanks in part to greater San Diego’s status as a bona fide first-wave craft-brewing hotbed, many of the trade’s toughest cautionary tales from the Terrible Tens/Teens started there.
Constellation Brands’ November 2015 announcement of plans to acquire Ballast Point for a cool billion dollars is the biggest boondoggle in the business, bar none. But everybody and their mother knows about Constellation’s glass-half-full-to-ass-half-out Ballast Point catastrophe. True connoisseurs of craft-brewing Icaruses outta Southern California may favor October 2014 for their deep cuts of salad-days delusion. That month, for example, Green Flash Brewing Company broke ground on a 58,000-square-foot plant in Virginia Beach that would close just four years later. It was also October 2014 that fellow SoCal high-flyer Stone Brewing concluded its multi-city search for a second location with the announcement that it would be taking its talents to Richmond, Va.
“We look forward to becoming an integral part of the lively craft beer community in Richmond, the state of Virginia and the entire eastern U.S.,” co-founder Greg Koch said in a press release at the time. The hope was that Stone’s then-legion diehard fans would bring cash to the firm’s East Coast outpost, hard by the James River in the East End of the commonwealth’s capital city, and that investment would follow. Tourists, Koch told The Washington Post in March 2015, “will spend money on hotel stays, local shops and local restaurants,” much like they did at the brewery’s original World Bistro & Gardens in Escondido, Calif., which was then doing a reported 600,000 visitors annually. And the monkey’s paw curled.
Earlier this month, Sapporo USA (née Sapporo-Stone Brewing, née-née Sapporo USA) announced plans to sell Stone to Firestone Walker, Duvel USA’s juggernaut in Paso Robles, for an undisclosed sum. The Japanese brewing giant is no stranger itself to California-based blunders, having euthanized San Francisco’s Anchor Brewing Co. in 2023, shortly after acquiring Stone for $165 million. All in, it has spent around $250 million on acquisitions in the segment since 2017, on craft breweries it no longer owns. If its strategy wasn’t just “buy firms named for things that sink and hope for the best,” well, that’s more or less how it shook out anyway.
“It’s not a story about offloading Stone, as much [as] it is about concentrat[ing] on Sapporo, and really putting the emphasis behind that brand as the sole company focus,” Zachary Keeling, the chief executive of the subsidiary, told Brewbound last week. That’s corporate palaver: Sapporo is offloading Stone. But it’s true that the parent company has plenty to focus on in its eponymous flagship, which is hammering right along. Sapporo Premium was up 14.4 percent in dollars and 10.4 percent in volume in multi-outlet grocery, mass retail, and convenience stores tracked by the market-research firm Circana over the 52 weeks through March 22. Having spent some $40 million to upgrade the brewery Stone opened in Richmond in 2016, Sapporo will now dedicate those tanks entirely to brewing enough of its own lager to serve U.S. markets.
It’s a happy enough outcome for Sapporo. Less so for the city of Richmond, which lined up the land deals and put its taxpayers on the hook for $31 million in general obligation bonds to lure Stone to town. (Disclosure: I’m a Richmond taxpayer; I didn’t live here when that bond issuance took place, but had I been, my city council member certainly would have gotten an earful about it.) The hospitality hub Koch and company envisioned on the “beat-up slab of concrete” on the northern bank of the James that the city had set aside for it never materialized, nor did those traveling hordes of cash-flashing Arrogant Bastards. Anecdotally, Stone’s sleek taproom has never been a destination even among Richmond’s drinking public. I live under a mile from the place, and I’ve never once seen its sprawling asphalt parking lot even half full. It was built for a future that never came to pass.
In a sense, much of Stone’s empire wound up like that Richmond parking lot. But it wasn’t always that way. Founded in 1996 during the heady days of the first “microbrewing” boom, the San Diego County outfit was for years a darling with drinkers and media alike thanks to its boundary-pushing beers and branding, and Koch’s boundary-pushing beardo proselytizing. “The Beer Jesus from America” — as a German tabloid coined the hirsute, wild-eyed founder early last decade, on the eve of Stone’s expansion to Berlin — lambasted odious corporate macrobrewers for their “fizzy yellow facsimile[s] of beer” and spoke eloquently to craft brewing’s “movement” roots. In the great David-and-Goliath battle of that era, with pre-InBev Anheuser-Busch nailing Boston Beer Company on “Dateline” and tapping pre-Stone Mitch Steele to clone popular India pale ales, Koch was the segment’s strongest soldier. Or at least its most quotable. “The commodity world … naturally, over time, reduces choice and quality, and those forces are strong, man,” he told me in 2016.
There were kernels of truth in much of Koch’s sermonizing, and for a while, it — in conjunction with its beers, which were genuinely groundbreaking for their time — produced real results for Stone. In 2017, just a year after I interviewed its co-founder for this Thrillist feature on “selling out” (more on that in a moment), Stone reached No. 8 on the Brewers Association’s annual ranking of craft breweries by volume. That year, Stone IPA did $28.8 million in chain retail sales tracked by the firm now known as Circana, according to a report from Good Beer Hunting. But it would be the brand’s high watermark. If the industry was, as Koch inelegantly claimed at the beginning of last decade, “like a Third World bus, with all these people hanging on to the roof” in danger of falling off when the road got rough, well, by the end of last decade, the brewery he co-founded had become one of those at-risk passengers.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see how Stone’s self-inflicted reputational damage and lack of focus did the firm in. But as somebody working the beat back then, I have to emphasize that it was also easy to see at the time. For a trip down memory lane, I revisited a 2020 Good Beer Hunting report casting the brewery (correctly, I think) as a “rebel without a cause,” in which longtime bev-alc journalist Kate Bernot laid out the latter-day missteps, overreaches, and underestimations that ushered the San Diego County juggernaut into dire straits.
Many of Stone’s image problems were directly downstream of Koch’s seemingly pathological inability to log off. Even as the brewery soared to spectacular success — or perhaps because it did — its co-founder descended into what the extremely online now semi-jokingly refer to as “poster’s madness.” For a stretch there, it felt like Koch was putting out 2,000-word blog posts every other week, taking on enemies real and perceived within the industry and beyond it. At times, this “beg for forgiveness, don’t ask for permission” approach to public communication appeared to seep into the walls of the place. Recall the vile tweets on the eve of International Women’s Day 2018 from the Arrogant Bastard brand’s account? Oh, you don’t? Well, it read (emphasis mine):
My technique that will help wash away the ordinariness of your day (or for rare few, cap off a day of significance). Put me in your mouth. Make an *Mmm* sound. Swallow. Express appreciation & ask permission to do it again. Hint: Only wussies do the ‘ask permission’ part.
The company deleted the tweet after receiving criticism, and Koch apologized. But while Stone was capable of walking back bad jokes under pressure, it proved remarkably incapable at ignoring perceived instances of intellectual property theft, and coupled with Koch’s always-be-posting impulse, that caused reputational damage of its own. To wit: In 2020, the co-founder posted a 2,694-word entry to the brewery’s blog reprising in excruciating detail how its litigation against a vanishingly small brewery in Kentucky over alleged trademark infringement and decrying that firm’s supposed “public smear campaign” and “bullying” against his own. Whatever the merits of the case, it was a terrible public-relations move. Gaffes like this fueled a growing narrative that Stone had sold out the movement and Beer Jesus had lost the mandate of heaven.
Normies never cared about this stuff, because normies never do. But Stone’s business was inflected with a similar, well, arrogance, and between the distractions, increased competition, and macroeconomic shifts, it cost the firm dearly. In 2016, the brewery announced a $100 million investment fund called “True Craft,” and (a few months later), revealed a $90 million private-equity investment in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The former never amounted to much, despite Koch’s lofty promises at the time that it would allow other brewers to obtain “the financing and flexibility that they need to flourish, while keeping their soul and control.” The latter amounted to some $464 million hanging over Stone as it emerged victorious from its five-year trademark suit from Molson Coors, ultimately forcing it into Sapporo’s arms. Its aforementioned expansion to Berlin was a disaster: An initial $29 million investment to upgrade an old gasworks ballooned into an undisclosed but surely greater total spend. Stone opened the facility in 2016 and sold it to BrewDog in 2019, losing “substantially” on the move. It had only produced around ~14 percent of its potential capacity the year prior. It closed its Shanghai outpost in 2020, and its Napa brewery in 2021, and lost a lawsuit over back rent there a couple years later.
(In the final analysis, Stone Distributing is an exception that proved the rule: It stood as testament to the intra-industry camaraderie the company was capable of at its best, but never achieved the scale necessary to sustain itself when the second boom began to go bust. Spun off from the brewery in the Sapporo acquisition, it was scooped up by the ABI-aligned Hand Family Companies in March 2025.)
Along the way, hundreds of workers lost their jobs, some in more dismal fashion than others. Sapporo’s ownership made few amends on this front; it spent more than $100,000 busting a Teamster drive at Stone Richmond in 2024. Stone’s portfolio, once innovative, went stale as it struggled to reconcile its dogmatic vision of what craft beer should be with what younger generations wanted out of the segment, and drinks generally. Stuck between a rock Stone and a hard place, things got weird: “fizzy yellow beers” by another name in 2016 and 2019; upside-down labels in 2020; even a hard seltzer in 2021. Nothing really took
In many of Koch’s posts over the years, he noted onlookers may be enjoying “schadenfreude” as he and his company were forced to eat crow and follow demand. There was plenty of that. But much like fellow first-wave West Coast belligerent Rogue Ales & Spirits, the Delicious IPA maker’s decline was only delicious to insiders because of the pride that cameth (?) before the fall. Nobody was rooting against Stone in a vacuum.
Perhaps the storied Southern California brand will find a third act with a smaller footprint and the steady stewardship of Firestone Walker. There are worse ports in a storm. “The Stone heart keeps beating,” Nick Firestone told Brewbound last week, adding that the firm planned to “honor what’s been built and carry it forward with the same authenticity and conviction that we love them for.”
He’d do well to remember that not everybody felt the same way.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
Anheuser-Busch InBev distributors form a “red” network, and Molson Coors distributors a “blue-silver” network. Constellation Brands, with its gilded Corona and Modelo brands, has its own color-coded middle-tier cohort: the “gold” network. Increasingly, it’s just Reyes Beverage Group. As first noted by Beer Marketer’s Insights, the Mexican lager mega-importer’s latest financial filing noted that just over 27 percent of its revenue — all its revenue — comes from the mighty case-movers at the country’s sixth-largest privately held company, which was listed under the “significant customers and concentration of credit risk” section of the macrobrewer’s 10-K for the 2026 fiscal year.
📈 Ups…
At the National Beer Wholesalers Association’s annual legislative conference, head honcho Craig Purser proclaimed “the wind may be shifting in our favor”… Coors Light is finally embracing its legacy as “f*cking close to water” with the launch of a non-alcoholic line… Manhattan Beer & Beverage Distributors is getting in on the ongoing Republic National Distributing Co. breakup, scooping up select brands in New York…
📉 …and downs
Athletic Brewing Co. is bidding farewell to its chief marketing officer… Boston Beer Co. is bidding farewell to leads for Sam Adams, Angry Orchard, and Truly… Regional beer wholesalers Columbia Distributing and Martignetti Companies are officially in the hunt for chunks of Republic National Distributing Company… Odom filed notice with Hawaii to lay off 53 workers… Boston Beer Co. and Molson Coors both posted quarterly volume declines…
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