Reflections of NBWA Meeting

Another NBWA Convention is in the can. Holy moly, for a non-trade-show year, it certainly was full of action and drama. First there was Craig Purser's "elephant in the room" speech, which set the stage for identifying distributor independence as the underlying theme in the face of big supplier consolidation. Importers and craft brewers seemed to rally to the side of distributors on this issue. Behind the scenes, the Bigs were pushing for the word independence to be replaced with