Generations are more or less made up. They’re a social construct, much like “time” and “the rule of law.” That doesn’t mean cultural norms aren’t shifting, and it certainly hasn’t stopped the beverage-alcohol industry from collectively freaking the hell out about it. But from Zoomer to Boomer and beyond, this generation stuff is kinda squishy.
Seasons, on the other hand, are pretty real. In the United States, winter tends to be cold and summer tends to be hot, unless you are experiencing El Niño, or worse, San Francisco. As you might imagine, this has serious implications for the fickle world of consumer foodstuffs. Winter was for so long a boom time for Big Soup that when President Donald Trump’s trade war sent budget-conscious Americans scrambling for Campbell’s last spring, the company considered the deviation so noteworthy it mentioned it to investors. “Canned soup summer,” NBC News called it. Very bleak stuff!
Seasonal shifts are not synonymous with windfalls, though. For example, it is a generally accepted truth in the modern American brewing business that summer is prime time for beer sales, owing to the sweltering temperatures, vacation opportunities, baseball season, and so forth. This is not a tough one to figure out. Or at least, it didn’t used to be.
“If you would have asked me how I feel about summer 2026 even a couple months ago, even at the end of Q1, it would have been better than I do right now,” says Dave Williams, the president at Bump Williams Consulting, in a recent phone interview. “I’m less than optimistic, but I’m not discouraged.”
This lukewarm, “could be worse” outlook from one of the trade’s most venerable analysts comes, as you might expect, from beer sales data leading up to the high season. Those have been a whole different kind of bleak than the vision of Americans pounding Campbell’s Chunky in the summer heat while Trump deliberates gold fixtures for the Oval Office.
Scan sheets from the industry’s two major providers have in recent weeks run red as the category has given up the off-premise ground it had clawed back in early 2026. “The enthusiasm from the explosive start of the year has fizzled a bit,” Circana’s executive vice president of beverage alcohol, Scott Scanlon, wrote in a memo regarding the market-research firm’s sales data for total alcohol through May 17. An assessment from rival outfit NIQ on its own figures, through May 16, was similarly downbeat: “Latest total alcohol performance further points to a challenged environment across categories in despite [sic] of spring’s seasonal demand.”
On-premise platform BeerBoard noted that just two of the top five beer suppliers grew draft volume share on Cinco de Mayo, and only a bit — Michelob Ultra +1.23 percent; Modelo +0.17 percent. For beer-industry observers, though, May 5 is just a small blip compared to the big sales bellwether that comes a few weeks later in the month. As the unofficial start of the summer, Memorial Day Weekend is also the trade’s unofficial sales stress test. A blockbuster weekend augurs three months of moving cases and making money; a bust, more summertime blues to come.
The good news is that despite the rain that buffeted much of the East Coast, scotching beach plans and cookouts, Memorial Day 2026 wasn’t a total wash for beer. Off-premise data from Circana through May 24 had total bev-alc down around 1.6 percent dollars and 3.4 percent volume, with beer doing worse than spirits but better than wine at -2.8 percent and -4 percent. Analysis of these data by Brewbound shows some actual year-over-year growth within the category, with non-alcoholic beer up 17.1 percent (albeit on a small base), and domestic super premium and sub premium up 1.8 and 1.5 percent, respectively, on big honking footprints. Still, this was no tour-de-force for the category: In a word-association canvass of their trade readership, the Beer Marketer’s Insights editors reported feedback on Memorial Day Weekend that ranged from “fair,” to “slow,” to “disaster.”
To Williams, the mixed bag cooler on the summer kickoff reflects a years-long loosening of beer’s once formidable grip on the season. Summer is still beer’s biggest “seasonality spike,” and the category “still wins [the season] from a visibility perspective,” he says. But spirits-based canned cocktails — and to some extent, wine- and malt-based slurries like BuzzBallz and Cayman Jack — have strong value propositions for the summer months now, too. Those products can be just as portable, and they often boast more novelty and more straightforward flavors. They pass the “pool-party test,” as Rabobank’s analysts memorably put it a few years back. Shelf space and share-of-mind that used to go to beer by default is now up for grabs no matter the season, and when the demand is more intense, that dynamic intensifies apace. As a result, says Williams, “I don’t know if [beer is] still the winner from a performance perspective.”
While the category’s summertime blues aren’t entirely new, it may have some unique opportunities to shake them off in 2026. Some are just a matter of discipline, with the pandemic boon yielding to a post-Covid hangover that has forced firms large and small to get more focused on what’s working and more honest about what isn’t. (See: Boston Beer Company’s Jim Koch admitting that White Claw, not Truly, is the nation’s “default” hard seltzer option after years of spiraling attempts to recapture the latter brand’s flash-in-the-pan…demic growth.) “I feel like beer is putting all of its chips into nailing this summer, which makes me feel a little bit better about the outlook than if I was just basing [my outlook] objectively off the trends alone,” says Williams, adding that he’s reserving final judgment until firms translate the reformed talk into “consistency” in execution.
As spirits-based RTDs have been chipping away at occasions, macrobrewers have become painfully aware of their flagships’ unprotected flanks. Buying those challengers — as Anheuser-Busch InBev, Molson Coors, and Mark Anthony Brands have done with Cutwater and Beatbox, Monaco, and Long Drink, respectively — helps to offset the problem, but it does not fix it. So “all these companies are putting a lot of effort into keeping beer front and center for these still-important beer holidays,” Williams says. It presages a possible halo effect: Coors Banquet’s big ad push might send somebody to the store for a case of that brand, but they might pick up a 6-pack of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale or a stovepipe of Allagash White while they’re there. After all, with Trump’s war on Iran sending gas prices to record highs just in time for road-trip season, people are likely to be making their trips to the store count.
Williams sees another potential “shot in the arm” for the category coming from the World Cup, which kicks off (ahem) later this month. Though ticket and transit prices are astronomical, lodging bookings are soft, and the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign looms over foreigners and Americans alike, beer still stands to benefit from the tournament’s sheer excitement and watchability. “On-site at the venues, whatever beer volume comes out of there is a gift, it’s a bonus, and whatever occasions people have off-premise, that’s a bonus as well,” says Williams, flagging brewery watch parties and other formal and informal World Cup tie-ins. “So even with all of these concerns or challenges, I still think that this is a tidal wave of found occasions and reasons to celebrate.” High ticket prices, he adds, are likely to keep more fans from trying to take in games at the stadiums themselves, which may funnel them to the off-premise, where beer traditionally performs best.
There would be a certain through-the-pint-glass symmetry to American beer finding its footing during the world’s biggest soccer tournament even as it loses its grasp on the States’ own version of football. Whether 2026 is the summer the category begins a durable comeback, though, depends more on things it can control, like its advertising and execution, things it can’t, like macroeconomics and consumer sentiment — and, in no small part, on the weather.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
Well, it’s the 250th anniversary of the United States and everybody’s excited to celebrate the country in all her modern glory! Right? RIGHT??? Ahem. Given that roughly 60 percent of Americans think the country’s best years are behind it, pitching all-together-now patriotism is a tough gig these days. Still, the New York Public Library took a shot at feting some fermentable American history this week with the release of a pair of beers brewed by the city’s Talea Beer Co. One of the beers, based on “George Washington’s 1757 ale recipe” was served at a tasting Tuesday at the library’s flagship building on 42nd Street; a commercial version “modified for modern tastes” will be sold around the city. So whether you’re one of the ~40 percent of Americans who feel good about the future of this visibly failing experiment, or you’re in the majority of people who think our finest hours have been consigned to history… ah… cheers, I guess?
📈 Ups…
Tilray Brands, following the lead of ABI and Constellation before it, is selling Atwater Brewery back to its former owner… Draft hit 9.6 percent of overall beer share in the Beer Institute’s packaging report for 2025, its highest since the pandemic… The beer-heavy hustlers at Columbia Distributing bought a stake in Idaho wine wholesaler Hayden Beverage Co. …
📉 …and downs
Armed Forces Brewing Co.’s former “national brand ambassador,” whose bigotry formed a basis for Norfolk organizers’ objection to the now-defunct brewery’s permit, appeared on a neo-Nazi podcast… The final judgment against BBC in its ongoing litigation with packager Ardagh ballooned to $191 million, with the brewer vowing an appeal… The Brewers Association’s ex post facto data revisions mean it overstated craft beer’s year-over-year volume decline for 2025 by more than 22 percent…
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