Justin Kendall provides daily coverage of the beer industry on Brewbound.com, conducts live-streamed interviews during Brewbound’s events and co-produces the Brewbound podcast. Kendall is a nearly 20-year career journalist who led alt-weekly newspapers in Kansas City, Missouri, and Des Moines, Iowa.
Off-premise dollar sales of beer continued to accelerate during the week ending May 3, as beer category sales increased 32.3%, to $952.3 million, during the one-week period, according to data from market research firm IRI shared by Bump Williams Consulting (BWC).
Portland, Oregon-headquartered Columbia Distributing has laid out its plan for addressing the voluminous amount of out-of-code beer at bars and restaurants in its three-state footprint that were forced to temporarily close in mid-March in an effort to stop the spread of the COVID-19 outbreak.
BeerBoard founder Mark Young has his eye on the future of on-premise retail, whenever it returns from a forced but temporary shutdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Brewers Association (BA) laid off 23% of its staff last week “in order to maintain the long-term viability” of the national trade group, which represents the interests of small and independent U.S. craft brewers.
Beer category dollar sales in off-premise retailers tracked by market research firm Nielsen increased 12.3%, to $856 million, for the week ending April 18, compared to the same one-week last year.
Michigan’s Founders Brewing Company plans to furlough 163 employees of its taproom and retail stores in Detroit and Grand Rapids, according to a Worker Adjustment and Notice Retraining Notification Act (WARN) filing with the state’s Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity dated April 20.
The Brewers Association (BA) today announced it has formed a partnership with nonprofit fundraising organization Bottleshare to establish the “Believe in Beer Fund” to support breweries and state brewers guilds across the country that have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The story of Boston Beer Company’s Truly Hard Seltzer brand remains the same; the company can’t keep up with demand for the hard seltzer category’s second largest brand. The mid-March pantry stock up caused by the novel coronavirus shutting down virtually all on-premise sales led to a spike in Truly sales earlier than expected.
Boston Beer Company posted double-digit depletions, shipments and net revenue growth in the first quarter of 2020, continuing momentum that propelled the company to $995.7 million in revenue in 2019.
COVID-19 is forcing brewery owners across the country to make hard decisions. Surly Brewing founder Omar Ansari has made his share of those decisions over the last month after shuttering his beer hall, pizza place and event space in mid-March. Couple those closures with the shutdown of on-premise sales, and around 60% of Surly’s revenue evaporated overnight.
A pair of recent surveys of craft brewery owners in South Carolina and California have revealed the financial pressures the novel coronavirus disease COVID-19 have placed on small beer companies. A survey released by the South Carolina Brewers Guild on April 14 showed that 80% of the state’s breweries may be forced to close within the next three months if the current shutdown of on-premise and at-the-brewery sales remain in place.
More than 1,900 fewer beer category (beer/FMB/cider) products — a majority of which were made by independent and longtail craft producers — were sold in off-premise retailers during the first six weeks of the COVID-19 crisis compared to the same period in 2019, according to market research firm Nielsen.
Barry Holmes, CEO of The Bruery and Offshoot Beer Co., offers tips to breweries considering getting into direct-to-consumer or membership club business and shares how The Bruery is engaging its members via weekly, virtual happy hours on Thursday nights. He also discusses how adding a line of canned hazy IPAs and a pilsner through the Offshoot brand has helped fortify The Bruery’s business, which was originally built on barrel-aged and sour offerings.