[00:00:00] Justin Kendall: Next on The Brewbound Podcast, we talk about Diageo's cuts and a whole lot more with Dave Infante. Hello and welcome to The Brewbound Podcast. I'm Justin Kendall. I'm Jessica Infante. And our esteemed guest.
[00:00:25] Dave Infante: Hey, it's Dave Infante. That's usually Zoe's spot.
[00:00:29] Justin Kendall: Yeah, I know.
[00:00:30] Dave Infante: I'm standing in for Zoe today. It's a high honor. Big shoes to fill.
[00:00:34] Justin Kendall: So Dave, welcome to the Brewbound podcast. Again, we'll get you your gift a little bit later.
[00:00:39] Dave Infante: Yeah. What am I up to? Do I get like a challenge coin or something? What do they give the Saturday Night Live hosts after they do five? They get a jacket? I think it's a jacket. I think it is. Do I get a brew brown blazer? Ooh, we should get those. It has like a, you know, like an inner lining with like an airbrushed portrait of Spuds McKenzie on like, you know, viscose fabric or something like that. I think it's the sort of thing we should be spending money on in this media environment. Right.
[00:01:06] Speaker: Yeah.
[00:01:08] Jessica Infante: We were somewhere and Spuds Mackenzie appeared on something.
[00:01:13] Dave Infante: I don't know, but I was with my... You were on an Ayahuasca trip and Spuds Mackenzie appeared.
[00:01:17] Jessica Infante: I was with my three-year-old daughter and she just pointed and was like, look, that doggie's wearing sunglasses. That's so silly. I was like, I wish I had this recorded for Dave.
[00:01:28] Dave Infante: Entire empires were built on that reaction right there. Yeah. Schlitz heard that.
[00:01:34] Justin Kendall: And future drinking habits.
[00:01:36] Dave Infante: And was like, fuck, we're cooked.
[00:01:38] Justin Kendall: Well, welcome back to the Brewbound podcast, as we said, and we've got to plug some things before we get started here. We've got Brewbound live coming up in Los Angeles on December 9th and 10th. Tickets are available now. You can get all the details at Brewbound.com. So go check that out. We've also got the Brewbound job board, lots of great jobs out there. If you're looking for a new employee to fill a role. Hit up the Brewbound job board. If you're looking for a job, we've got the job board. So hit that. But let's get into the news of the week.
[00:02:13] Dave Infante: Now, let me ask you a question. Can you sort the job board by good bosses or no? No. That's a fun one. I'm looking for a good boss. Where do I find one of those?
[00:02:23] Jessica Infante: Do you mean the person or the organization? Ideally both.
[00:02:26] Dave Infante: At this point, yeah, I'm looking for both. I would take anything at this point.
[00:02:33] Justin Kendall: I think that's a new category that we have to add.
[00:02:35] Dave Infante: Okay, let's get the product team on that, you know, vibe code some shit up for us. Are we allowed to swear or forget? Always. Yes. Okay, cool.
[00:02:43] Justin Kendall: Do you consider yourself a good boss?
[00:02:46] Dave Infante: Me?
[00:02:46] Justin Kendall: Yes, no, maybe. Oh, I see what you're saying.
[00:02:50] Dave Infante: I was gonna say, I strictly avoid having employees, so I never have to contemplate that.
[00:02:55] Justin Kendall: That seems like the way to go.
[00:02:57] Dave Infante: It's a level of self-introspection that I'm just not capable of, so just avoiding it entirely.
[00:03:02] Justin Kendall: Well, I think that is a great way to dive into Diageo and the news over there of late.
[00:03:09] Jessica Infante: Yes. Speaking of fucking bosses. Speaking of fucking Daves.
[00:03:17] Justin Kendall: Do you think, and I really don't care about the answer here. This is a weird question, but do you think Dave Lewis likes the drastic Dave name?
[00:03:26] Dave Infante: It's cool, right? Like, it's gotta be cool. He feels like a swashbuckling, like, I'm coming in to save this place. Like, it's not bad, right? I don't think that, like, I would be mad to be in that situation. I mean, it's bad for the employees. Well, yeah, man, but he's the one holding the carving knife. Like, that's the beauty of it, you know? Like, shit flows downhill. Yeah, I mean, like, it's similar to, like, remember in the first Trump administration, one of the secretaries of, I forget the whole fucking sequence of it, but one of them was called Mad Dog. He was like, uh, uh, fuck, he was a marine general. Anyway, and, like, it came out after the fact that, like, Trump basically just selected him because the nickname was cool. Like, I like the idea that, like, Diageo's board, which, by the way, like, do you remember a few, I think Farron for BevNET covered this, or maybe it was Financial Times, but it came out that the Diageo board was like, guys, like, we're taking a new strategy here. We're looking to put people on the Diageo board with beverage alcohol experience. It's just like fucking awesome that they weren't doing that up until this point, you know, like, but like something similar. It's like, you got to imagine the fucking Diageo board is like, well, like the Casamigos cash machine stopped like throwing fucking hundred dollar bills out at a rate of 1 billion per second. We should probably find someone cool who can figure this out for us. And just like Googled around for CEOs with interesting nicknames and landed on a old Tesco turnaround chappy, Dave Lewis.
[00:04:56] Justin Kendall: Do you think it's on his resume?
[00:04:58] Dave Infante: I should fucking hope so. If not, bang my line, buddy. Let's do a little career rehab. Do you think he puts the sir on his resume? Oh, absolutely. Do we know how he got the sir just for doing good layoffs? What's the deal? He does them really good, you know.
[00:05:16] Jessica Infante: By order of the queen, you have done excellent work trimming the Unilever beauty portfolio.
[00:05:22] Dave Infante: Thank you for fucking delivering more value to the shareholders this quarter. You get like christened with the fucking, you know, machete of people's hopes and dreams.
[00:05:32] Justin Kendall: So speaking of those people.
[00:05:33] Jessica Infante: Well, I think we might need to back up a little bit here and explain to the people.
[00:05:38] Dave Infante: No, no, Jess, don't try to save this. We just got a barrel ahead.
[00:05:43] Jessica Infante: why we're talking about Diageo. If you hang in the beer world as we do, you probably just associate Diageo with Guinness and Smirnoff Ice, but they make a whole lot more than that. Dave, you name checked Casamigos, the George Clooney tequila that I guess is taking a
[00:06:05] Dave Infante: It's really flattened out lately. I mean the, you know, the post-pandemic hangover I think hit Casamigos particularly hard. It was also just like one of these things where like they were riding like full bottle spirits so aggressively and Casamigos was leading the charge and then you picked your head up and like the high noons of the world and the the buzz balls to some extent of the world are the hot new thing and and Diageo had a portfolio it was just like not oriented to that at all, which is remarkable, right? Like this wasn't like a quick transition, but the Casamigos, yeah, it kind of stopped firing on all cylinders for them a year and a half, two years ago. And what's that Warren Buffett thing? Like when the tide goes out, you see he's been swimming naked. Like Diageo, kind of the tide went out and it's like, huh, man, like this is, they're wearing a Casamigos branded Speedo and not a whole lot else, you know?
[00:07:01] Justin Kendall: but they're not alone
[00:07:03] Dave Infante: No, definitely not alone, certainly not, but they're the biggest spirits conglomerate in the world. There's probably a Chinese one that's bigger, but they're the biggest one in the Western hemisphere, certainly. They're the heaviest hitter in terms of just spirits portfolio. And I think to me, and this is just my perspective, but the delta between what I would have expected from a Diageo and what Diageo was able to deliver in the marketplace, not in terms of shareholder returns or anything, but just pivoting to total beverage is probably the biggest one, right? Like, I'm not so surprised that, like, Brown Foreman's had a tough time figuring it out. I am somewhat surprised that Diageo's had a tough time figuring it out.
[00:07:45] Jessica Infante: And just a small example of the pivoting, but too late, they launched Cosamigos RTDs this summer, right?
[00:07:51] Dave Infante: That's crazy. Yeah. They launched Casamigos Tequila RTD in summer 2026. It's been so long since they acquired Casamigos that one of the other guys who started Casamigos, his like non-compete had already fucking expired because he also launched something along those lines. Do you guys remember that brand that one of the Casamigos founders launched? Do you mean George Clooney's non-alcohol beer? No, not Crazy Fountain. Yeah, not fucking Yellowstone Light, Crazy Mountain. But there was another, it was like called like Uno Mas or something. I don't think it did much. But like, to your point is well made, man. Like summer 2026, entering the tequila based RTD market with what should have been, you know, it's not rocket science to try that product, right? No.
[00:08:39] Jessica Infante: Well, and they acquired Casamigos before I was ever at Brewbound.
[00:08:43] Dave Infante: Is it 2017-ish? Probably. Yeah, I want to say. And there was like a bit of an earn out for Clooney, but like they did earn out. The brand did really well for a while. And it's still doing fine. It's just not delivering the growth that they need anymore.
[00:08:57] Jessica Infante: Right. And Guinness is doing pretty well, like at least here in the US. Guinness is doing great. But that's not nearly enough.
[00:09:03] Dave Infante: Yeah.
[00:09:04] Jessica Infante: Shocking to me that Smirnoff is up single digits.
[00:09:08] Dave Infante: In Circana scans? Yeah. This is Smirnoff Ice? Correct. No on-premise presence for Smirnoff Ice, probably. No. Not a lot. Can't remember the last time I walked into a bar and saw someone order a Smirnoff Ice.
[00:09:20] Jessica Infante: They've done a decent job at, you know, celebrity partnerships and other branded things. Like, I think they do something with Love Island.
[00:09:27] Dave Infante: Yeah. Okay.
[00:09:28] Jessica Infante: I could see that. They've, like, found ways to make themselves relevant to people younger than I, which is what you got to do.
[00:09:33] Dave Infante: Yeah. None of us are really the target demographic for really any brand besides, like, perhaps, like, fiber supplements. Yeah. And like thoughtful fucking ESG Roth IRAs, you know?
[00:09:47] Jessica Infante: I mean, I assume I'm right now a core demo of diapers for babies, but because I waited so long, I'm probably not too far off from diapers for me. Wow.
[00:09:56] Dave Infante: Oh, yeah. Is there any way you can kind of bundle? That's a great question. Just thinking kind of, you know, it's a scale business, Jess. Be like, look, I cover the beverage and alcohol industry. I know that you guys would rather just drop pallets of diapers than have to merchandise them on the shelf in children and adult sections. Why don't you just back the truck up to my house? Well, it's one time, it's a QD. The FTC doesn't exist anymore, so they can't fucking probe you for this. And you know, I get my cheap diapers, you get a bunch of cash flow. Yeah, I'll post you on my Instagram. It's a good deal. Someone at Southern Glazers is like, this is not funny. I do not appreciate this, actually.
[00:10:38] Justin Kendall: They're going to be carrying diapers on their trucks before long.
[00:10:41] Dave Infante: Yeah, let's get some diapers on the SGWS trucks. They don't fill themselves.
[00:10:47] Justin Kendall: Yeah. Diapers don't fill themselves. I mean, they do, but those trucks don't.
[00:10:53] Dave Infante: All right, sorry, I know, I'm all over the place here. Yeah, Guinness is doing really well, and it hasn't done well enough, and they got rid of the head of the Diageo Beer, what is it called? Diageo Beer Company? Diageo Beer Division?
[00:11:05] Justin Kendall: I forget what that- Is that confirmed? Because they were being very strange about whether she was in or out.
[00:11:12] Dave Infante: Oh, interesting.
[00:11:13] Justin Kendall: Yeah.
[00:11:14] Dave Infante: My understanding was she was out, but I can't say for absolute certain. So let's say that I heard that she was out. In any case, Guinness is doing very well, but yeah, it can't plug the hole in Diageo's portfolio because there's a structural issue, right? Which is the one that we've just discussed, like among any of the other sort of like Financial catastrophes going on in their books, which I've kind of rifled through, but not too much. There's just the basic like product market fit issue for a lot of their portfolio. Like people are drinking in singles. People are drinking very much in RTDs. people are looking for, in the case of Guinness, you know, like experiential stuff, right? Like the splitting the duty thing. I think that's real to some extent, right? And like Diageo doesn't have a lot to offer. It's not as nimble as a lot of its competitors, its upstart competitors. It's not oriented towards like high velocity channels, like the C-Store with, you know, singles. Like what's its answer to fucking a 19-2 of Cutwater? Oh, I think I just got a hangover thinking about that. But what is it? I actually don't know. And that's bad because all three of us cover the space. Like, what is Diageo's answer to a 15% buzz balls biggie? It doesn't have one. And it won't soon.
[00:12:36] Justin Kendall: Can I interest you in a glass bottle of Smirnoff ice?
[00:12:41] Dave Infante: Right, exactly. And Smirnoff Ice is punching above its weight maybe partly because of the nostalgia and the fact that like, you know, you still have Gen Xers and Millennials that are drinking this stuff because it's funny and fun and whatever, but like... I don't know dude I just got pitched on a Captain Morgan RTD collaboration with Voodoo Donuts and like I let out like a low groan like I was the guy next to you in the ER that's like through the curtain and you're like what the fuck is wrong with that guy like that's the sound I made it's like I take both of these things out back separately and shoot them you know like Respectfully.
[00:13:24] Jessica Infante: They did have like a, they did a Captain Morgan RTD co-brand with Bite of Cocoa, I think years ago.
[00:13:31] Dave Infante: I wonder if that still exists. Was it the bomb one? There was one that was shaped like a bomb, which I honestly thought was kind of clever. I thought that would work better than it did, but I don't think they pushed it properly.
[00:13:41] Justin Kendall: Have you met buzz balls?
[00:13:44] Dave Infante: Sorry, are you referring to Lit, the new Boston beer company, White Space Innovation?
[00:13:49] Justin Kendall: No, not the light bulbs.
[00:13:52] Dave Infante: side of Michael's personal friend drastic Dave is making are meant to make that pivot whether these cuts are muscle or fat remain to be seen and I can't really speak to that I think some of the reporting that I was doing when when you know the cuts were when the layoffs were really coming down. Even people that were getting cut were like, I think this makes sense. What's frustrating is that there were many opportunities to reposition the business before such a cataclysmic set of layoffs had to happen, right? You don't have to get to this point before you start pivoting to RTDs. There was a lot of talent maybe on the team that was misallocated. And the structure of the departments, especially in the North American business, crosswise with the way the market drinks, right? Like they had everything kind of siloed by spirit. And then RTDs was like its own world. Whereas like, well, that's not constructive, right? Like that, I don't know why they did that. But like, so the new orientation, at least in the marketing department is to have those all kind of- Are uniting up. Exactly.
[00:15:17] Speaker: Yeah.
[00:15:17] Dave Infante: But yeah, like, why let it get to that point? I think that's what a lot of people, including some people who were getting laid off, were like, they were conceding, like, yeah, I understand, like, the moves. I don't understand, like, why the company insisted on waiting this long and then putting people out of work.
[00:15:33] Jessica Infante: Yeah, I don't know, this is not something that I know, Dave, maybe you know. What is their footprint like here distribution-wise? Like do they have different wholesalers in different markets by like Diageo Beer Co. is in this network and the Spirits team goes with somebody else. I guess it doesn't really matter because they don't really have any RTDs to speak of. But I wonder how much of a drag that has been for them, like maintaining like really massive distro footprints.
[00:16:01] Dave Infante: That's a good question. I actually don't know a ton about what their national distribution footprint looks like. I do remember that when they were making the big cuts, this would have been like June, early July of this year, there was, I'm pulling up my coverages now because I want to remember exactly what it was phrased, but one of the adjustments, at least at the high level, was a sort of like Let's see. This is me writing, this is in June 2023 to 2026. I reported that one of the slides that I had obtained from Diageo North America's all hands meeting about this was like, they were describing a plan route to market strategy shift from a distributor led model to one that orients around their sales regions. So it seems like based on that, they were kind of letting distributors called the ball on like how they thought about markets and where they put emphasis in markets and they wanted to take a little bit of power back in terms of like sales structure and like agency around that which like would comport with what we were talking about with regards to like their portfolio mix which is like It kind of seems to some extent like they slip walked into this a little bit. And it's like, man, yeah, you don't want distributor led model. Like, what the fuck are you talking about, man? Like, you got to get out there and sell this stuff. You can't just like follow the truck.
[00:17:34] Justin Kendall: Well, and from a portfolio standpoint, too, as we've kind of laid out, they were a slow mover into RTDs. They're getting lapped by Sazerac, which is just won't stop spending money on things.
[00:17:47] Jessica Infante: I would like to confirm that I was correct. Vitacoco Spiked comes through Diageo with Captain Morgan. Launched in early 2023. 5% ABV.
[00:17:59] Dave Infante: Slim cans of- Oak One was crazy. Dude. I assume that's discontinued at this point. I have no idea. Never seen that in person.
[00:18:10] Jessica Infante: No. The Google machine seems to think it's still around.
[00:18:15] Dave Infante: Yeah, so portfolio issues, like route to market issues, internal org chart structural issues. I think all of these things are on the docket for Lewis to try to address. The North American market is so important to Diageo, right? Even though we know that the market is maturing, whatever, there's just a colossal amount of money here. It's just, I think the frustration that I heard from current and former Diageo employees was mostly about like, yeah, man, like, why weren't we doing this before we had to start laying everyone off? And I mean, that speaks more to maybe what we were talking about earlier with regards to like the board's lack of finger on the pulse of the beverage alcohol industry or an awareness for what works and what doesn't. I don't know.
[00:19:05] Speaker 1: Gotta have more Diageo employees dish on that to get a better sense for it, but. Now, if you're hiring, get your role in front of brewers, beer sales leaders, and distributor staff already tracking the category. Applications go directly to your company. Post your job on cpgjobs.com today. Use code BREWBOUND26 and save on a job listing.
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[00:20:05] Justin Kendall: Do you have a sense whether some of this bloodletting is about something more than just trimming fat and removing layers within corporate and whether they are potentially looking at a sale down the road.
[00:20:23] Dave Infante: Yeah, I've heard that chatter, same as you guys. I don't have anything substantive to report on that front. I think just speaking from a speculative analysis, knowing the pieces on the board, I can't see why they wouldn't be looking at potential sales. I don't want to say that Diageo's grand experiment of becoming the liquor chungus of the world is failed, but it's certainly not a runaway success that everyone is scrambling to emulate. It's kind of a mixed bag. So like Lewis is getting a lot of pressure from Wall Street to look at opportunities to go asset light and to maybe like spin off or sell off brands that are underperforming and that don't align with this new vision he has. So, not knowing anything from within Fortress Diageo, I can't say with any certainty I would be shocked if they weren't. I don't know, what do you guys think? What is the bull case for keeping this massive liquor-soaked ball of yarn together here? I mean, who would buy them?
[00:21:36] Jessica Infante: Right? Oh, no. I don't think anybody could buy them in their entirety.
[00:21:39] Dave Infante: Like ExxonMobil, maybe. Or fucking, you know, Anthropic or whatever. SpaceX. Let's send this liquor to space. But like all the chatter that I've heard, all the speculation I've heard, any of the potential outcomes more orient around like breaking up chunks of the business and selling them off where it makes sense. And because of its global footprint, it can split up licenses in different parts of the world and sell those off rather than selling off the brands entirely. There's a lot of value in that company. I think the critical perspective from analysts that I've read and the reporting that I've read is that those critics don't think that Diageo is currently built to achieve that maximum value potential. So there's more money in selling these things off, is the contention, you know?
[00:22:32] Jessica Infante: Yeah. I mean, if we want to say one nice thing about them, I think they never really got bogged down in any real silliness with regard to beer, right?
[00:22:41] Dave Infante: No, yeah, didn't give a shit about beer.
[00:22:43] Jessica Infante: Yeah, great job guys.
[00:22:45] Dave Infante: Yeah, what's that about? Were they ever considering, do you guys ever, I don't think I can even remember hearing a rumor that Diageo might have been considering a craft beer acquisition.
[00:22:54] Justin Kendall: Not that I'm aware of.
[00:22:56] Dave Infante: I love that. They did one thing right. I don't know about that, man. Oh yeah, have a great time with fucking Devil's Backbone, guys, you know? Good luck with Ballast Point. Yeah, go nuts with Funky Buddha, you know? Like over here, you know, printing money with Johnny Walker. So on the beer front with Diageo, Guinness obviously has outperformed the beer market and has been on a real heater and did well with letting the market come to them. A lot of patience on the draft investment that had been paying dividends last summer and through this year. So I think there's a lot to like about how Guinness is doing, but Guinness is ultimately there's not that much you can do with Guinness, right? Like, it's gonna keep selling. Like, the draft is great. It's a great experience. Like, it's a cool story to tell. It's growing in a way that's, like, sustainable and admirable. I wrote a column about their draft investment at Vinepair last year just because, like, that is the shit that the ground game or, like, the, you know, hand-to-hand combat that you really do want to see I think more breweries need to be doing is like, no, invest now to reap the benefit years from now. And like, that's the business that you're in. It used to be. And like, it can be again and it should be right. Like, yeah, I really believe that. But like, also, what are you going to do with Guinness besides continue selling Guinness? They've tried with like Blondale. They've tried with like the on premise experiences. They've dabbled with, I don't know, like different package and nitro and the little widgets and stuff. Like, you know, some of that's incremental sales opportunities. Some of it straight up failed, right? Like the Baltimore open gate situation. I think that in the final analysis was a failure, right? It just like didn't work in the way that they had probably hoped.
[00:24:54] Justin Kendall: Non-alc.
[00:24:55] Dave Infante: The non-alc is good.
[00:24:56] Justin Kendall: Yeah, the non-alc is great.
[00:24:57] Dave Infante: The Baltimore Urban Gate is still open but it's just a taproom now. So like now it's just one of these like sad like little fucking like Epcot storefronts you accidentally like stumble into like while you're waiting for a Flixbus, you know, like what a bummer. Yeah, the non-alc is really good. Their non-alc product is terrific. I think probably one of the best clones of a macro flagship that's out there. And that's good. And that's again, like you've got incremental sales opportunity. You've also got creating, you know, potential new Guinness occasions, like all the shit that the marketers love. And I think that's. Again, I think that's good. I'm not trying to say, like, Guinness is in trouble. It's just that, like, you can't make it something that it's not. You can't go from Budweiser to Bud Light. You can't go Guinness to Guinness Light, right? Like, it doesn't work in the same way. Like, I mean, you certainly can't go, you know, Guinness to Guinness Hard Seltzer, right? Like, there's no there there. Yeah.
[00:25:52] Justin Kendall: Yeah, and the non-elk is just, it's gonna be a smaller piece of the business. It just is. It's not gonna be some rocket ship.
[00:26:00] Dave Infante: Right. And it's good and it's a good story to tell and you can show it to regulators when they ask you about what your responsible drinking programs are or whatever. Every year, I don't know if Diageo does this, but I get the press release from Molson Coors being like, we're teaming up with the city of Milwaukee to offer free buses on New Year's Eve or whatever it is. It's something along those lines. And it's like, cool, man. We used to just have taxes that we would just kind of levy on you. And then we would pay for the buses, you know, but like, thanks for the ride. It's a good story. You know, Guinness is good and will continue to be good. And I, I think that that is a real success story for beer and for Diageo, which deserves credit for not fumbling the ball there. Right. Like they're not ultimately like a beer company first.
[00:26:44] Jessica Infante: I think your point about how patient they were is key, you know, like.
[00:26:48] Dave Infante: I don't think anybody has that level of patience in beer anymore.
[00:27:05] Jessica Infante: My God, I thought you meant the president, Jesus.
[00:27:09] Dave Infante: Right, the other person. Yeah, yeah.
[00:27:11] Jessica Infante: I don't know that anybody feels that way.
[00:27:13] Dave Infante: Big fan of Desert Shield. Not Desert Storm, but Desert Shield was the good stuff, yeah.
[00:27:18] Justin Kendall: Do you have all the cards, the trading cards?
[00:27:20] Dave Infante: Yeah, oh man, I forgot about those. Colin Powell and fucking Condoleezza Rice on the little Pokemon cards.
[00:27:27] Justin Kendall: Gotta get that rare Saddam Hussein card.
[00:27:31] Dave Infante: What a sick country we are. But the Bush family that ran the Anheuser-Busch brewing conglomerate, I overly romanticized. I'm guilty of that from time to time. Like August Bush III's reign, I obviously never met the man, but like all of the reporting that I've read on his reign was like he ruled with an iron fist and like he had genuinely good instincts about the business, but was also willing to incorporate feedback from throughout the network and was willing to play the long game and like had a real personal vested interest in maintaining you know the quality and the positioning of really the bud brand but also to some extent the bud light brand whatever like that ship has sailed in st louis right like that era is most certainly over and i don't think anyone would accuse the Brazilians of being like overly romantic about the portfolio that they now run at ABI. But like they also don't demonstrate like a level of ABI and Molson Coors. I guess Heineken maybe to some extent. They haven't really like demonstrated that type of like patience and like willingness to invest in a market for the sake of growing and shaping that market, right? It like feels a lot more transactional than it used to. And I think part of this is because of much bigger trends with like the way like people get hired and have careers, right? Like they used to be, you would work for fucking Anheuser-Busch for 30 years. And if you went to Miller, that was like turning your back on the Catholic church, you know? Like you were like persona non grata, ditto, like Coors and Strohs, whatever. Like, that shit doesn't happen anymore. I remember I talked to, like, Philip Van Munching, whose dad was the importer, his grandfather, his father, and then he all worked for the Heineken importer before Heineken USA took over and ran it in-house in, like, the early 90s, I want to say. And, like, they were just fucking beer guys. And Philip made the point that, like, they started, like, hiring marketers from like Colgate Palmolive who were like literally had had been like selling toothpaste right and like no offense to any toothpaste salesmen or marketers out there but like it's not the same thing it's not interchangeable with beer and a lot of the angst and trouble and malaise in the beer market over the course of the past decade is due to the fact that people are trying to come into this category from elsewhere in consumer packaged goods and run the same playbook and it just doesn't work in the same way. You don't invest in a toothpaste market and develop a premium toothpaste experience for two decades. Who would do that? You've never heard of such a thing, right? It's just not the nature of it. I love brushing my teeth, dude.
[00:30:25] Jessica Infante: I don't know. Who got to you? Oral B, you know? Despite being rejected from the university, I am a Colgate girlie.
[00:30:36] Dave Infante: Whatever, I'm rambling here, but I do think that Guinness has done a tremendously good job. Diageo deserves credit for not killing the goose that laid the golden egg, so to speak, with Guinness, especially in this market. A lot of companies, including big, sophisticated macro brewers with lots of marketing firepower, might have smothered that thing in the cradle when Split the G really started popping off, and Diageo deserves a lot of credit for letting it play out.
[00:31:01] Justin Kendall: They absolutely could have shoved that down people's throats.
[00:31:04] Dave Infante: No doubt, dude. Yeah, no, I agree. I genuinely mean that. Sometimes restraint is the best option, and they made the right play there. Yeah, as for the bigger, you know, broader portfolio, though, I mean, I don't know. I was reporting, what, earlier this summer, Aviation Gin? Like, what the fuck was that, man? They bought Aviation Gin earlier this decade, I want to say, maybe late last decade. And then kind of like limped along and, you know, finally closed the Portland facility, this gorgeous, however many multi-million dollar facility that they had in Portland. They did it in phases. It like kind of was just sad. And like now they have this gin brand that, you know, gin is just not well positioned for RTD. It's not the story, right? It doesn't have the health halo of tequila. Should they have bought Long Drink? Diageo? Yeah.
[00:31:58] Justin Kendall: I should have bought something.
[00:31:59] Dave Infante: They should have bought something. I think that's well put, Justin. They should have bought something. Will they buy Carbless? My understanding is Carbless is for sale, and that's fine. There's no pretenses about what it is, right? It's a business. Somebody should buy it. Somebody should buy it. Will they get the podcast with it, do you think, or no?
[00:32:18] Justin Kendall: No, they keep that.
[00:32:19] Dave Infante: Was it at the Kmart? Oh shit, that's right. Where is it? Like Pontiac, Wisconsin or something? It is Wisconsin.
[00:32:26] Jessica Infante: Plymouth?
[00:32:27] Dave Infante: I think it is Plymouth, Wisconsin.
[00:32:28] Jessica Infante: I think it's a P-Town that also exists in Massachusetts, but not like the P-Town.
[00:32:32] Dave Infante: Tell you what, man, I know that the Carbless folks are doing that podcast that's kind of like a, almost kind of like a reality TV show of like, this is how we're building our business, right? It's a podcast, whatever. Everyone's kind of Trying to monetize the workflow, I suppose. Go with God. But I would enjoy a reality TV show about a Diageo executive in fucking Plymouth, Wisconsin. Sort of like a Groundhog Day, you know, with fucking Bill Murray. You know, he's a city slicker, goes to like hometown Midwest and rediscovers why he loves beverage alcohol. Can we get a Hallmark movie out of this, maybe?
[00:33:11] Justin Kendall: I just keep hearing, we bought a Kmart. It's like, we bought a zoo.
[00:33:17] Dave Infante: Yeah. I mean, to be fair, they own that SEO. No one is coming for that. No. We're still fucking talking about it. Top result on Google. Yeah. I mean, they should have bought something, whether it was Long Drink or something else. I really like the matchup of Long Drink and Marc Anthony Brands. That made a lot of sense to me. Totally. I would be shocked if Marc Anthony Brands does not make that work. I mean, stranger things have happened. You know, like there's a lot there, the overlap. I liked that deal a lot more than Molson Coors and Monaco. I just thought that Molson Coors was kind of playing not to lose there and didn't want to make a big, bold purchase and kind of laid up. I think Monaco is a good workhorse, but it doesn't really make any sense.
[00:34:00] Jessica Infante: Their weekly scan numbers have been good, like double digit growth.
[00:34:03] Dave Infante: Yeah. No, no. Monaco as a brand is, yeah, like the growth is there. I just like don't, you know, it's like, OK, man, like, OK, I guess you've got it. But like, what's your move to answer, again, a cut water, to answer a long drink, for example, like or to answer a beat box like Monaco kind of gets you partial answers to some of those questions? Yeah.
[00:34:25] Justin Kendall: I mean, I guess they should have done like an aviation. Carbless seemed to make more sense.
[00:34:28] Dave Infante: Carbless would have made to me would have made a lot more sense with Molson Coors.
[00:34:32] Justin Kendall: Yeah. Yeah. I think that part of the problem for Molson Coors was when you put it out there that you're in the market and willing to spend $350 million or whatever it was that they threw out that they were willing to spend, you set some expectations. But at that figure, you're not even in the ballpark of your hot brands like Buzzballs or Beatbox or, God forbid, even like Stateside. You're not even like sniffing Stateside for under probably a billion dollars at this point.
[00:35:05] Dave Infante: Right. Yeah, the fact that they like went to market with like, here's what we're going to spend kind of reminds me of like going into a car dealership and just like advertising like your lowest, your highest numbers. Like this is what I'm going to buy a car for. They're like, that's what I'm going to sell you a car for. You know, got it. You know, like, yeah, it turns out by coincidence, everything is $350 million, you know, crazy. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, obviously, I have no experience in M&A, so it's possible that that strategy paid dividends. And ultimately, Molson, of course, did wind up paying a fair amount less than its target max for Monaco, if I recall correctly. But that raises its own questions, right? Which is like, well, hang on, man. If this was this shot in the arm you needed, you guys are way late to RTD. Talk about late to RTDs. Way late to RTDs, you had all the momentum coming out of the Bud Light fiasco and more or less vaporized it, right? MillerLight and CoorsLight did not lock those gains in. They love to tell the Coors Banquet story and it's a positive story. Just in terms of volume like that's things aren't like going great over there at the moment and it's like you need like a big bold move and and I just don't I just don't see Monica being it. I don't think that it's going to be bad, but it's not going to be it. And then yeah, Diageo. I mean you mentioned stateside just moments ago like. I don't know, does Diageo panic buy stateside? That would be fun for me. I don't know if it would work for them, but there's not that much out there left to buy at scale, right? What's still for sale that's scaled?
[00:36:46] Justin Kendall: Apparently not Brown Foreman.
[00:36:50] Dave Infante: Yeah, Diageo should just start offering, like, whatever Sazerac was, like $15 billion, Diageo should just, like, throw a tat in the ring for, like, $15 billion and $1, you know? Like, just, like, the constant ritual humiliation of Brown-Foreman, even though no one has any intention of either accepting or transacting on either side of that deal. I really think that Sazerac is just doing it to fuck with Brown-Foreman.
[00:37:12] Justin Kendall: Oh, yeah.
[00:37:13] Dave Infante: Yeah. So, my understanding is that they don't particularly like each other. There's, like, definitely a little bit of a culture clash there. Which I think is great.
[00:37:24] Justin Kendall: Let's talk a little bit about that culture clash while we're on the subject. So this Buzz Balls Pop Tarts thing, that's real?
[00:37:32] Dave Infante: It's real. So your listeners probably know about this, but like, Buzzballs has a new collaboration with Pop-Tarts, the fucking famed toaster strudel company. Of the Kelloggs. What is that? Yeah. Well, do you know what they call the parent company? I looked it up the other day. Kellanova.
[00:37:50] Jessica Infante: Oh yeah.
[00:37:51] Dave Infante: Formerly Kelloggs, Kellanova.
[00:37:53] Jessica Infante: Kellanova. It's fancy.
[00:37:55] Dave Infante: I was like, you go to a Big Ten like, you know, job recruitment fair and you're like, I don't want to work at like boring Kellogg's. We're like, well, I'm so glad you asked because we've recently, we've recently rebranded as Kellanova. Yeah. Everyone gets an iPad. Welcome to Kellanova, you know. But yeah, so BuzzBawls released a collaboration with Pop-Tarts. The certificate of label approvals got, the colas, got approved in April of this year. There are two flavors, there's like frosted cinnamon and frosted Some mores or something like that and I read about him the other day like went a little viral on blue sky This is the sort of thing that you know will pop off on social media as you guys know We're 10 years into this type of like stunt collaboration and to some extent varying extents depending on the release This is why you do this type of thing right like Arby's french fry flavored vodka like they barely made any of that shit but like the earned media that they received for like bottling you know hundred units was like dramatically more valuable than whatever they made the margin they made on the actual product itself. I don't know what buzzball's plans are for the breadth of distribution on pop-tarts I wrote about this the other day at Fingers. It's really astonishing how quickly the norms around not looking like you're advertising to children or trying to attract children to your product have broken down in the beverage alcohol world. I think, I forget if I was texting you, Justin, but this is the sort of thing that Mothers Against Drunk Driving marched on the fucking Capitol about. This is the sort of thing that anti-alcohol advocates are like up a senator's ass about in like the mid-90s, the early 2000s. You know, the power or the influence of those groups has certainly ebbed, right, and been co-opted in some cases, right? The industry somewhat infamously got very tight with MADD, you know, and now there's a lot of sort of talk about responsible drinking and whatnot and less about like, excising the evils of the corporate alcohol world from American society. But still, I am astonished by a product like Pop-Tarts, Buzzballs, because, like, at some point, the pendulum is going to swing back the other way. I believe that it will, not because I'm rooting for that necessarily, but just because, like, that's the way this shit happens, right? Like, people are already talking about it with regards to sports gambling, right? Online, you know, like, FanDuel and DraftKings and all of their competitors. Online sports betting has dramatically changed the way people experience sports, the way people experience society. I saw a fucking poll the other day that indicated that a lot of younger people are looking at it as an alternative form of investment. So I'm sure that'll work out great. So we'll reap that whirlwind five years from now. call it a puritanist streak or call it a natural and logical reaction to the excesses of this somewhat more loosey-goosey regulatory period, whatever the case may be, this stuff is going to, in the final analysis, it's not going to be reflected upon well. There's going to be, I think, a bit of a reckoning on some of these products. We're watching it in microcosm with hemp-derived THC. which the somewhat more, I don't know, mature beverage sector of the hemp drive THC business is working to distance itself from the gas station shitheads that are selling like double stuffed 10 milligram like Oreo hemp bullshit, right? Like it's all this like knocked off intellectual property of like you can buy like every Nabisco snack has like a knockoff THC version that like some guy named fucking like Casey is like selling out of the back of his Nissan Altima. Like it's, that's not good for a market. And every press release with every police chief is like holding up the photos of these things and like kids are getting it. He's like, yeah, I can actually kind of see that. Like that's, I would believe that that's happening, man. Like, you know, we had this moral panic around hard Mountain Dew. That was, I think, to no small extent driven by the wholesalers, right? The middle tier, which didn't love the idea of Pepsi trying to end around them. But now we're just doing fucking Buzzball's Pop-Tarts and everyone's on the wiser. No one really seems to care too much.
[00:42:40] Justin Kendall: A cynical take would be that they care when it's not on their truck and they don't care when it is on their truck.
[00:42:50] Dave Infante: Are you telling me that there's a moral relativism that grips the middle tier? I don't believe it, man.
[00:42:57] Jessica Infante: Can I proffer my take on the buzz balls, Pop-Tarts, which I've only just learned of today. Somehow I've been living under a rock. I think the thing here is that kids aren't eating Pop-Tarts. You know who's eating Pop-Tarts? Sad elder millennials who can't afford anything else and want a tiny treat. Yeah, I see that. The moms who would be out marching on the Capitol, up in arms against this, aren't feeding that to their kids.
[00:43:19] Dave Infante: Or the ones that are intrigued by the Pop-Tarts buzz balls that they saw on Instagram or whatever. That's definitely going into their Stanley tumblers.
[00:43:26] Justin Kendall: Yeah. Well, and will it be served at the Pop-Tarts Bowl?
[00:43:31] Dave Infante: Yeah, what a symbol right like that's a big event every year instead of a giant pop-tart The pop-tart they gotta eat that that's like the fucking most Kafka s thing this country has to offer Yeah, I think Jess that's a really good point certainly a lot of these kid tinged adjacent nostalgic things are for there for us Yeah That's probably true. I think it would be perhaps more alarming if like Mr. Beast started making like Mr. Booze, you know?
[00:44:02] Jessica Infante: And that is probably coming. Isn't that where Michelle Shane Cox went? Yeah, right.
[00:44:07] Dave Infante: But, oh yeah, true. Yeah, she's there. She's there at Feastables now. Former Molson Coors marketing whiz turned Feastables... Friend of Jimmy. Is she chief marketer? Chief marketing officer? I don't know. Chief Beastable? Whatever. The other thing, and this is maybe not working in, like, I don't know that the trade gets, like, credit for this, but, like, perhaps part of the reason that this is not as alarming to see children's breakfast brand-themed other-than-standard wine product on the shelves is that underage drinking genuinely has gone off a cliff over the course of the past 10, 15 years, 20 years. That's been, like, a real meaningful shift and like a genuine success story that the trade to its limited credit, I suppose, did have some small part in, right, of like promoting stronger underage drinking regulations and dialing back their marketing, often kicking and screaming. I'm not saying that they did this out of the goodness of their hearts. So maybe it's like less on regulators' radars. Because A, everything in this country is falling apart. This is relatively small potatoes. And B, because underage drinking just is not nearly as, you know, it's not the closest alligator to the boat that it once was. It's not a high salience issue, as they say, within the Beltway.
[00:45:30] Jessica Infante: Did you happen to see, it was like a Reddit post that kind of went a little viral last weekend.
[00:45:33] Dave Infante: And I say it went viral because my husband was talking to me about it, where it was- Everyone has someone in their life that's like, oh man, you're such a normie that if you've heard about this, like that means it's breaking through. Yeah. And yours is Ryan. And mine is Ryan.
[00:45:48] Jessica Infante: No, it was like a kid in Gen Z who was like, I just, you know, is it true that millennials really had house parties and drank out of solo cups and got kegs? Like, all these things that you see in the movies, like, did that really happen? Because we don't do any of that. And it's like, yeah, that did really happen.
[00:46:06] Dave Infante: And like, I'm sad for you guys that you don't do that. It's a lack of cultural imprinting, man. I think the pandemic really did disrupt a lot of that, not to be too glib here and blame everything on the pandemic, but like, Maybe that behavior was in decline before the pandemic, but then like two years of not having it made it a lot harder to like resuscitate those cultural norms or those practices. Once everyone got vaccinated, I saw this a little bit, I did some reporting on this, like at this point, five years ago about like college keggers, right? Like the idea of like the college keg party. And it's like, yeah, man, like, I don't know, half the party or more than half the party wants High Noon or White Claw, neither of those comes in kegs, but also then that erodes the demand for keg beer anyways. How many kegs are we going to kill? And so the whole thing kind of came apart. Also, no one knows how to use a keg anymore.
[00:46:59] Jessica Infante: It's really atrocious.
[00:47:01] Dave Infante: Open the schools!
[00:47:04] Jessica Infante: They aren't teaching this. It's up to us. Our Beach Neighborhood Association had their annual picnic when I was still down the shore last month, and there were kegs from Bolero Snort Brewing out of Carlstown, New Jersey.
[00:47:16] Dave Infante: Thank you to them.
[00:47:17] Jessica Infante: Whoa, that's crazy. Unsure what the connection is. I was helping to set up and I was like trying to like move chairs and tables and coolers around and it's like me and a bunch of dudes and they kept trying to take things from me. So when they were looking at the kegs, I was like, I'm not even going to bother and trying to help you because you would not accept my help. But like everybody, they had like the pump top and everybody that came up for a beer, because it's serve yourself, just like pumped it so full because everybody wants food. Look at me, I'm doing something. I know how to use this keg. And every pour was just all fucking foam. I was getting really upset about it.
[00:47:48] Dave Infante: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, on one hand, is this a big deal? No. On the other, is it indicative of, like, a loss of, as I was saying, like, cultural imprinting around, like, drinking keg beer? Yeah, absolutely, man. I mean, there are a lot of people just awkward around kegs because they're awkward as people, but, like, it's also, like, just sometimes a fundamental lack of awareness for how this shit works, and you learn that, or you used to, in the woods behind like the fucking, you know, middle school, right? Like at a party that like everyone drunk drove home from. And it was fine. Kind of.
[00:48:27] Jessica Infante: I was going to say in the woods behind the Kmart in Plymouth, Wisconsin.
[00:48:33] Dave Infante: Yeah, probably. That's probably exactly where.
[00:48:36] Jessica Infante: Justin, I just had a great idea. The opening night party to Brewbound Live this year. Let's throw an old school kegger. in the courtyard at the Marina del Rey Marriott.
[00:48:47] Justin Kendall: Why do it there? Let's just find like some wooded area.
[00:48:50] Jessica Infante: Well, there's a beach right across the street. Let's do that.
[00:48:52] Justin Kendall: We can tell everybody, you know, we can send them like a map to wherever it is.
[00:48:58] Jessica Infante: I keep a party tap in my pantry, so I will pack it.
[00:49:01] Dave Infante: I think that's a great idea. What kind of cigarettes were people smoking at 17? Newports? What was I smoking at 17? Virginia Slim? I don't think I've ever smoked a Virginia Slim in my life. Parliaments? My friends were all at the Marlboro Boat to Silver. Marble but not red like I feel like that's a tie-in opportunity like you know everyone's talking about cigarette alcohols need tobacco well fine, man. Let's do it. You know let's uh You guys make little fucking cigarette holders, or you could tuck a Lucy in you know found a koozie I saw some headline that said smoking was back. Yeah, New York mag. Do you think it's alone? They're very they're very so frustrating right cuz like You guys do a lot of rigorous work with sales data. It's part of the reason Brewbound is what it is, because it's actually oriented around what's happening in the world. You work for the four magazines that are left, and you're allowed to just kind of... talk about it. You know, like, oh, like I saw some people smoking. Is that a trend? Like, I guess so. And then, like, you know, and then you then everyone's like throwing the article around. I guess smoking's back. I was like, not really, man.
[00:50:13] Justin Kendall: Yeah, it's like the quarterly craft is dead.
[00:50:16] Dave Infante: Yeah, right. Exactly. And, you know, very poorly substantiated, very poorly sourced. But then, like, there's this whole discourse cycle around it. And it's very frustrating because I think that there's some interesting things going on with cigarette smoking, but, like, it's not substantiated in that story.
[00:50:32] Jessica Infante: Well, not necessarily of like the actual smoking of cigarettes, but there's like a segment of wellness influencers on the spectrum of Crunchy De Maga who are trying to say that nicotine is a really great natural stimulant and it's better for you than caffeine.
[00:50:47] Dave Infante: So I used to cover the vaping industry a little bit back in like 10 years ago when people were still using like open systems where you would fill the juice up yourself and you would get like the different juices at the different fucking shops and whatever. Now they're mostly closed systems where you just buy the elf bar in a specific flavor, you smoke it until it's done, and then you buy another elf bar. You can't fill the juice up again. So now we're just creating more trash. way more trash also like there's a lot of concerns about like what's in these things whatever i don't want to that's a whole discourse and like i imagine people who are very like pro vape are gonna yell at me but the point i was gonna make is like this nicotine idea has been one of their talking points for well over a decade which is like The harmful part about cigarettes was the combustion of tobacco and like the tar and the chemicals that it releases. But if you can isolate just nicotine as a chemical compound without burning tobacco to obtain it, nicotine is akin to caffeine. It's fairly safe in small quantities, et cetera, et cetera. I can't like validate that argument, but that is very much the argument of like the pro-vape sort of group. You don't ever really hear people making that argument on the alcohol side, right? Like that's not... No one's like, look, if we could just... If we could find a way to just fucking drink pure alcohol, you'll be fine. So, chemically, a little bit of a different challenge there. But, yeah, it's like, why don't you just inject ethyl alcohol directly into your bloodstream? It's pure, you know. Comes from nature. Don't do that. Yeah, no one do that, okay, yeah. Oh, my God.
[00:52:35] Justin Kendall: Did you send your pee to a data center?
[00:52:37] Dave Infante: not yet i'm gonna walk it over i'm in virginia you forget i'm surrounded by these things i don't mail it i can just fucking drive it over afterwards i think that ad campaign is really good i honestly like people accuse me of being a curmudgeon and about the business i'm really not it's just the most of The campaigns suck and are very poorly thought out and are gun-shy and whatever. GarageVeer is doing a tremendous job, has been for a while. They have very good marketing. They understand what they want to be in the marketplace. They're not just reacting. Liquid Death, I'm a little bit more out on. I get it. We're going to do stunts and they're going to be crazy. It's like jackass with a fucking water brand attached to it. Fine, whatever, that's their thing. I think that the GarageVeer, Liquid Death, fifth
[00:53:32] Justin Kendall: Because it taps into something real.
[00:53:34] Dave Infante: It taps into like the fucking conversation that's happening in this country that is cutting across party lines. It's cutting across fucking age and race lines. No one fucking likes data centers. No one likes the AI corporations that are driving their growth because they want to, you know, harvest our cognitive ability. And, you know, like, the head of the Utah Senate, I want to say, just, like, he was the incumbent and he got ousted because he had, like, supported a data center. It's having real, like, electoral implications. This is the issue. Talk about high salience issues. This is the high salience issue of our day. It certainly will be in the midterms. It may even be by the time 2028 rolls around. I also think that, like, breweries, beverage companies generally have a good angle on this because, like, the obvious get in is you need good water to brew good beer and like it's not possible if you have all these fucking buildings that look like server prisons popping up all over the country it's like i think it's smart i think they did a very good job with like the actual ad itself right it's like fun and like Jason Kelsey is a real genuine talent and like just a lovable loaf I don't know if he's like a jerk in real life I hope not but like he really reads as like you know kind of like affable dude from down the street who like walks around in shorts and flip-flops in January you know like that's the type of guy he is like people people love that type of guy and like he's fun and he's a good you know he's good on camera and whatever So I think it really works, man. I think Garage Beer has been on a real, real run for, at this point, what, nine to 12 months. And just in terms of their marketing, I mean, obviously their sales are doing very well, but like their marketing has been very good and ambitious, and I give them a lot of credit for that.
[00:55:31] Justin Kendall: Well, if you were looking for the Liquid Death Garage Beer data center coolant collector, the resealable
[00:55:40] Dave Infante: Some people might call it a piss jar, but not me.
[00:55:42] Justin Kendall: Yeah, a piss jar, no. It sold out. $18 each. Sold out, yeah. Yeah, however many they actually made.
[00:55:48] Dave Infante: That's the thing. Like, the selling out is just a gimmick so they can say it sold out. They had a very small number of units. You guys know the game. But like, I still think, I think the campaign is smart. I think it's good.
[00:55:59] Justin Kendall: Look for yours on eBay.
[00:56:00] Dave Infante: What did you guys, did you guys not like the piss? And I wrote this, the piss stuff is optional. You know, like, you don't have to do the piss stuff. It's only if you're into it.
[00:56:11] Justin Kendall: I think it's everything you said it taps into something very real and very like Unifying if there is something unifying in our world at this point Yeah, it used to be like we can all just come together over a beer now We can all come together over a jar of piss.
[00:56:27] Dave Infante: You know well you drink the beer and then you Know it feels very true to garages brand.
[00:56:33] Justin Kendall: Yeah, I
[00:56:34] Dave Infante: But it could have gone the other way, right? The Kelseys are somewhat politically progressive in their lives, just in terms of the public statements they've made. They don't seem to want to be too involved in electoral politics, but to the extent that they are, they do seem to be... somewhat progressive. So I guess I maybe shouldn't have been surprised, but like, I don't know, man, like the brand is very bro-y. The brand is very, yo, I fucking placed a prediction on Polly Market for like how many times Trump says the R word at the next show, like at the next rally, right? Like there's a component of that. That you said show, I feel like is very... I mean show, like let's not kid ourselves, you know? And I'm not saying that Garage Beer is courting that audience or that they, you know, deserve it. I think Garage Beer has done a good job of positioning themselves as very open and available for anyone who, you know, wants to come and be a part of their story, so to speak. But like, that customer certainly exists. And so I was very pleased. Again, I give them credit for like, You know, I have to imagine some fucking guys or who were Garage Beer fans, like maybe are not like that pumped about it or maybe like, huh, like, I guess like the jokes on me a little bit type of thing. It's like, I mean, good for them, man. I mean, is anybody pro data center? Yes. The fucking finance bros who are financing all this shit and making enormous amounts of money off of it. And then, like, dipshit, like, county-level officials who are just, like, cartoonishly corrupt and are, like, doing the cha-ching noise as they sign NDAs with Microsoft or whatever, you know?
[00:58:13] Justin Kendall: Well, speaking of bros, do you think that August the 3rd would have been bros with Shane Gillis?
[00:58:19] Dave Infante: No, absolutely not. I genuinely don't. I think that he would have been like, who is this fucking guy? Get him out of my face. Although I don't think that August Bush III, like I don't think they let him near the talent, you know? I think he was like too intense, right? Like that was kind of his whole thing. It was like, he like didn't want to waste any time. He's just like a high level of intensity, high level of, you know, sort of domineering my way or the highway type shit. I have to imagine they kept him away from like the endorsers. Bad vibe.
[00:58:47] Justin Kendall: Only reason I bring that up was you wrote about Gillis's appearance on Joe Rogan, where he said or he accused Trump of insider trading. Basically, you pay to get his truth social posts beforehand so you can make your bets or whatever.
[00:59:04] Dave Infante: So I think that that shit's really interesting because you guys know I've been, and you have as well, I'm not the only one, we've been looking at the Bud Light fiasco and fallout for three and a half years now, almost three and a half years now. And my reporting and our reporting suggests that like Anheuser-Busch, whether consciously or just out of pure reaction, moved their brand positioning for Bud Light to the right on the political axis in the wake of the Bud Light fiasco. They're panicked about what's going on with Kid Rock and what's going on with fucking Conservative dad and Brendan Whitworth can't get out in front of it and it'd take too long, whatever. Anyway, so like by October 2023, they signed a $100 million deal with Dana White and the UFC, right? Everyone correctly at that time, I think, read that as their Kind of going for the Chud vote and trying to make amends with the country's mouth-breathing minority. And then they also hired Gillis in February 2024. And Gillis, at that point, was mostly known for being quote-unquote cancelled from Saturday Night Live. For, you know, having said some racial slurs and some kind of like uglier jokes that, you know, I guess Lorne Michaels decided he didn't want to be part of once the public pressure came on to SNL to cut ties with him. So Gillis became kind of this like. cause celeb of the you know like alt-right like kind of like sweatpants men vote and like i don't think he's ever been fully comfortable with that like there there's been garbage day has done a lot of good by ryan broderick has done a lot of good reporting on like that dynamics like gillis himself like maybe didn't really want to be one of these like, you know, intellectual dark web type guys. Like, I think he's just like kind of a fucking dude, but like it's positioned him well to kind of speak to that, you know, that bro unreconstructed bro, so to speak. And, and that made sense for Bud Light's goal at that time. And really still, but like Gillis has. eyes and he's obviously very perceptive about the world and he's a very talented comedian whatever you think of the substance of his act and he can tell which way the wind's blowing and like Trump is doing insider trading like everyone fucking knows it like it's not hard to see right like we're nine weeks into the Iran war nine months into the I don't even know how long it's been going on at this point and like every other weekend he's he's posting about shit right after the markets close and then like And lo and behold, the deal's off by the time the markets reopen. Come on, man. Born at night, but not last night type of thing. So Gillis, I think, correctly points this out on Joe Rogan, but what makes it interesting is, Bud Light brought him on to not be that fucking guy. I have to imagine they weren't thrilled with the fact that he's calling it literally insider trading, you know?
[01:02:10] Justin Kendall: Drinking a Bud Light right there, too.
[01:02:11] Dave Infante: Drinking a Bud Light on the podcast, you know? They didn't respond. They never respond to me. And that's fine. I don't really care. But like, they're not going to touch that with a 10 foot pole. It's just that, like, you go all in on the MAGA kind of like reactionary id. And you wind up on the wrong side of things as the pendulum starts swinging back the other way, which it currently is.
[01:02:35] Justin Kendall: You do a good job of laying out, like, everything in between, too, with, like, the UFC fights at the White House and everything that went on there with Bud Light's branding right in the background as one of the fighters says something about Michelle Obama.
[01:02:51] Dave Infante: That's right. Yeah, it's an ugly like no comment there either. No comment. No comment on any of that barstool sports founder dave portnoy noted shithead like absolute fucking chud After the day after the fight, he's like, yeah, that was too far.
[01:03:07] Jessica Infante: That was not appropriate Yeah, is this even working for them though? Because their numbers are still bad and getting worse. So it's like you, you embrace this demographic, psychographic, social, whatever. And I don't even know that they're embracing you back. Right.
[01:03:27] Justin Kendall: How much of it's just a tourniquet on bleeding out?
[01:03:31] Dave Infante: Like, it might have been worse if not for this type of thing. I don't know. I mean, that's impossible to say, I suppose, without more understanding of what's going on within the company. I have to imagine soothing the seething reactionary id of Anheuser-Busch's distributor network in the wake of the Bud Light fiasco is a big part of this calculus. I mean, I don't think it's any big secret that wholesale, the people who own distributorships tend to be conservative and Republican and oriented towards the MAGA movement such as it is. I think like other landed gentry, they have class interests, but they also have ideological interests in this project. And I know because I was reporting on it back then and so were you guys that like that was one of the big stumbling blocks for Anheuser-Busch's, like, initial response on the fiasco is, like, they couldn't figure out how to, like, thread the needle between the public that was mostly angry with them for either being supportive of trans people or not, but then also the distribution core that was angry with them for blowing up this brand, but also being aligned with, you know, this woke shit, right? And, like, that is a difficult calculus. Like, I don't envy trying to figure that out, but, like, Three years later, it's not working well, but it maybe is still pleasing to the distributors or the distributorship owners that are maybe more politically aligned with the Trump administration. It's like, well, look, I'm not happy with the Bud Light numbers, and I don't think they've done a great job with that brand, but they've done a lot of right by. like us by buying into the shit that we care about. I don't know, man. I'm speculating. That is not based on reporting because no one is quite foolish enough to say that to me. But that is one read on how this is all shaken out for them. I don't think it's working. It's also just not that big. $100 million, the viewership numbers on that UFC fight were not great. It's not the Super Bowl, man. This is a niche media property.
[01:05:42] Justin Kendall: But that was a terrible decision on their part anyway, to run it on Paramount Plus or whatever, as opposed to CBS proper.
[01:05:49] Dave Infante: Yeah. Like, look, man, I have too many streaming services as it is. Like, I really wanted to watch this, but I just can't afford Paramount Plus.
[01:05:57] Justin Kendall: You were going to give up Fox Nation to get Paramount Plus?
[01:06:02] Dave Infante: Yeah, exactly. Or One American News Network. Yeah. I mean, I have my shows, Justin, OK?
[01:06:10] Justin Kendall: Well, we appreciate you coming on, Dave. Thanks for doing this. We'll look forward to having you back and we'll get your jacket ready.
[01:06:18] Dave Infante: Thank you. Yeah, it's always a pleasure, guys. Thanks so much for having me.
[01:06:22] Jessica Infante: And that's our show for this week. Thank you for listening. The Brewbound Podcast is a production of BevNET CPG. Our audio engineer for the Brewbound Podcast is Joe Cracci. Our technical director is Joshua Pratt and our video editor is Ryan Galang. Our social marketing manager is Amanda Smerlinski. Our designer is Amanda Huang. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with your colleagues and friends and review us on your listening platform of choice. You can find our work at Brewbound.com. And we also welcome feedback and suggestions at podcastatbrewbound.com. On behalf of the entire Brewbound podcast team, thank you for listening. We'll be back next week.
