Boston Beer Company - Samuel Adams

With two weeks left until Super Bowl LVI, big beer brands have continued to tease advertisement spots for the big game.

Boston Beer Company’s “Your Cousin From Boston” ad campaign is entering the Super Bowl LVI ad conversation once again with a regional ad buy in 13 markets.

Celebrating the creative magic at the intersection of art and ales, Dogfish Head Craft Brewery’s Off-Centered Art Series is a yearly collection of four limited-edition beers featuring artwork by a different collaborating artist. The brewery’s featured artist for 2022 is Max Mahn, a well-known printmaker and illustrator from Missoula, Montana. Max kicks off his Off-Centered Art Series residency with label artwork for the brewery’s all-new beer, Where the Wild Hops Are, a rustic, unfiltered IPA brewed with four wild-derived hop varieties.

After granting five New York wholesalers a temporary restraining order (TRO) last week against Boston Beer Company (BBC) and Manhattan Beer Distributors’ attempt to terminate their rights to sell Boston Beer’s Samuel Adams, Angry Orchard and Twisted Tea brands, New York Supreme Court Justice Andrew Borrok changed course and denied their motion for an injunction against the sale of their rights to Manhattan Beer.

As headwinds hit the hard seltzer segment, Boston Beer Company executives reiterated their confidence in Truly Hard Seltzer’s ability to perform during a conference call to discuss the company’s third quarter earnings with investors and analysts on Thursday evening.

Boston Beer Company’s second quarter earnings call in July set the stage for a tumultuous third quarter that saw the company pull its financial guidance and anticipate write-off costs related to excess hard seltzer inventory, which was followed by a rush of investor lawsuits. Although the Q2 earnings report left analysts flummoxed and disappointed, the company’s third quarter earnings report came with less of a jolt but more of the residual sting of the slowdown in hard seltzer growth and lowered expectations.

Truly Hard Seltzer will say g’day to a new market in February 2022. Boston Beer Company will partner with the Campari Group to bring Truly to Australia next year, the company announced today.

Retail sales of Boston Beer Company’s Truly Hard Seltzer continued to increase in Q3, to an estimated +51% year-over-year, according to a recent “Beverage Bytes” retailer survey by Goldman Sachs analyst Bonnie Herzog.

PepsiCo CEO Ramon Laguarta emphasized that the soft drink maker has “been investing a lot in R&D” and believes its “pipeline is strong” during Tuesday’s third quarter call with investors and analysts.

Boston Beer Company’s hard seltzer woes are spilling over into the legal system. The maker of Truly Hard Seltzer, the second best-selling hard seltzer on the market, is now facing a proposed class action lawsuit for allegedly failing to disclose the deceleration in sales of Truly to investors.

Citing “continuing uncertainty about hard seltzer demand trends for the remainder” of 2021, Truly Hard Seltzer maker Boston Beer Company today withdrew its 2021 financial guidance. The company also said it anticipates “hard seltzer-related inventory write-offs, shortfall fees payable to third party brewers, and other costs” that will be incurred throughout the remainder of 2021.

Boston Beer Company’s innovation pipeline continues to pump out new brands as the fall approaches, announcing today a planned nationwide launch in November of Bevy Long Drink, a sparkling refresher inspired by a traditional Finnish cocktail that consists of gin, grapefruit soda, and tonic. However, Boston’s version of the beverage, checking in at 5.8% ABV, won’t contain spirits.

Despite recent slowdowns in hard seltzer sales trends, Boston Beer chief marketing officer Lesya Lysyj remains confident that the bubbly beverage and Truly Hard Seltzer are not going anywhere. “The category has become a mega category, and the growth is not done yet,” she told Brewbound.

Hard seltzer’s late summer slowdown has pushed several financial services firms to adjust their forecast for the sparkling segment’s performance. “We are incrementally more cautious on the beer and hard seltzer category based on feedback from our beer distributor contacts in our new proprietary ‘Beverage Bytes’ survey,” Goldman Sachs equity research analyst Bonnie Herzog wrote in a report published today.