Ready-to-drink (RTD) products surpassed $13 billion in off-premise sales in the 52-week period ending July 13, up +4% year-over-year (YoY), according to a mid-year report from market research firm NIQ.

Left Hand Brewing co-founder Eric Wallace has assessed today’s challenging landscape for craft brewers and believes his Longmont, Colorado-based company may have a solution.

Sapporo-Stone workers in Virginia have begun a union drive, VinePair’s Dave Infante reported Monday. Workers are seeking “higher pay, more consistent scheduling and better working conditions,” per the report.

While brewery menus are littered with near beer options and non-alcoholic spirits are making their way onto bar menus as the fastest growing category in the zero-proof set, wine remains one of the most difficult bev-alc formats to bridge the gap between fully dry consumers and the sober-curious drinkers driving category growth.

Well celebrity booze brands, you’ve had a good run … but now it’s Bey’s turn. Yes, add noted whisky enthusiast Beyonce Knowles-Carter (she insists I use her full name when we talk on the phone, but she calls me GIF Guy) to the list of Hollywood A-list liquor entrepreneurs.

Beer declines continued in the last four weeks, with even previous high-performing segments such as imports feeling late summer pains in recent scans from market research firm Circana (data ending August 11).

San Francisco-based Magnolia Brewing is changing hands once again. Kirin-owned Lion Little World Beverages acquired the brewery as part of the 2019 acquisition of New Belgium Brewing.

For its 2025 brand plan, New Trail Brewing is seeing things more clearly than the six-year-old craft brewery ever has before, leadership told partners during the brewery’s inaugural distributor summit earlier this month.

Facing pressure from conservative activists online, Brown-Forman has dropped its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies, following a broader trend of major multinational companies cutting programs created to address systemic inequality in the corporate world.

BeatBox founders Aimy Steadman, Justin Fenchel and Brad Schultz’s ask to wholesalers is to help them build a “flavor wall” at retailers across the country. They described the flavor wall – two to three shelves, featuring assorted flavors of the party punch – during BeatBox’s first large-scale distributor meeting in Houston last week.

Tilray cemented its place as a top five U.S. craft brewery by volume last week with the acquisition of four brands from Molson Coors’ Tenth & Blake division: Atwater, Hop Valley, Revolver and Terrapin.

The latest data set from NIQ showed a modest improvement in sales growth for total bev-alc in the two-week period before August 10, according to analysis from Goldman Sachs Equity Research.

The Brewbound team is hosting a free beer industry happy hour on Sunday, September 29th from 4PM to 6PM PT at The Church by The Lost Abbey in San Diego!

Sierra Nevada CEO Pryce Greenow began his remarks to wholesalers last week acknowledging that craft beer is not short on challenges, including a “cash-constrained consumer,” category price increases, trends in moderation and bev-alc abstinence “becoming more meaningful,” and “a whole host of substitute products” entering the market.