Brewbound Podcast: The NBWA’s Lester Jones Provides a Reality Check on Beer and the Economy

[00:00:00] Jessica Infante: Heading to CBC? Kick things off the day before at Brewbound's meetup at Love City Brewing in Philly, Sunday, April 19th from 5 to 7 p.m. Connect with beer industry leaders, grab a drink, and catch up with the Brewbound team. It's free to attend and walking distance from the convention center. Head to Brewbound.com slash lovecity.rsvp. And don't forget to catch the Brewbound team at booth 956 during CBC. Lester Jones drops by to talk beer and the economy next on the Brewbound Podcast. Hello and welcome to the Brewbound Podcast. My name is Justin Kendall and I am the editor of Brewbound and I am joined by the very alive Jessica Infante, managing editor of Brewbound. How are you doing, Jess?

[00:00:58] Lester Jones: Very alive is a stretch. I would say marginally alive. But yes, I am living contrary to how it looked Brew Talks last week.

[00:01:07] Jessica Infante: Well, yes, you unfortunately weren't able to join Zoe and I Brew Talks. And actually Zoe is unable to join us this week on the podcast because she's doing far more fun things on vacation somewhere in the world.

[00:01:24] Lester Jones: Zoe is on a well-deserved vacation to California. I apparently got acute diverticulitis last week because I have become an old man.

[00:01:35] Jessica Infante: And the secret's out as to why you are not at Bruton.

[00:01:39] Lester Jones: Yeah, that was rough, man. Like I thought, like my appendix was getting ready to burst. I was scared and in a whole mess of pain. And I mostly just felt really bad about leaving you guys. And I almost did it because like, Brutox was day two of this attack, and I had been seen and diagnosed and medicated. And the doctor was like, you could go, but if I were you, I would not go. So I listened to her.

[00:02:06] Jessica Infante: I'm glad you listened to her because you weren't going to listen to us when we were telling you to not come. So I'm glad you listened to somebody in this whole fiasco. And it was a fiasco indeed. Not because of you, but my own travel issues.

[00:02:24] Lester Jones: Oh yeah, you had it bad too.

[00:02:26] Jessica Infante: Out of Des Moines. I was supposed to be out of Des Moines on the first plane and instead I was on the last plane.

[00:02:33] Lester Jones: My God. And then what happened?

[00:02:38] Jessica Infante: The hotel gave away my room after promising that they weren't going to give away my room. They had assured us that they were going to hold it because I was late. And at 2 a.m., I'm sitting in a residence in trying to find a room in Boston. And there was not a room to be found anywhere close.

[00:02:58] Lester Jones: There was no room in any inn.

[00:03:00] Jessica Infante: And so I, I ended up in Framingham and at 4am I was finally asleep.

[00:03:07] Lester Jones: Oh my stars. Yeah, last week was the Hot Mess Express, but I watched BrewTalks from home, courtesy of the live stream, courtesy of our friends from Jogfish Head, our presenting sponsor. And you guys did great, like great conversations. You and Zoe both did great job hosting. Crowd looked to be having a good time. I only had a little bit of FOMO, but you guys held it down just fine. Looked like everything went well.

[00:03:32] Jessica Infante: That was a performance brought to you by Cafe Nero. So yes, I was all coffeed up and I was telling Sam Calagione to steer clear of my coffees. I needed them. But yeah, it was a good time. Thanks to everybody who came out and joined us in Boston. The conversations are now available. They're free to watch. They're on Brewbound.com. Posts are starting to pop up, but if you look around, you'll be able to find the videos that are already up there. So go watch them and you can see everything you missed. or didn't miss and rewatch them. Anyway, yeah, it was fun. Glad that we did that and talk about adding to the the pile on as we getting to the news here of that day. By the time I woke up at 9am, there was an email invite in my inbox for a conversation with Night Shift, and I did not know what was going on. One of our speakers was telling me, yeah, I would rather not talk about this if possible, which I totally understood because not really his story to tell, but woke up, saw the invite, and you got me up to speed. for, you know, somebody who was through the wringer like you were, and a real sicko, you championed it out.

[00:04:58] Lester Jones: I mean, I needed something to take my mind off the fact that it felt like my, I don't even know, I will tell you, I was like a nine to a nine and a half on the one to 10 pain scale. So I needed to be distracted from that. And I did that by bringing my laptop to the emergency room, like you just said, quote, a real sicko. But yeah, we had gotten an email from Night Shift's communications team the day before on Tuesday in the afternoon, just saying, hey, you know, you guys have covered the carbon dioxide shortage before. It's affecting Night Shift in a new way, and it's going to change their relationship with Jax Abbey. So it was slightly cryptic. And I was like, yeah, I'm interested. Like, tell us all about it. So we set up a conversation with Night Shift co-founders Rob Burns and Michael Oxton, and we had a tough chat about the state of the owl. Yeah, the state of the owl, but like the state of the industry, too.

[00:05:56] Jessica Infante: Right.

[00:05:57] Lester Jones: But yeah, basically, the the nut graph of this story, and if you didn't go to journalism school, shoot me a DM and I'll explain what a nut graph is to you, is that Night Shift is ceasing most of their main production at their Everett Mass Brewery and outsourcing it to Jack's Abbey in Framingham, where there is a hotel that had a room for you in the middle of the night.

[00:06:20] Jessica Infante: That looked like a castle.

[00:06:21] Lester Jones: Did you feel like a princess?

[00:06:23] Jessica Infante: Not at 4am, I did not feel like a princess.

[00:06:27] Lester Jones: Yeah, so they're sending production to Jack's Abbey and to Isle Brewers Guild down in Rhode Island, which is a contract facility that they've worked with for a long time. And they've worked with Jack's Abbey for a long time too. As the guys told us, Night Shift does about half of their production in-house and the other half they have to outsource. I mean, this obviously is new news, but it's something that they've been doing before. And unfortunately, the escalating incident here is the fact that the week before last, their CO2 provider called them up and said, hey, we don't have a delivery for you. Now, they'd already had their allocations reduced and reduced, so they knew that there was a shortage. It's not like this came completely out of nowhere, but to get that call and say, hey, no carbon dioxide. I think that was like the inciting incident here that really ramped up this decision. But we had a really long chat with them and it's not just the CO2. And they were pretty frank with us about that. The Everett brewery has never really been optimized to handle the level of production capacity that it needs. A lot of tweaks there and they just keep sinking money into it, but they've never really gotten the building to be where it should be. So how do we get here? I mean, and the real impact here is that their 12-person production team could potentially be out of work by October 1st. And they've told them all, we are going to pay your salary until then. If there's no work by then, you will all be receiving severance packages and recommendations. So, like, obviously, you know, I live in New England, you, until less than a month ago, also lived in New England. Yeah, like the rumor mill, I felt like went wild. Like my DMs were blowing up on Wednesday morning, and that doesn't really happen to me too much. And I'm not sure if that's a combination of like proximity, like we live here, they're here, we report on them a lot. They've always been really good about making themselves available to the media. You know, people know who they are and they're usually really willing to talk about things. So I think all of those factors led to this situation where like half of Massachusetts was like, oh my God, did you hear about Night Shift? And it's, that's kind of where we are. And things were getting out of control. And people were saying they fired everybody. And it's like, well, like, no, that's not what's happened here. I mean, two months notice, plus a severance package.

[00:08:41] Jessica Infante: If it comes to that, if it comes to that, which might not happen, probably will for some. And one of the details that sort of stood out to me from your story was the week before they'd hired three production people.

[00:08:57] Lester Jones: Yeah, they'd hired three new people on production. So that's where things do feel a little fuzzy, you know.

[00:09:02] Jessica Infante: That's a pretty abrupt about face.

[00:09:06] Lester Jones: Right, right. There's a lot of factors that go into this current situation. And it's a tough situation.

[00:09:13] Jessica Infante: And we've been hearing about CO2 for this is the second year that we've heard about issues.

[00:09:20] Lester Jones: Yeah. I mean, the last not this current CO2 shortage, but the last one stemmed from the fact that carbon dioxide comes from many different sources, but a big source is, it is a byproduct in the processing of ethanol for gasoline. So when you think back to, you know, March, April, May of 2020, when nobody was going anywhere and gas production all but shut down, the ramifications of that were felt months later, and CO2 became very scarce. This time around, there's different issues here. I asked if this had anything to do with Ukraine because there are other supply chain issues that could come out from that, like grain. But no, this current issue is that another source of CO2 comes from fertilizer production and fertilizer production plants, you know, they produce fertilizer all of the winter, all the fall and winter and early spring months so that people have it now when they need it and they usually shut down for maintenance. So there's some of that going on, but there's also a well down south, I want to say Mississippi, that was giving off CO2 and that CO2 has been contaminated. So it's not really up to snuff for beverage grade. Rob did tell us that their provider had said, hey, we can get you some CO2, but it's tainted with some sulfur and we can't make any promises. And they were like, oh, absolutely not keep that. We don't want it.

[00:10:35] Jessica Infante: Yeah. And they told us as well that they had explored other options other than their supplier. And what they were told was it would be about a year before they'd be able to be supplied with CO2 at the level that they needed.

[00:10:49] Lester Jones: Yeah. So, I mean, it's kind of like the can situation. Again, if you're not on contract with a supplier, you're in trouble.

[00:10:57] Jessica Infante: And luckily for them, their contract partners, Jack's Abbey and Isle Brewers Guild are. But I mean, the one thing that we can't sort of pretend with Night Shift is that there haven't been major shifts in the business recently. They sold their brand distribution rights and shuttered their distribution business. They had planned to open a production facility in Philadelphia. That's something that they had to pull back out of.

[00:11:25] Lester Jones: Right. We keep saying that the Everett facility was never meant for what it is, and that was never their plan. That Philly brewery was supposed to be where they produce their beer. And that was just a combination of bad timing and bad luck. It was right before the pandemic. not that everybody in the world needs to hear this, but it's like, always interesting to me when this gets brought up. But you and I talked about the Philly brewery at my Brewbound job interview.

[00:11:54] Jessica Infante: Oh, yeah, that's right.

[00:11:55] Lester Jones: Right. Wow.

[00:11:56] Jessica Infante: Yeah, it all comes full circle. Yeah, it's all about me. Really? It really is. the entire brew-bound world revolves around you. That is not at all true.

[00:12:07] Lester Jones: But other things on the horizon for Night Shift. They very recently got their federal and state distilling licenses for the Everett facility. So, you know, Rob pointed out that distilling does have some advantages in that flat spirits don't need CO2. So, that is something they'd be able to do. But you know, the guys did both say like, these aren't the conditions we wanted to launch a spirits brand under like under duress with no time to test it and concept it.

[00:12:34] Jessica Infante: So it takes time. Yeah.

[00:12:36] Lester Jones: Yeah, the other thing that I think we really should make clear is that both taprooms are still open, the taproom at Everett and their taproom at Lovejoy, plus they've also got a bunch of pop-ups around the Boston area. I think we're going to see quite a few shifts like this where, you know, when it becomes too expensive to make your own product and there's plenty of contract partners out there that probably have time in their schedules, that I'm sure becomes very attractive.

[00:13:04] Jessica Infante: Yeah. Speaking of another situation that has been playing out for some time and one that wasn't a great situation and, you know, hopefully it lands in a better situation, is Maui is planning to acquire Modern Times after all. They had the backup bid in the auction and they were sitting there on deck waiting to see what happened with Brewery X. And Brewery X dropped out. And Maui said, oh, they dropped out. Well, we got to look at this. And they looked at it. And now they're they're all in.

[00:13:40] Lester Jones: They're all in. Yeah, that was a dramatic couple of weeks with lots of back and forth behind the scenes. So it was interesting to be privy to that. I am in a few different beer Facebook groups, which is like a good source of news for me because people in these groups will share news about their local breweries that I wouldn't see otherwise. And somebody shared the San Diego Beer News story about this and wrote the caption, I don't know about you ladies, but this is unexpected. It's just like, oh, I only wish this were unexpected for me. This is a story that has been living on our periphery for what I feel like is half of my life. But no, it's just a few months. So if this is how we feel, I can only imagine how the Modern Times team feels. But they've got their forever home, expected to close in October.

[00:14:29] National Beer: Yeah.

[00:14:31] Lester Jones: I don't know if we'll ever find out what happened with Brewery X or what happened with MTD, who turned down the backup bidder spot. If you really want a brewery, that's not what you do. So now, you know, I think you said this, but Modern Times will be acquiring Maui for 15.3 million, which is a good chunk less than the 20 million that Brewery X was going to buy it for. And even less than the 21 million that MTD countered with, But in theory, we've got an end to that. We also have an end to something else that's been going on for what feels like half of my natural life.

[00:15:11] Jessica Infante: Feels like all of my life at this point. Yes, the judge in the Stone-Molson-Gore's trademark infringement case that has been going on since 2018 upheld the jury verdict of $56 million. But definitely while saying, I'm not going to second guess the jury's decision, pretty much second guess the jury's decision throughout his opinion, but upheld that. And then a couple of days later or a few days later, I should say by the end of the week, tossed out all of Stone's motions to disgorge profits from Molson Coors and get attorney's fees and treble damages, like all that tossed out. Judges like the jury had the opportunity to do this in their award. They didn't do it. We're done here.

[00:16:07] Lester Jones: Yeah, I guess this is a win for the, you know, American jury trial system. I particularly enjoyed his honors pointing out that quote. So Stone, you know, tried to recoup attorney's fees and he wrote, quote, Stone also points to the scorched earth nature of Molson Coors' litigation strategy while ignoring the role Stone themselves played in fostering a contentious litigation environment.

[00:16:37] Jessica Infante: What would have set that off? A video announcing that you're filing a trademark infringement lawsuit?

[00:16:44] Lester Jones: Or just, like, years of flexing your lawyerly muscle to threaten anybody that uses the word stone in anything pertaining to their business name? Like, I mean, this is the very definition of fuck around and find out.

[00:16:58] Jessica Infante: Yeah, let's get away from this. Everybody's probably tired of hearing about Stone and Molson Coors at this point, and they're discouraging and not discouraging. And so basically, TLDR, Stone isn't getting the hundreds of millions of dollars that they sought in damages from Molson Coors from this, and they're not getting four years worth of attorneys fees either.

[00:17:21] Lester Jones: A bummer for them.

[00:17:22] Jessica Infante: Yeah. And finally, wrapping this up here, we both sat in on Bart Watson, the Chief Economist for the Brewers Association's latest webinar. What do we got from Bart?

[00:17:34] Lester Jones: a mixed bag of what Bart called mixed signals. So at the halfway point, Bart is upholding the guidance he issued at the end of 21 that craft beer would grow 5% this year.

[00:17:47] Jessica Infante: You make Bart sound like a publicly traded company.

[00:17:51] Lester Jones: Yeah.

[00:17:52] Jessica Infante: I'd buy stock in Bart.

[00:17:53] Lester Jones: I would buy stock in Bart before I bought stock in almost anything else.

[00:17:58] Jessica Infante: Yeah, definitely don't buy stock in cannabis. Let me tell you that.

[00:18:01] Lester Jones: Oh, I mean, I got no stock.

[00:18:03] Jessica Infante: Anyway, yes, get us back on track here.

[00:18:06] Lester Jones: Yeah, so I know Bart is saying it looks like we're going to net out between up four and five percent for the year, but really like this is very much a tale of two cities, depending on what size brewery you are, what your distribution strategy is, what channels you play in. Distributed craft has not even reached its 2019 levels. While that's down, the brewery sales are up. Some signs point to struggling, some signs point to strength. And they're kind of all over the place. But Bart did his annual mid-year survey. He got 200 responses from 44 states. He noted that distributed draft is up 32%, which Bart says is a big number. But he points out that we're cycling a really weak period for distributed draft last year. So basically all the numbers are really wonky. put together a great slide that compares distributed off-premise BA-defined craft sales between this current year and 2019. Because if you look at those numbers from 2020 and 21, they're so wonky. They really throw everything out of whack. So if you can look at this year, which I don't want to say is a normal year because it's not, but people are behaving more similarly to like the quote unquote old times this year than they were, you know, last year and the year before. So this year is a little bit more apples to apples with 2019. And 2022 is still pretty far off from 2019 at the important peaks in the beer off premise calendar. So, you know, you can always see in a, in a line chart, I think this is orange, right? It's been so long since I had to learn what kinds of charts exist, but I can tell you this is not a bar chart and it's not a pie chart.

[00:19:46] Jessica Infante: I'll take your word for it.

[00:19:48] Lester Jones: I mean, don't take my word for much. I literally failed statistics freshman year of college, and I used to cry to my high school math tutor. But, you know, you can always see in one of these where the Super Bowl is, where Memorial Day is, where the Fourth of July is, you know, and at all those peaks, 2022 is most of the time a good deal off from 2019.

[00:20:09] Jessica Infante: One of the things that I took away is there was a slide that had 39% of weekly craft beer drinkers think there is too much slash more than enough selection versus 17% not at all enough, not nearly enough. And as Bart pointed out, the plurality of that, 43% think there is just enough. Man, that 40%, nearly 40%, it's almost half and half, right? Like we're talking 43% versus 39%. If I'm a brewer, I do not want a retailer looking at that slide.

[00:20:46] Lester Jones: Definitely not, because retailers I'm sure are looking to cut wherever they can. So to know that consumers maybe agree, and 43% felt there was just enough.

[00:20:56] National Beer: Yeah.

[00:20:58] Lester Jones: There's not really too many pervs out here who are saying they want more, right?

[00:21:01] Jessica Infante: 17%, not at all enough, not nearly enough. There's 17% of sickos out there.

[00:21:08] Lester Jones: Come on, guys. There's a lot.

[00:21:11] Jessica Infante: Yeah. Have you been in a grocery store, like beer section? Not that I'm rooting against anybody here.

[00:21:16] Lester Jones: No. If there's anything we are wanting for in this society of ours, it is not choice of commercial products.

[00:21:24] Jessica Infante: And you definitely don't want paralysis.

[00:21:27] Lester Jones: No. I mean, I have analysis paralysis a lot when I go shopping for beer, and like, I'm a pretty informed and generally enthusiastic consumer. Not right now, thanks to the antibiotics, but I look forward to having a beer tomorrow. Yeah, another thing Bart pointed out was beverage alcohol share. It's something we talk about a lot. Spirits steal and share from beer all the time. In 2021, beer accounted for 45.6%. of all beverage alcohol and spirits accounted for 38.4%. That is a much, much narrower gap than in the year 2000 when beer was just about 60% and spirits were just under 30%. So that gap closes a little tiny bit every single year. And according to IWSR, next year could be the year that spirits overtake beer.

[00:22:26] Jessica Infante: and value, right?

[00:22:28] Lester Jones: Yeah. I mean, while I was home in New Jersey, my mom's friend, you know, whenever he hears something that pertains to beer, will bring it up to me as a way to have something to talk about. And he's like, Jessa, and he doesn't drink. So he's like, I heard that spirits are going to overtake beer soon. And I was like, Where did you hear this? And he's like, what's beer gonna do about it? What's their plan? And I was like, Oh, that's a great question.

[00:22:51] Jessica Infante: Let me tell you, once we get a beer Institute precedent, we'll be back on track to figuring it out. Help us Jim McGreevy. You're our only hope.

[00:23:02] Lester Jones: Oh, I miss Jim. I should have tried to see Jim while I was in New Jersey. I bet he would have liked to have had a beer. But do you think Jim still listens to this podcast?

[00:23:11] Jessica Infante: You never know.

[00:23:12] Lester Jones: You never know. I'd like to think he misses us, but who knows?

[00:23:16] Jessica Infante: Do you ever think about us, Jim? I think there's like a sad stick song or something that should be playing right now. Anyway, let's get to our featured interview now. We've got Lester Jones, the chief economist of the National Beer Wholesalers Association. Let's get to it. All right, let's bring on our featured guest, Lester Jones, the Chief Economist for the National Beer Wholesalers Association. Thanks for being here, Lester. Thanks for having me. We wanted to talk about beer and where things stand in the current economy and inflationary environment, lots of fears of recession. You've been talking to a lot of folks, you're the numbers guy, you're going to break it down for us. Let's get going. What's the myth and reality of what we're seeing right now out there?

[00:24:14] Wholesalers Association: Okay, so it's really complicated times to be in the beer economics and demographic business. There's a lot of kind of confounding things that people are seeing. Inflation is really strong, but you know, job market's really strong. Prices are up and wages are up and relatively, we're kind of all in the same position, right? But inflation's up. How much is inflation up? Beer inflation's up 4%. Wages are up 5%. So on average, price of beer is lower than it was the same time last year relative to your wages, right? Oh, but gas is up, and rents are up, and mortgage is up. It's not a linear one-to-one world. And I spend a lot of time trying to convince people that we need to think in a nonlinear way, and we need to think across multivariables, many different variables, not just the relationship between gas And beer and the convenience store, right? It's it's more than that. And that's really what we're trying to figure out how to. To put into perspective for our members and beer distributor members and also members of the brewing industry, whether they're suppliers or on the retail side as well.

[00:25:24] Lester Jones: So what are you hearing from people out in the field? Because I'm sure when people start to feel a little iffy and a little panicky and a little unsure, you are one of their first calls. So what are you hearing from the world?

[00:25:35] Wholesalers Association: Well, I mean, if you looked at the beer purchasers index, and it's what we just put it out on Friday, and it was kind of a I liked it, because it was indicative or was representative of really what's happening in the economy as a whole, which is just sliding into neutral. I have the bear purchase index, and it has four quadrants to it. When everything's 50, when both inventories and purchasing is above 50, it's kind of a weird place. When everything's both below 50, it's a weird place. We kind of like to be on that line, and you can see it on the news release. I like that nice line, like when inventories are low, purchase indexes are high. inventories are high, purchases are low, you'd like to be balanced. Right now, for the last two months, we found this spot where the bear purchaser index is below 50, and that at-risk inventory index is below 50. That's a signal that, okay, I'm not going to order more, but my inventories are also getting a little lean And it's not comfortable being there because when your inventories are getting low, you want to order more because we're in this period right now where we're not quite sure what's going to happen because we have all the talk of recession. And what happens in the recession is typically people, the economy goes negative. We make less goods and services, employment falls. We turn more to our, to transfer payments, like unemployment benefits and those kinds of things to help carry us through these bad times. But we're not there, right? Because we know from the data that the job market is strong. Consumer balance sheets are still strong. Things like mortgage delinquency and credit card delinquency and all these variables that you keep track of aren't really in any kind of any point where we should be concerned with the average household's financial situation, they're all doing pretty good, personal savings are up, things like that, and cash accounts are looking pretty hefty. We actually have the ability as a consuming house as in an aggregate. I can find you lots of individual stories that don't fit the average, but in aggregate for the economy as a whole, the balance sheet for consumers looks really strong and has a potential to carry through any economic slowdown that we may see. Moreover, what we see from these two quarters of negative GDP growth is that, well, they're a little different than others. First of all, they're pretty shallow. They're not down 2%, down 3%. The last first quarter was down 1.6%, this was down just slightly below 1%. It was mainly from growing inventories and some other, it wasn't from consumer spending, which is two-thirds of the economy, it was things like inventories and the other little minor accounts that drove us down into the negative. What I'm trying to explain to people is that you're looking forward, things look bad, but a lot of the variables that we've collected, a lot of the data points that we've collected so far indicate that consumers are in a good position for whether an economic downturn.

[00:28:50] Jessica Infante: So you're taking more of a this is short term pain, but keep a view of the long game type of guy right now.

[00:29:00] Wholesalers Association: Well, I would I would even use the word pain. I mean. Pain is when you can't eat, and you can't pay your electric bill, and there's an eviction notice attached to your door, and the repo man is dragging away your car. That's pain. When you look at the data, I don't see that short-term pain in a large share of the population. Yeah, we're going to find some marginal households that are falling into pain. That's just what happens, but it's not a big jump into that. at this point.

[00:29:29] Jessica Infante: Yeah. So as we're heading into this back half of the year, what are the indicators that you are going to be watching that are going to sort of guide you through this?

[00:29:39] Wholesalers Association: Inventories, inventories, inventories. That's all about inventory. You know, early in the year, we heard about Walmart and Target and Best Buy and there and and how they started having too much inventories built. We're seeing that in other parts of the economy. One of the things that's interesting is how In prior inflationary periods and prior recessionary periods, things were a lot more equitably distributed amongst the industries. In 2008, 2010, when the housing market collapsed, housing got hit hard. While housing was hit hard, the energy cycle, the energy boom that we're having in fracking and liquid natural gas coming out of the Southwest was very strong. that was a different period of time. Now what we're looking at is this, this period where we started, we came out when we were in the pandemic, everything was about durable goods. People were buying decks, they're buying furniture, they're buying computers, they're buying, they're doing additions to their homes. And, and those drove those lumber prices and those furnishings. And, and then all of a sudden, you know, we got to the summer and people started traveling out and we saw the non-durable world and the good service world start to, to inch up in inflation. How the economy is responding to this in the second half will really be indicative of what happens to all this stuff we've made. We've been trying to watch the supply chain heal. We're going to have lots of stuff, lots of durable goods around us, because that's what we've been building up in inventories. We're coming out of that summer holiday period and we're moving, we're going to start, kids are going to start going back to school, kids are going to go to college, kids are going to go to high school, we're going to have this big back to school rush in September. How our economy responds to that, I think is going to be very, very interesting. What's really going to happen in the second half of the year is what happened with all the stuff that accumulated in the first half of the year, and how it plays out in the economy. If you saw the news today, Amazon laid off 100,000 people. That's wild. Yeah, a hundred, that's a small, how many people are in your town that you live in now, Justin? That's more than I think where I live.

[00:31:55] Lester Jones: That's like two and a half of my town.

[00:31:57] Wholesalers Association: Exactly. So Amazon laid off 100,000 people today. And the reason was is they hired too many people to take care of all the demand that they didn't know was coming. If you remember what I said at the end of last year, we made way too much beer. We ended the fourth quarter of 2021 with way too much beer. Everyone thought that seltzers were going to, every individual brewer had their seltzers up 10, 20%, you know, and cumulatively, it just wasn't, it was too much when you added it all up. And that's kind of what happened with the recipe economy. And that's why I love to tell people that the beer industry is a great reflection of the U.S. economy. Because what we experienced in this, in the fourth quarter of last year with all this excess supply is happening in Amazon right now. They're like, oh my God, too much stuff, and we have too many people, and we have too much warehouse space. It's too much, too much. All of our expectations were greater than what the economy could take from us. It's a very important lesson for brewers, and for distributors, and for retailers is that What happened yesterday is not always a good indicator of what's going to happen tomorrow. You need to be thinking about how consumer behavior is going to change tomorrow relative to yesterday, and then maybe make an adjustment to what you think is going to happen. What I see in the second half of this year is I see all these people that went out and did all this traveling and all this excessive demand in the service of hospitality sector and traveling and airlines. is going to dissipate very quickly. I think we're going to find ourselves in September with a lot of great deals on airline tickets and probably continued decline in gas prices. Things are going to be very different as the country adapts to the fall schedule. I think it's going to be a lot more stronger seasonality component to this fall than we've ever seen before. That's my forecast and my expectations for the beer industry, at least, and for the economy as a whole. I think what happened last fall is not going to happen this fall. I think we're going to see a much steeper fall off in consumer behavior as we get ready to go back to school and go back to work and kind of settle back into the second half of the year.

[00:34:18] Jessica Infante: When you look at what happened with hard seltzer over the last two years, how much of that was driven by all of that excess inventory build versus a consumer shift to other products? Or are we just talking like a perfect storm of all things sort of hitting at once?

[00:34:40] Wholesalers Association: It's one of those things that was a perfect storm. Everyone had of this irrational expectations for this segment. At the same time, the distilled spirits industry was looking at the industry saying, I could do that, and I could probably do it better, and I can do it cheaper even with this really crazy tax rate, but doing it gives me all this opportunity to suddenly talk about taxes. That was part of it. And at the same time, consumers changed. They moved out into the marketplace instead of being at home. And as we well know, the 12-pack of cans is an off-premise, at-home package versus something which is more away from home. And I think all those things came at the perfect time to really lead us to that excessive supply, which led us into the first quarter, which was just kind of like, what's going on? What am I supposed to do? And that's the perfect storm.

[00:35:39] Lester Jones: It is wild to me, since we're talking about hard seltzer and spirits-based RTDs, how many people I have seen as of late out at bars and restaurants drinking high noons? Like, just ask them to make you a vodka soda with a splash of pineapple. It's the same thing.

[00:35:55] Wholesalers Association: It is the same thing. But high noons, well, it's not linear, guys. The world is not linear. It's cyclical, it's nonlinear. You know, what we see today, it'll be in a very different place this time last next year, I'm sure.

[00:36:10] Jessica Infante: And it's a cachet thing too, probably.

[00:36:13] Lester Jones: Totally, it's like a badge, yeah. Oh, Lester, I wanted to thank you for giving me one of my favorite tidbits when we saw each other earlier this summer in Fort Collins. You mentioned that the next supply chain crisis was going to be facing the popcorn market. And I went out and I bought popcorn to make at home. I love making popcorn at home. I told my mom who also loves making popcorn at home. So the Infante ladies, thank you for that nugget.

[00:36:40] Wholesalers Association: You're welcome. And I'm glad to know that you have a good stash of popcorn in your house in case I need some.

[00:36:48] Lester Jones: Ironically, I can't eat it right now. We don't need to talk about diverticulitis in this part of the podcast.

[00:36:54] Jessica Infante: Yeah, we're already hit on the top of the show.

[00:36:59] Lester Jones: And now the beer podcast listening public knows way too much about my guts. But yeah, it's just interesting to me to just see how all of these things affect each other. You know, movie theaters closed down in the beginning of the pandemic. Popcorn farmers didn't get the demand that they needed. So they didn't plant the stuff that they would have needed. And now we don't have enough popcorn. Likewise, you know, brewers that were making hard seltzer that was selling really well had these projections that they were going to need all of this hard seltzer because the trend line was just up, up, up. And then all of a sudden the trend line was not so up, up, up. And they had all of this contracted time and space at their cold packers. And now they get hit with penalties. So yeah, all these things are not so different.

[00:37:41] Wholesalers Association: They're predictable in an unpredictable way, right? Yeah. It's the timing that is so important to get right in all of this and knowing what's going to happen next. And that's where I think it's important to divide the short-term impacts versus the long-term impacts. What's happening short term with the relationship between beer prices and gas prices and rent and interest rates and what am I going to lose my job tomorrow and all that other stuff versus what do we see down the line? I am still incredibly optimistic about beer and the beer space for what's coming because there's so much opportunity here and there's going to be a lot of change coming our way. and I think it's going to be great for the beer industry in general because you can be obsessed about the short term because I understand if you're a brewer, you're a distributor, you're bringing in beer and you're making beer and you're bringing in beer and you got to keep those cases moving because if those cases sit still, they don't turn into dollars. Things need to move and they need to stay in motion so that they can come back to you in terms of dollar bills that you can in turn buy more stuff with or pay your employees or invest in a bigger place or do something that you want to do from a standpoint. That's a very short-term reality. But when you shift and start thinking long-term, where are we headed and what's going to happen, I'm optimistic, believe it or not. I'm not a pessimist on this. I see a lot of good things that are going to happen to the beer industry going forward. It all falls in to what's happening in the labor force and what's happening with the American consumer, which is actually a lot younger now. I think we talked about this before is that we have these two very distinct demographic groups. We have a very wealthy aging baby boom population sitting on literally trillions, $70 trillion worth of wealth. Like I've said before, think about $70 trillion and how you would personally spend $70 trillion. That's the aggregate wealth of this baby boom silent generation. Two things are going to happen to this money. They're either going to spend it with reckless abandon, or they're going to set it aside and give it to their millennial Gen Z kids. Either way, this pot of wealth, even with the market being down and interest rates going up, it's still an extremely large amount of money that needs to be spent, that will be spent, like I said, either recklessly or maybe moderately, but however, it's going to move its way down this timeline. We've never been in a world where we've seen this much wealth. transferring down through the generations. And at the same time, we have a very young, well-educated, probably one of the best educated demographic groups we ever had. They grew up on technology. They had great access to education in many places. So they're young, they're inexperienced, but they're going to get experience pretty darn quickly. They're going to go from their second jobs to their third jobs. As they move on these jobs, they're going to gain income, they're going to gain knowledge, they're going to gain wealth. When people say that Gen Zs don't have the same standard of living as the guy, the nuclear family from the 1950s and they couldn't afford a house, I just shake my head because There's such apples to orange comparisons, right? It's just this generation of young workers that are entering the workforce in a tight labor market with just growing opportunities to become entrepreneurs or to become part of the labor force and to grow and to earn income is just phenomenal. but it's something that they also have that knowledge that they have an incredibly wealthy elderly generation that's kind of going to help them along. I certainly didn't have it, and I know a lot of people my generation didn't have it, so I think it's I look forward to how this Gen Z and millennial generation grow into the labor force, acquire skills, and grow the overall market for everything, including beer, in ways that I think we don't even realize how it's going to turn out.

[00:42:07] Lester Jones: So basically Generation X and millennials are just kind of screwed.

[00:42:12] Wholesalers Association: I wouldn't say that. We're going to be the Gen X. We're going to be the beneficiaries of all this. We're in the trough, but the reality is that trough is being carried by all this economic activity, by all this innovation, by all this knowledge, this wealth of knowledge that we've accumulated to just make the world a better place. We just released the MBWA Sustainability Calculator. It's exciting because beer distributors can sit down, calculate their their carbon footprint, they can actually benchmark their carbon footprint, they can share with their brewer partners, their retailer partners, everything they're doing to make, you know, to make a difference moving forward. These are things that we would probably wouldn't have done 20 years ago. And here we are today doing that. and our distributor members are embracing it, and they're going to move forward with that. They're going to look for more efficient ways to get beer to retailers with a significantly less carbon footprint. That's a good thing. I mean, it's something to be excited about, because it will make a difference in the end to how our economy functions.

[00:43:19] Lester Jones: So Lester, between brewers and wholesalers, they both, you know, they're generally one team, one dream, but they both have to navigate these waters differently. So what is something that is affecting wholesalers at the moment that's not affecting brewers, you know, and the reverse?

[00:43:36] Wholesalers Association: Clearly, for beer distributors right now, fuel is a significant part of the cost of getting beer to retailers and people. We need physical labor. We need people to take a forklift and put beer on the truck, and we need people to take the beer off the truck with a handcart and roll it into a retailer. There's no way around that. Even if I came up with a robot that could do it, it would still need supervision walking into a retailer, right? So that energy requirement and that labor requirement are incredibly important to bio distributors. And then we're going to be navigating those challenges for a while. Even though Amazon laid off 100,000 people, I don't think we're going to immediately solve the beer distributors' labor problem and warehouse problems just because of that. I think it's going to be a little bit longer that we're going to have to get through. But it's an obstacle we're going to overcome, and I think we're going to find that we can figure out how to make it work. But at the meantime, and on the other side, you have brewers, and brewers need ingredients. They need malt. They need hops. They need clean water. I mean, most of the US, a large chunk of the Southwestern United States is in a drought right now, and I would be very worried about water and clean, good water. I'd be very worried about my malt supply and my barley supply. And those are two very different things that are going to keep both parties distracted when, like you said, they need to be, you know, they're going to be distracted by these two things, but they need to be working together to make sure that there's a steady supply of beer rolling through the supply chain, getting to retailers and getting out there. You know the liquor and you remember the liquor industry they i've always said they can you know they can make hard liquor out of anything they make it out of old stale bread. You know they can make it out of they all they need is something to to ferment and then distill into hard liquor we don't do that in the beer industry we use. We use good barley and good malts and good hops to make tasty beers. Sorry, seltzer guys that piss on your parade. But, you know, from the core of beer that I think is so important to being a beer drinker, I think that's important. So, yeah, those are very different realities. One's almost like a kind of think of the one's kind of like a labor. constraint and the other is like a land resource constraint. Brewers are going to be concerned about the water and the barley and the environment to get those core ingredients into their shop. And meanwhile, we've got the distributors on the other side that need that labor in those hands to make sure that stuff moves on through the supply chain. So, you know, we can all work together and get those things moving, you know, find safe places to be for everyone. I think it would be a great way to move forward.

[00:46:29] Jessica Infante: What's your view of what's been going on with craft. We just had Bart Watson's mid-year state of the industry address. It's mixed signals. You know scans have been what they are. But at the brewery it's been the bright spot of course. So what's your your view at craft here at the halfway point.

[00:46:49] Wholesalers Association: It seems to me that it's going to be taproom. It's going to be direct-to-consumer, taproom, close-to-home kind of stuff. I haven't been to a taproom yet this year that I haven't talked to the person. I said, oh, taproom's crushing it. package sales, not so much. That's been the consistent theme I've gotten from people. The problem with taprooms is they definitely are way below the radar. They're not in the stand, we don't see them. A lot of them are quarterly or annual filers, so we won't even have a clue how much of that annual filing volume is actually out there until March or April of 2023. We can sit around and speculate on how much beer is flying under the radar of the Nielsen scans and the IRIs and what the BA is picking up. I'm sure there's plenty of small little guys out there with small systems selling taproom beer that don't even know who the Brewers Association may be and more or less not in any way interested in even, you know, submitting a Brewers of a survey to them. So I think we're going to see, we're going to be very surprised, I should say, come next year when we look at that, what's been flying under the radar for craft and realizing that craft is probably doing what craft should be doing. Drink local, think global and support your local, you know, your local guy. And, you know, selling into Costco and Walmart, not so much. That's probably how that's going to play out, in my opinion. So am I bullish on Kraft? Yeah, I think Kraft will do fine for the niche markets that it actually really dominates in, which is that kind of space.

[00:48:43] Lester Jones: So two years from now, the Kraft section at, say, like an Albertsons, not going to look the way it does right now, right?

[00:48:51] Wholesalers Association: Probably not probably some mainstream. I mean, I mean, if you're if you're nationally distribute and everyone recognizes your name. It's just the style of beer at that point. So craft, you'll be able to go to your local Albertson, you will find a craft style beer, the ownership thing. I don't think. 90% of the consumers will even figure it out or care about it at that point. They just want to know, do I have a craft style beer at my disposal? And that's what they're going to want. And hopefully there'll be one or two hometown heroes there and a regional guy there and a national guy there, and then a whole bunch of imports and a whole bunch of other things that make the beer industry great. Having a wide variety and choice selection of beer will be sufficient in those channels of trade.

[00:49:37] Lester Jones: That totally makes sense. What bright spots, if any, are there in our current situation for beer? And I'm taking this particularly pessimistically because I know you're going to counter with a more optimistic answer. So we'll make you look like, you know, the happier one.

[00:49:53] Wholesalers Association: I see lots of bright spots. I poo-pooed NAs for a while. Now I'm a cheerleader. I think introducing people to the flavor of beer through the non-alk category is what every distributor and brewer should be doing right now. I visited a brewer years ago and in a state that they weren't allowed to drink on the job. And I asked them, well, why don't you have an NA so you can have a beer with me? We're at the brewery, he goes, well, I'm on the clock and according to the state laws, I can't have a beer. I'm like, well, make a non-alk and let's have a beer together. And I remember that moment, and I remember the individual looking at me, and he's like, well, I don't know why we don't have an N.A., probably because it's expensive, and I don't know how to do it, and it's an expensive endeavor to engage in. But I think the N.A. 's, reintroducing people to the taste of beer, through a non out category I think is a great, great spot. And I actually kind of think that again, a category is kind of going to grow into the low out category where, you know, I've been to a lot of taprooms, a lot of breweries, and I've seen a lot of 3.2 and 3.4 and 3.5, but I wouldn't be surprised, I wouldn't be surprised if like the non-ALP category kind of suddenly starts introducing ALPs, and then the ALP category, and then there's all of a sudden a blurring, ooh, a blurring of the lines. And there's suddenly another blurring of the lines that what is an ALP versus a non-ALP? Where's that point? You know, it used to be 3.2 beer. We've managed to get rid of 3.2 beer. I think everywhere except for Minnesota, where it still exists in sea stores or grocery stores. But a bright spot, I think, is coming down, bringing down those ABVs and maybe non-out. Some of these non-out guys say, oh, this is a great non-out band. It has lots of recognition. I can see once you have something like Athletic Brewing Company with a national recognized name, someone's going to say, scratch their head one day and say, we have this great brand. We have all this brand recognition amongst all these consumers. Why the hell don't we have an alcoholic brand, a low ABV brand? Because you built this brand. You spent all this time and all this money building this brand. Why wouldn't you capitalize it? Maybe that's 10 years from now, maybe that's five years from now, but wouldn't surprise me if we saw something like that. That's a bright spot for me. And I got others, but.

[00:52:28] Lester Jones: I'd assume imports are one of them. Yeah, yeah, imports are doing pretty darn good.

[00:52:33] Wholesalers Association: I'd love to see Canadian imports start to rock again. You go back to the 80s, and you look at the data, and you see how it was all Canadian imports at one point, and there's a little tiny sliver of Mexican imports, and now it's all flipped over in the head. One day, Canadian imports will be strong again. Mark my word. A moose head on every table.

[00:52:56] Lester Jones: a moose head and an athletic for all.

[00:52:59] Wholesalers Association: Exactly. You just don't know though, right? Yeah. It's sometimes the absurd stuff that you walk into and you're like, I would never have thought that was going to happen. So looking forward, I see, you know, I think import category will be, you know, I mean, can't have 100% of all imports, right? We're at 20% imports. We're not going to be 100% imported beer country where everything is imported. At some point, it's going to peak out. At some point, Mexican imports are going to top out. We can't have 100% of all imports being Mexican and 100% of the beer market being Mexican. Things will become nonlinear eventually, and something else will become popular and find the fancy of the American beer consumer, I'm sure.

[00:53:49] Jessica Infante: One of the things that struck me that you were talking about was introducing people to the taste of beer. And we're in a three-year, four-year period here where a lot of consumers were coming into the beer category through products that weren't National Beer or having that traditional flavor. And they didn't have to have the acquired taste that you or me, and I'm guessing Jess as well, had to go through with beer. And I kind of wonder about sort of the Trojan horse nature of hard seltzer if that sort of comes back in the end to sort of bite the industry in a way that it didn't anticipate. It ends up allowing consumers to hop to other beverages such as RTD can cocktails for whatever, you know, we talked about high noon, you see it in the like the tax equivalentization fights, all of that, you know, I'm curious to get sort of your view on that as someone that's, you know, been very pro beer for very long time.

[00:54:53] Wholesalers Association: You know, I will continue to argue that beer is the beverage of moderation. Even if you, in a sneaky way, take a can and put 5%, you know, make it 5% with vodka, it's still basically a vodka drink. And it's the base liquid that we're talking about, not how you concoct it into a package. And I think the beer industry can successfully navigate through the state houses around the country and educate legislatures and regulators and public health folks that, you know, there's a distinct difference between a distilled spirit and a fermented malt beverage. And, you know, those qualities need to be recognized and maintained in the tax structure. We'll lose some here and there, but I think this will be a good place for the beer industry to work together to hold the line between the differences between the two products.

[00:55:48] Jessica Infante: But it's like a philosophical thing, you know, when you look at the lasting effect of what hard seltzer has been, and it's still, it's still huge, you know, it's 10% of the category, whatever. But, you know, do you think that there's sort of like this lasting, you know, effect that having introduced all these drinkers through this, you know, and bully for the companies that capitalize?

[00:56:11] Wholesalers Association: Yeah, no doubt the cat's out of the bag. We had plenty of FMVs, we had, you know, lots of fun FMVs out there. what hard seltzers did really just with the momentum and the magnitude of rolling them out there and putting them into the face of the rest of the alcohol beverage industry, that definitely opened the door for everyone in the alcohol beverage industry to look into that. and then question, well, why do we have these tax structures? What the beer industry needs to do is settle back down to its time-tested and true-to-form talking points that fermented malt beverages are different, and this is why. And we're going to stick to those guns in the statehouse fights. And even though the cat's out of the bag, it's If you're in government fairs, you appreciate this because now you have a job for the next 10 years because, you know, this is what was unleashed in the marketplace. And now we have to figure out how to manage it and control it and keep it in perspective for our legislatures and our regulators and everyone in public health and how these play out.

[00:57:20] Lester Jones: It is interesting to me. I remember being in, you know, practice runs for ABP meetings, you know, in 2016, 2017 at my former employer who makes a hard seltzer brand. And the way it had to be explained to wholesalers back then was it's similar to a vodka soda. We noticed that the younger drinkers were really gravitating toward vodka soda because they liked that it doesn't fill them up and, you know, whatever, whatever, and all this and that. to hard seltzer, did what hard seltzer did, and now we're all way back around to vodka, sodas, and cans. Yeah.

[00:57:57] Jessica Infante: Amazing, isn't it?

[00:57:58] Lester Jones: Time is a flat circle.

[00:57:59] Jessica Infante: And if you listen to the Boston Beer earnings call, you know, you can hear the CEO say that light beer is what's benefiting from the share losses of hard seltzer.

[00:58:11] Lester Jones: That is wild to me. And you know, Justin, you and Zoe graciously took that story so that I could be off the next day. But I listened a little bit while we were still working on Thursday during the call. And that boggled my mind that, you know, people went from this like hard seltzer flavor overblast of every possible thing you could imagine, back to the tried and true premium lights.

[00:58:35] Wholesalers Association: Exactly. Once again, it's not a linear world. And that's kind of what I wanted to start out by saying when we started the conversation is let's not take inflation and go straight to the moon. Let's not take recession and unemployment and go straight to the moon. These things are very cyclical. They're short-term events that will impact everyone's businesses, and they'll be you know, some tightening and there'll be some reorganizations and there'll be some reallocation of resources, however you want to say it. But then there's that long-term and those long-term trends are much more interesting to me in how things play out in the long run, because that's really where we want beer to be. A long-run play, building brand equity, reintroducing people to the taste of beer, doing all those things that pay off in dividends later down the road.

[00:59:30] Jessica Infante: And I'm guessing this is a message you'll be spreading through the remainder of the year and that we'll be hearing during the NBWA's annual convention in Chicago.

[00:59:41] Wholesalers Association: Yeah, the NBWA convention's coming up in Chicago. I've been pushing a theme for working smarter, not harder. I don't know if you saw my talk at the Encompass Connect conference, that was kind of like the theme of my talk was working smarter, not harder, just because we kind of have to do that. And I mean, even Amazon, one of the world's most successful businesses is kind of waking up to that reality. you know, today, or in there, you know, their sales are down, they're laying people off, they're reevaluating. Even this behemoth of a company that just overwhelms everything with sheer force and power is now like, okay, so maybe this isn't the best strategy for us. Let's see if we can work a little bit smarter and not so harder. You know, that's an important time for everyone to kind of settle into this, this new reality and figure out how to work with that mantra.

[01:00:32] Lester Jones: The COVID changes that led Amazon to have to hire all those people. Look at GoPuff. Great example. GoPuff, I feel like really came alive during the pandemic. And now they need to, I hate this term, but like they need to right size, which is probably what Amazon. So it's hard to know what pandemic changes are going to stick. Like, for example, I never not want to work from home. Well, I mean, I hope we're not living in a two-bedroom, one-bathroom condo for the rest of my life, but I would be perfectly happy to not go into an office five days a week ever, ever, ever again.

[01:01:05] Jessica Infante: Well, you're in luck.

[01:01:09] Lester Jones: Great news.

[01:01:11] Jessica Infante: Because you're looking at my new office.

[01:01:13] Lester Jones: Yeah, at your new home.

[01:01:15] Jessica Infante: But yeah, I'm in the Iowa branch right now.

[01:01:18] Lester Jones: So the Iowa Bureau and the Salem Bureau. Zoe might want to go to the office. I don't know. Maybe we should ask her. But she's free to do that whenever she wants. So you know, and I'm sure like, you know, managers of gastro pubs that had 60 draft lines really want to never go back to that because that's a bear. But it's hard to know what is going to stick and what is going to revert.

[01:01:42] Wholesalers Association: Exactly. We'll see. I think September is going to be a really important time for the economy. I think as everyone goes back to school, and we see companies reevaluate their work from home policies, we'll also see a slowing economy, which will take the bargaining power from a seller's market to a buyer's market in terms of the labor force. just because that's what's going to happen when things are slowed down. So September is going to be incredibly interesting. And we're not really going to know what really happened in September until October or November anyway, unless you pay attention to the coincidental indicators. September is going to be very important, I think, for the economy and for the beer market as a whole. It'll be interesting.

[01:02:30] Jessica Infante: I'm going to drink all the Oktoberfests and pumpkin beers and everything on the way out here.

[01:02:36] Lester Jones: Yeah, bluster pumpkin beers this year, yay or nay?

[01:02:39] Wholesalers Association: I'm going to give it a yay because last I've given him a nay every year and they always turn around and surprise me. So I will give pumpkin beers a yay. And I will, I will venture to say they'll probably be about as strong as they were in any other prior year. Wow. Bold. They're just going to be there, right? They're not, it's not like they're huge. It's just that they're there. And I think people will make their pumpkin beers and people that like pumpkin beers will buy their pumpkin beer. And that's just the way it comes out. It's not a crash and burn, but I don't see it shooting through the sky. I'll just say they'll be about where they were last year, which is a good way of talking about the beer industry. Maybe the industry right now is down around a percent, a half a percent. By the end of the year, we'll probably be flat. When you look back on how the industry performed over the last three or four years, kind of that same story. So, you know, it's the competition within the industry and the innovation within the industry that make it so exciting for everyone who is a analyst or an observer of the industry.

[01:03:50] Jessica Infante: Well, Lester, anything that we're missing that you want to hit before we get out of here?

[01:03:55] Wholesalers Association: Nope. I think we've covered plenty. We've covered big economics, big demographics, microeconomics, microdemographics. beer industry, equalization, I don't know. What else we could talk about?

[01:04:08] Lester Jones: Popcorn.

[01:04:11] Jessica Infante: Any plugs for economy beer at this point?

[01:04:16] Lester Jones: Yeah, good question.

[01:04:17] Jessica Infante: Because here in Iowa, and I didn't realize I wasn't celebrating properly, last week was Bush Light Week, I believe.

[01:04:25] Wholesalers Association: Really?

[01:04:26] Jessica Infante: Yeah, at least in Heidi.

[01:04:28] Wholesalers Association: It is Swiss Independence Day, and I forgot to get a Swiss beer to cheers to all Swiss citizens that live in the United States today. It is the independence of Switzerland.

[01:04:41] Lester Jones: A happy day to them. And what Swiss beers are there?

[01:04:44] Wholesalers Association: Well, there's a lot of good Swiss beers out there. There's Dolchlausen, and there's Calanda Brau, and there's some good beers, Korstadt. I remember having them all over there, which is a local craft brewer. They have very good, clean water in Switzerland that makes delicious beer. So if you ever have a chance to drink some Swiss beers, you'll be pleasantly surprised.

[01:05:09] Lester Jones: That sounds lovely. I don't care for their cheese, but

[01:05:13] Jessica Infante: Well, cheers to all who ce we'll get out of here and this week. Thanks for jo to just happy vacation t in the world. She may be our one man audio team jo of podcast editing. He's

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