Lester: Consumers Haven’t Left, They’ve Moved

Dear Client: The latest Q1 beer read from NBWA’s Lester Jones and Fintech’s Eric Kiser carried a familiar theme: consumers are still spending, just not where the industry has counted on them being as of late. That theme continued to show up clearly in Fintech’s first-quarter sales-to-retailer data, which pointed to a beer business that was roughly stable to start 2026, but still shaped by the same structural shift Lester has been hammering for some time now – namely, that