Nearly two years after publicly declaring an interest in opening a farmhouse brewery in Connecticut, popular Massachusetts craft beer maker Trillium Brewing Company has purchased a farm in North Stonington, about two hours outside of Boston. In a blog post, JC and Esther Tetreault, the husband-and-wife team that co-founded Trillium in 2013, said they bought the farm in order to fulfill their dream of opening a farm brewery near where they were married in the pastoral region of Connecticut.
Yet another major U.S. alcohol company is getting into the cannabis sector. Breakthru Beverage, a multi-state wholesaler that was formed via the 2015 merger of Chicago-based Wirtz Beverage Group and New York’s Charmer Sunbelt Group, has agreed to invest $9.2 million in CannTrust, a Canadian marijuana maker.
Thousands of California beer industry professionals met in Sacramento last week for the California Craft Brewers Association annual three-day Craft Beer Summit, Expo and Beer Festival. As an official media partner of the event, Brewbound hosted 10 hours of live streamed interviews, and sat in on a variety of seminars during the show. Here’s what we learned.
A record 7,000 breweries will be in operation in the United States in 2018, Brewers Association chief economist Bart Watson shared Thursday during the opening session of the California Craft Brewers Association’s Craft Beer Summit, Expo and Beer Festival in Sacramento. Watson called it a “virtual certainty” that the industry will reach that milestone this year, and more breweries are on the way with more than 9,000 active permits filed with the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau at the midway point of 2018.
Pabst Brewing Company today announced a number of executive changes, including the departure of chief executive officer Simon Thorpe, whose time with the company lasted 21 months. In a press release, the company said Thorpe, along with chief operating officer Brian Bousely, had stepped down from their roles.
The continued growth of All Day IPA has Founders Brewing Company staring down nearly 600,000 barrels of beer in 2018, according to the brewery’s co-founder and CEO Mike Stevens. “We’re clipping along at around 30 percent growth,” Stevens told Brewbound. “I see next year about the same.”
MillerCoors will eliminate 350 salaried positions across the organization by the end of October, the company announced today in a memo. In the letter, CEO Gavin Hattersley characterized the job cuts as MillerCoors “moving quickly and decisively to get our business back on track.” Molson Coors’ U.S. business is offering a voluntary severance program to existing employees as well as eliminating 150 unfilled positions.
Brewbound is proud to be an official media partner of this week’s California Craft Beer Summit and Festival in Sacramento. The California Craft Brewers Association will host its annual industry meeting and beer festival Thursday, September 6, through Saturday, September 8, at the Sacramento Convention Center. With more than 900 craft breweries now in operation, California is home to more craft beer companies than any other state in the nation and it contributed more than $8.2 billion to the U.S. economy in 2017.
In this week’s Last Call: Red Brick reverts back to Atlanta Brewing Company; Coronado closes the Monkey Paw brewpub; Canarchy Craft Brewery Collective announces cross-platform mixed pack (and its GABF presence); Harpoon says it will brew, distribute a former Red Sox Player’s beer offerings.
Year-to-Date volume sales of beer are basically flat, according to market research firm IRI Worldwide, which tracks scan data at major off-premise retailers throughout the U.S. In its latest monthly report, the firm also said off-premise retail volume sales of craft beer had grown 1.4 percent year-to-date through the period ending August 12.
The Brewers Association (BA) has rolled out a new national advertising campaign aimed at bringing another round of consumer attention to its independent craft brewer seal that was unveiled last year. Launched today, the effort, called “That’s Independence You’re Tasting,” includes a pair of 30-second commercials that will be “presented across a variety of media platforms,” according to a press release.
More often than not, Evil Twin Brewing founder Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø finds himself in the news for a supposed “feud” with his identical twin brother, Mikkel Borg Bjergsø, the founder of Mikkeller Beer. But the storyline is getting old to Jeppe, who has, at times, turned to social media to express his discontent with how media outlets compare the Evil Twin and Mikkeller businesses. Still, Jeppe, who met with Brewbound in June to discuss the forthcoming opening of his first brick and mortar production facility in Queens, New York, says the fractured relationship with his brother is not an act.
Scottish craft brewery BrewDog is continuing to expand its reach beyond the beer category, today announcing the launch of a namesake streaming video service that features more than 100 hours of drinks-related content.
