Dear Client: The Brewers Of Pennsylvania held their annual Meeting Of The Malts at a new venue, in Chocolate Town, Hershey PA, at the Hershey Lodge last week. A highlight of the full evening was a Bar Stool to Bar Stool conversation on The Three Tier System featuring Boston Beer Co.’s Jim Koch and Craig … Continue reading “Jim and Craig’s Hot Takes on Three Tier”

Dear Client: As we wrote yesterday, A-B is fronting a new umbrella wholesaler agreement for all for their wine and spirits brands, like newly acquired Cutwater Spirits and Babe wines.  First off, if A-B distributors want to get in on this action, they gotta get a state wine/spirits wholesale license. Second, they gotta sign the … Continue reading “Grokking A-B’s Pestalozzi Agreement Termination at 2X Gross”

Dear Client: Back in 2006, then Anheuser-Busch chief August Busch IV told a packed crowd at our Beer Industry Summit that they were committed to seriously getting into wine and spirits.  Never happened, (unless you count Jekyll and Hyde). In a bid to aggressively grow their “beyond beer” portfolio to a billion dollars by 2027, … Continue reading “A-B Fronting New Wine & Spirits Wholesaler Agreement”

Dear Client: It’s a seltzer theme for today’s issue. Get used to it: Boston Beer reports this afternoon, and you can bet their stock is depending a lot on trends for Truly Hard Seltzer, the second largest hard seltzer (behind White Claw).  We’ll bring you the deets when that hits. But we’re not talking Truly … Continue reading “Smirnoff Gunning For a Top 3 Hard Seltzer Spot”

Dear Client: BRITO TRIES ON NEW MANAGEMENT STYLE “Amid soft sales, a costly and complex integration with SABMiller, uneven currency exchanges, market share losses in its largest market, a stock price down 38%, and most of all a crippling $105 billion debt load that reduced their Moody’s rating just a few steps from junk and … Continue reading “The New and Improved Brito”

Dear Client: Constellation’s weed partner, Canopy Growth, announced an arrangement that grants Canopy “the right to acquire 100 percent of the shares” of New York-based Acreage Holdings, which is a vertically integrated cannabis company with operations in 19 U.S. states. Acreage owns cannabis licenses and assets, and last year launched a national retail brand dubbed … Continue reading “Constellation/Canopy Makes Big U.S. Play”

Dear Client: Between Tito’s, hard seltzers, and super premiums, traditional light beer  has a lot coming directly at their longnecks. Add another growing genre to the onslaught: craft light lagers. To that end, it’s been awhile since we’ve reported on Montucky Cold Snacks [see BBD 07-10-2018].  (Cold snacks is slang for cold beer in Montana. … Continue reading “It’s All About the Cold Snacks”

Dear Client: The total US non-alc beer market is less than 0.3% of its overall beer counterpart, at about $80 million to $29 billion (off premise, at least). That sounds small. But if you’ve been paying attention to millennials, or at least the Nielsen research around them, it’s growing. Millennials drink less beer than older … Continue reading “Non-Alc? Really?? Yes, Says Athletic Brewing Co.”

Dear Client: Break out your monocle and top hat, because the world’s largest c-store operator and the largest U.S. beer retailer, 7-Eleven, is about to get all fancy up in your grill. Much like beer, 7-Eleven wants to expand its “customer base to include more women, millennials and Gen Z,” the company told USA Today. … Continue reading “Thank Heaven: Largest Beer Retailer Going Upscale”

Dear Client: Look out: Amazon is on the hunt for “a booze business policy and lobbying expert,” reports the Washington Business Journal. The outlet dug up a job posting earlier this week that says the ecommerce giant is searching for a person to fill the newly-created role of manager of alcohol public policy. Whoever lands … Continue reading “Amazon Looking to Get Into the Bev-Alc Lobbying Game”

Dear Client: You’ve likely seen or heard about it by now, but Anheuser-Busch “broke the internet,” as Budweiser vp Ricardo Marques put it in a chat with BBD, with an online video featuring the now officially retired Miami Heat guard Dwyane Wade titled “This Bud’s for Three,” referring to the future hall of famer’s jersey … Continue reading “The Day Bud Broke the Internet”

Dear Client: The craft beer segment needs more drinkers, fast. And they need those drinkers to drink more craft beer. While craft sits at 4% growth or about one million barrels a year — which is still impressive for such a large bev-alc category — that slowed growth is split amongst many more breweries and … Continue reading “Craft Beer’s Identity Crisis”

Dear Client: One of the biggest takeaways of the retailer panel at CBC, which featured a slew of Kroger (and its banners) beer assortment and category managers? They’re not so hot on larger craft packs. Not just the 15- and 18-packs; even 12 packs. “I wanna caution everyone on the larger packs,” said Matt Boyd, … Continue reading “Larger Craft Packs A Tough Sell to Kroger, and Other CBC Retail Panel Highlights”

Dear Client: After a full year of merger negotiations, huge wine and spirits distributors Breakthru Beverage and Republic National Distributing Co., as reported last week by my colleague Sarah Barrett at Wine & Spirits Daily. The reason both companies gave for the termination of negotiations, and the withdrawal of their antitrust filing with the FTC, … Continue reading “FTC Kiboshes Mega-Distributor Deal”

Dear Client: Our story on Tito’s Handmade Vodka last week, entitled Can We Get Serious Now?, received plenty of feedback.   If you missed it here was the main takeaway: Can we get serious about what is actually cutting into beer sales, particularly light beer sales? We can talk about cannabis and Netflix, health/wellness, and … Continue reading “Readers Weigh in on Beer Pressure Points”