New York-based private equity firm Verus Investment Partners has sold the 156-year-old Pittsburgh Brewing Company to an undisclosed buyer. Specific financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

San Diego’s Ballast Point Brewing will open the first on-site brewery in Anaheim’s downtown Disney District at Disneyland Resort this fall. The Disney taproom is the seventh Ballast Point location in Southern California — and first in Orange County — for the Constellation Brands-owned craft brewery. The move is part of the beer company’s ongoing strategy to grow the Ballast Point brand through local outposts both in California and across the country.

After growing two percent in 2017, Canarchy Craft Brewery Collective – a consortium of beer companies formed by Oskar Blues and Fireman Capital Partners following investments in Cigar City Brewing, Perrin Brewing and Utah Brewers Cooperative – has brought in a pair of C-level executives to “develop necessary and scalable infrastructure” within the organization.

In an effort to combat the influence Texas wholesalers wield with local lawmakers, the state’s craft brewers guild has launched its own political action committee, called CraftPAC. In a press release, the Texas Craft Brewers Guild said the goal of CraftPAC would be to overturn “archaic, anti-competitive beer laws” that have “had a chilling effect on the industry’s growth.”

BeerBoard, the management platform behind digital menu displays at on-premise retailers such as Buffalo Wild Wings, Tilted Kilt and World of Beer, recently reviewed data from more than 50,000 draft lines and found that craft beer share grew by two percent in 2017.

After two decades of steady growth, Upland Brewing is taking a two-pronged approach to expansion in 2018. The brewery, ranked by the Brewers Association as the third largest beer company in Indiana, not only plans to dig deeper in its home state, but also expand distribution of its wood-aged and sour beers to a handful of new U.S. markets this year.

North American Breweries this week announced that Kris Sirchio, who has served as CEO since 2013, would step down. Adrian Lachowski, the general manager of Florida Ice and Farm Co.’s (FIFCO) Central American beer and FMB business, will take over as CEO in early February, the company said via a press release.

In this week’s Last Call: Smuttynose’s owners comment on their brewery’s pending auction; the FBI investigates an Ohio equipment supplier accused of defrauding several breweries; Southern Tier announces plans for a downtown Cleveland brewery and taproom; and more.

California’s Mendocino Brewing Co. and New York’s Olde Saratoga Brewing Co. have shuttered, impacting the operations of several other small companies who also produced beer at those facilities. The shutdown comes as the Indian government moves to extradite billionaire Vijay Mallya, who owns the two breweries, from London on fraud and money laundering charges in excess of $1 billion.

For the second time in as many years, Pabst Brewing Company will undergo a major round of layoffs, today announcing that it has eliminated a total of 70 positions from the company. The cuts — which impacted employees across all areas of the organization, including sales, marketing, operations and administration — are being made to help the company reduce its cost basis by 15 percent.

New Hampshire’s Smuttynose Brewing, citing overleveraging of investments and missed growth projections amidst increased competition from fellow craft brewers, is scheduled to be sold March 9 at a bank auction.

Chris Gallant, the co-founder of New York-based Bronx Brewery, will step down this year as his family prepares for a move to California, the company announced today. Gallant, who launched the company in 2011 with head brewer, Damian Brown, will maintain an ownership stake in the business and a seat on the company’s board. However, he will no longer be active in its day-to-day operations.

U.S. beer volume sales were roughly flat in 2017, according to retail data provider IRI Worldwide. The market research firm, which tracks category-wide sales trends at off-premise retailers, reported that total U.S. beer dollar sales topped $34 billion in the firm’s multi-outlet and convenience (MULC) universe of stores (grocery, drug, club, dollar, mass-merchandiser and military).

Facing increased competition from more than 6,000 U.S. craft breweries, Green Flash Brewing today announced plans to pull distribution from 33 states in a move that will also include a 15 percent reduction of its workforce.