The best breweries seem to be inspired by love, not lucre. Nevertheless, it's still a business. A very fascinating business, it turns out.
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The best breweries seem to be inspired by love, not lucre. Nevertheless, it's still a business. A very fascinating business, it turns out.
We can all agree on what a beer currently costs. In Portland, a pint will set you back $7. Before Covid it was $6, and not long before that five. So is $7 expensive? It depends
Last week, London’s Meantime Brewery was in the news. Its fortunes are bound up with Fuller’s and Dark Star—by coincidence three breweries I toured 13 years ago. Show did they get here?
Our friends at AB InBev have offered us a new beer promising a “fathomless palate squeeze.” Wait, what? And Juice Dust? That does not sound appetizing. What is going on here?
In which I look at the national beer market and make some interesting discoveries.
About a year ago, Rogue launched its Dead Guy brand family of new beers. That wasn’t a superficial lunge at a popular strategy, however, but rather the first step on a multi-year plan for reinvention.
I was recently served a bottle of Corona at a Mexican restaurant. Instead of the familiar blue-and-white label, this giant bottle had a brown one. It was a great beer, and I’ve been trying to figure out what it was ever since.
We can’t help looking back at the end of a year, and 2023 was definitely a challenging one for beer. But there was a lot of latent good news if you know where to look—along with a return to the untroubled fun beer offered before the pandemic.
There aren’t too many bright spots in the beer industry right now, but I discovered two projects in Chicago that have the capacity to expand the market for craft beer. They involve unusual business models and entrepreneurs targeting communities who haven’t yet discovered good, locally-brewed beer.
About six weeks ago, Guinness launched their second brewery/pub, this time in Chicago. This continues a pub- and pint-first approach that other large breweries haven’t adopted. More than that, it acts as a lens on the larger beer world, and how much things have changed since they launched their first American brewery.
After twelve years, Reverend Nat’s Hard Cider is ending its run. But founder Nat West isn’t sad about it and he doesn’t want his fans to be, either. Here’s the story, and the legacy the cidery leaves behind.
Who had “ABI will sell off seven craft properties plus its weird, lame Shock Top brand to a weed company for $85 million” on their bingo card for this fine Monday? It’s pretty big news around these parts, because two of the brands are big in Oregon.
An interesting data point from a company that tracks on-premise alcohol sales. In the months since the Bud Light fiasco, an unexpected beneficiary has entered the frame.
If you were going to place a bet on one malthouse that might escape craft malting’s difficult economic realities, Skagit Valley would have been the odds-on favorite. That’s why their abrupt closure over the weekend has dark implications for the future of craft malting.
How the story of Cleveland’s Platform brewery—which launched, exploded in popularity, sold out to AB InBev, collapsed and folded—is the inverse corollary to last week’s Anchor Brewing news. In this case, how optimism can be a bad thing indeed.
If you look closely at your beer industry news feed, you see a lot of downsizing, consolidation, and renewed focus on core lines. The expectation of inevitable growth has given way to a new pessimism in beer—especially craft beer. But that’s probably good news.
Bud Light did a great thing: the company reached out to a winsome young woman with a massive social media following. Everything since then has been a disgrace.
Heineken has a new product aimed at an American audience, but everything about the rollout suggests Heineken doesn’t really get Americans.
In the oscillating cycle of innovation and retrenchment, breweries focus on different things. People aren’t clamoring for the newest, most exotic beer anymore, and breweries will contend with this new normal by training their creativity on their business structures instead.
Technology is disrupting not just how but what we pay, and has the whole enterprise of tipping teetering near collapse. Perhaps it’s time to say good riddance.
For years and years, you could count on the craft segment to grow. Light beer, FMBs, cider—they might bounce around, but craft beer was sure and steady. That is, until the past year. Now craft looks like the anchor dragging down the industry.
The beer industry news has been fairly bleak as we head into the new year. But how does it feel at the brewery level? I spoke to more than a dozen breweries, and got more individual, personal—and enlightening—responses.
For decades, Yorkshire’s Samuel Smith Brewery managed to do things their own, very weird way, seemingly flouting the rules of business, if not physics. But a three-year pandemic may have changed the calculus.
Forty percent of America’s breweries are small neighborhood affairs that, prior to 2020, were fun and rewarding little businesses. With Covid, inflation, supply-chain issues, and difficulties getting to market, how many still are? In Portland, one of them just called it quits.
A massively over-spiced bottle of holiday ale from one of America’s grand old craft breweries, not to mention a cringey line extension at odds with the brand, have me worried.
It appears Elon Musk has actually acquired Twitter after all. But whether that’s good news or bad, the major social media sites are in big trouble. Now that legacy media is good and truly gutted, the troubling question is this: what comes next?
In 2017, the Brewers Association launched the “independent brewer” seal as a way of making customers aware of who makes their beer. Looking back after five years, has it made a difference?
Three Washington-state breweries have sued Oregon over the right to self-distribute to the Beaver State as well as ship beer to Oregon consumers directly. They have a really good case.
On July 1, New Jersey’s alcohol regulatory issued rules limiting what breweries could do in their own taprooms. They were comically draconian, and outraged New Jerseyans have been filling the internet with disgusted memes. Is it really the case that NJ wants these taprooms to fail, and if so, who benefits? I spoke to one man with some answers.
In the lifecycle of any successful brewery, there are phases of growth and cultural currency—but also stumbling and mistakes. Stone’s sale to Sapporo gives us one of the most potent cases in point.
Each April, the Brewers Association releases an important package of data, headlined by a list of largest US breweries. This year’s numbers were a mixed bag, and revealed a lot about the state of the industry.