Bud Light was the undisputed best-selling beer in the country. Twisted Tea was just hitting its long-simmering breakout run. Reyes Beverage Group was still called Reyes Beer Division.
It was a different beer industry when I first took the helm here at Hop Take in September 2022. Which, duh: Time is linear, and change is constant, etc., etc. Still, my tenure here each week has coincided with some of the most tectonic shifts the American brewing business has known since… I mean… certainly the decade and a half I’ve been on the beat. But maybe the Light Beer Wars, or even the end of Prohibition. The upheavals are fast and furious these days, and I’ll get into them in more detail in just a moment. But first, please join me in celebrating my third anniversary as VinePair’s Hop Take columnist! [Holds for applause that does not come, because this is a rhetorical device not a live audience.]
In my first column on Sept. 15, 2022, I laid out a brief mission statement for the work ahead:
It’s a chance to develop a rolling, opinionated, week-in/week-out conversation about the American beer landscape insulated from the noxious fumes of industry forums, private Facebook groups, and public Twitter spats. Go elsewhere for beer reviews, warmed-over press releases, and lifestyle puffery. Come here for context, coverage, and commentary about the business and culture of beer.
I’d like to think I’ve hit that mark with most of the 158 (!!!) weekly columns I’ve filed since. They can’t all be winners, of course, and they haven’t been. Publishing compelling and well-informed ideas about the beer business — or anything — every seven days is pretty hard, as I have come to learn. Has this finally taught me respect for Bret Stephens? Ha! No. But it has given me a greater appreciation for the challenge of covering the trade this way than I ever could have possessed when I first agreed to do this. Still, I’m glad I took the assignment.
Assuming a conservative average word count of 1,200 words per column, I’ve filed 189,600 words since picking up the Hop Take mantle. (That’s just the ones that were published: spare a thought for VinePair’s tireless editor-in-chief, Joanna Sciarrino, who has likely left almost that many lying on the cutting room floor, for my own good.) It would be impossible to reprise all that coverage in this column, and I’d likely bore you to death trying. So instead of doing that, I’ve selected three of my favorite columns from each of my three years at Hop Take.
Longtime readers know I’m a big fan of the Potter Stewart school of literary (ish) criticism, and my yardstick here was very much of the “know it when you see it” variety. In other words, this isn’t necessarily a collection of pieces that drove the most traffic to VinePair’s website or subscriptions to its email newsletter (which you should subscribe to, by the way.) Many did! But I selected the pieces below because I believe they represent Hop Take at its best: original, informative, and aggressive. These are the types of columns I tend to have the most fun reporting and writing. I hope they’re among the ones you’ve most enjoyed reading over the past three years.
All right, enough throat-clearing, navel-gazing, back-patting, and [insert cliched metonym here]. To the columns!
2022/2023
The Culture War Has Come to Craft Brewing. Time to Pick a Side. (12/15/22): Even in 2022, political violence was very much A Thing. After instances of right-wing violence against craft breweries’ drag brunches and storytime hours, I used this column to make the case to brewery owners that this grim stochastic campaign was only going to get worse, and that they needed to be prepared for it to keep their guests, workers, and themselves safe.
The Cowardly King of Beers Bends the Knee to Bigots (4/27/2023): I’ve probably written 10,000 words here at Hop Take about the Bud Light fiasco, but these were the first. One of the things I value most about my work here at VinePair is that I am able to call ‘em like I see them, even when — especially when — criticizing some of the industry’s most powerful executives.
How Sapporo USA Sank Anchor Brewing Co. (7/13/2023): Like so many other members of the American drinking public, I was saddened to learn that San Francisco’s iconic brewery had run out of steam. I broke news of its closure here at VinePair, then quickly followed up with this column, which included interviews from rank-and-file workers that directly contradicted the “official” story that Sapporo USA’s gun-for-hire publicist tried to spin.
2023/2024
A Fight Over a Controversial Brewery Exposes the Limits of ‘Community’ (11/9/2023): I’ve been fascinated with the economics of suds-for-chuds brands for years, so when Armed Forces Brewing Co. announced it had secured a home just down the road from me in Norfolk, Va., with the help of the Commonwealth’s Republican governor, I decided to file some public-records requests to find out exactly what that meant. That investigation clued me in to the story of how Norfolk folks (Norfolks?) were organizing in hopes of blocking it and its conservative culture-war schtick out of the gay-friendly neighborhood it planned to move into. They failed, but earlier this year, AFBC failed, too, blaming the “local woke mob” for abruptly shutting down.
When Brewers Enforce Non-Competes, Everybody Loses (2/16/2024): When people talk about “labor reporting,” they are often referring to reporting on the labor movement. But most American workers do not belong to unions in this country, and they still face all sorts of workplace hardship and exploitation at their bosses’ hands. I thought it was important to shine a spotlight on the frustrating experience that former Boston Beer Co. employees had fighting in court for their right to make a living in the beer business.
What Would It Take to Dim Modelo’s Rising Star? (4/19/2024): It was VinePair co-founder Josh Malin who wondered this titular question aloud one day last spring. We decided I’d run the thought experiment. I can’t claim to be exactly right about how the second Trump administration would affect Constellation Brands’ then-still-surging Mexican lager brand, and I didn’t rank the threat highly enough, but it was certainly on my mind — which is better than you can say for a bunch of Wall Street analysts, and maybe even the firm’s own political action committee. Anyway, sorry for jinxing the hot streak, folks!
2024/2025
Craft Brewing’s ‘Painful Period of Rationalization’ Is Here. Finally. (1/3/2025): Somebody asked me the other day if I could maybe file some more positive stories here and there. I assume this piece was on their mind. For the record, I don’t enjoy publishing columns that highlight the craft brewing industry’s woes. But as I told them, I consider it my job to tell the story warts-and-all, and there’s no doubt in my mind that more small, independent craft breweries will have to fail before the struggling segment regains its footing.
Sapporo-Stone Brewing Spent Over $100K Busting Its Union. Here’s Why. (3/28/25): I covered the launch of the Teamsters union drive at Stone’s slick East Coast plant here in Richmond, Va., in the fall of 2024. Thanks to my sources at the brewery, I was able to publish literal pages from the corporation’s union-busting playbook in a column while the drive was still alive. After it’d failed, I used belated federal filings to show how much Sapporo-Stone had paid its “persuaders” to swing the election against the union — and decades of labor history to explain why.
Anheuser-Busch Drafts a Big New Player for Its Middle-Tier Power Game (8/22/25): This was a complicated one, as writing about the esoteric world of beer distributors so often is. But that’s why I included it here: It was challenging to try to draw out the significance of ABI’s unprecedented realignment toward Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits, and I believe it’s important to try to shed light on shifting power dynamics within the middle tier. It’s the fulcrum on which the entire trade balances, and full of wealthy, often-paranoid characters who clearly have some reasons to be watching their backs. What columnist could resist?
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
As you may recall, Boston Beer Co. co-founder and chairman Jim Koch recently found himself back in the saddle as his firm’s chief executive after board member and ex-Nike honcho Michael Spillane resigned from the job after just 16 months for personal reasons. As his first order of business, the elder statesman of American craft beer announced the planned closure of Truly’s ill-conceived taproom in Los Angeles, which seemed to hint at a newly disciplined era for the House That Sam Adams Built after nearly a decade of over-innovation and “next big thing”-ism. Err, maybe not: At a conference last week, Koch self-deprecatingly told the crowd BBC had “a lot of failures” because the firm was “built around regular failure,” per Brewbound’s report. “If we do 10 of those and one becomes a 10-million-case, $250 million brand, I’m good with that,” he said. It must feel amazing to be a billionaire who controls all his company’s voting shares, man.
📈 Ups…
Texas’ governor issued an executive order to establish a legal framework for hemp-derived THC products after the Lone Star legislature twice tried and failed to ban them… Like Beatbox before it, Dad Strength will appear on an episode of “Shark Tank” later this month… Submissions are open for this year’s U.S. Cider Championships awards and Cider Is for Everyone scholarships… Congratulations to Westbound & Down of Colorado and Mother Road of Arizona on successful million dollar-plus crowdfunding campaigns…
📉 …and downs
Draft beer sales were down 7.3 percent and package 8.3 percent during the National Football League’s opening weekend, per BeerBoard’s on-premise “total performance” data… Inflation for beer away from home was 3.2 percent last month — much better than spirits, a smidge worse than wine, and still outpacing the overall market’s 2.9-percent reading… In a sign of homebrewing’s waning popularity, author Tom Acitelli got nothing when contacting clubs and shops in Alabama and Mississippi (the final states to legalize it)…
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!
