Brewbound Podcast

The Magic of Airport Beers with Experience Threee’s Liz EinhornThe pre-flight beer ranks high on many people’s lists of simple pleasures, but what does it take for that beer to end up in a pint glass?Experience Threee founder Liz Einhorn joins this week’s episode of the Brewbound Podcast to discuss the complexities of beer service in airport concessions. She shares the pros and cons of brewery-branded, airport taprooms and what it takes to secure (and keep) a draft line in a busy airport bar.Before the interview, Justin and Jess break down the latest beer industry headlines, including a lawsuit between Ballast Point’s owners over allegedly ill-gotten business loans, new leadership at the National Black Brewers Association and James Watt’s second attempt to buy back BrewDog. Listen here or on your preferred podcast platform.

Athletic Brewing co-founder and CEO Bill Shufelt is “the most excited” he’s felt since founding the dedicated non-alcoholic (NA) beer brand.On the latest edition of the Brewbound Podcast, Shufelt shared what’s driving his hyped feeling, with a foundation he and co-founder John Walker laid about a decade ago. That foundation is built on a team of 300 co-workers, bicoastal brewing facilities, a strong distribution base for its core beers, a slate of new products hitting retailers and marketing campaigns beginning to ramp up.“I’m very bullish on the long-term health and growth of the category and our part in growing that,” Shufelt said. “It was very hard to get non-alcoholic beer from zero to 2% of beer, but there are actual retailers in the U.S. [where] non-alcoholic beer is touching up against 20% of their beer sales.”Those retailers lend credence to Shufelt’s belief that NA beer can be a much bigger part of the beer category. Shufelt explained that consumers are very early in the NA beer discovery curve, with the vast majority unaware how the product has changed in the last decade. Even with the stage set for growth, Shufelt acknowledged that Athletic still has work to do for the company and the segment to reach some of his loftier goals. For Athletic in particular, which holds around 22% of the NA beer segment, distribution remains its biggest opportunity. “In independents, no matter how much our distributors smile at us and tell us we’re a priority, we’re in like 10% of their independents,” Shufelt said. “And I can go into stores in almost any state in the country and look at a shelf that is controlled by our distributor that has five-plus non-alcoholic beer products on it, and Athletic will have none. There’s just such untapped distribution out there still.”For now, Shufelt is focused on driving Athletic and NA beer forward. But could the future include an IPO? An Athletic led by someone else? Shufelt said it’s possible, but he doesn't want to be on the outside looking in on an opportunity he was one of the few people to see.Before the interview, Justin, Jess and Zoe discuss the latest headlines, including the mixed results craft brewers are seeing from the World Cup, the American Cider Association co-locating its 2027 CiderCon conference with the Brewers Association’s Craft Brewers Conference, the closure of Nebraska’s largest craft brewery and the top new products of so far this year.

The pack mentality isn’t going away anytime soon in craft brewing. The Oregon Beverage Collective (OBC) – the tie up of Crux Fermentation Project, Cascade Lakes Brewing, Silver Moon Brewing, Goodlife Brewing and Tumalo Cider – launched a couple of weeks ago as one of the latest additions to this crowd. OBC president Andy Rhine joined the latest edition of the Brewbound Podcast to share how those five brands are looking to build strength in numbers Rhine explained that OBC’s formation wasn’t out of necessity even in a Pacific Northwest market facing challenges through distributor consolidation. Instead, the collective’s foundation was built via long-time relationships among brewery owners in Bend. And it was those relationships that led to Rhine acquiring Crux in a separate deal from founders Larry Sidor and Paul Evers. Even with a portfolio of five brands and efforts to consolidate production, sales and marketing, Rhine said maintaining each brand’s “unique identity” will be key to the future of the collective. The conversation also covered Rhine’s view of OBC’s future and whether more members will be added to its ranks. Before the interview, Justin and Zoe break down the latest headlines, including the fallout from Dry January, the Brewers Association’s 2025 financial results, Tilray’s licensing deal with Carlsberg, the Left Hand Collective’s newest member and the Supreme Court’s ruling on reciprocal tariffs. Listen here or on your preferred podcast platform.

After a lengthy delay that included much fretting among industry insiders, the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) were unveiled earlier this month. Any fears that anti-alcohol activists had infiltrated the quinquennial process were eased, as the new guidelines preach moderation over specific daily drink allowances. Beer Marketer’s Insights senior editor Christopher Shepard, who has followed the process closely, joined the Brewbound Podcast to discuss the DGA, the fraught path to publication and what this could mean for brewers. “The overall guidance didn’t really change,” Shepard said of the DGA’s move to recommend moderation over the former standard daily limit of two drinks for men and one for women. “They just decided to take the specifics away.” Industry trade groups have celebrated the DGA’s embrace of moderation, particularly as it pertains to beer, which has long been touted as an alcoholic beverage that can be consumed in moderation. “One of the reasons it’s been viewed as a win by the industry writ large, and by a coalition of industry trade organizations that came together, is that they came together because there was a very real threat that the Dietary Guidelines were going to tilt towards or embrace a ‘no safe level’ [of alcohol consumption] rhetoric,” Shepard said. “That threat was, in fact, real.” The prior recommendation of two or one daily drinks detailed a drink as 12 oz. of 5% ABV beer, 5 oz. of 12% ABV wine or 1.5 oz. of liquor. Shepard posited that the move away from that method may not sit well with the spirits industry. “There are probably some folks in the distilling world that are not so pleased that that’s gone,” he said. “There are probably some folks in the brewing world that are a little bit happier that that’s no longer on the books.” Before the featured interview, Zoe and Jess discuss recent beer industry headlines, including a proposed deal between the Reyes Beverage Group and Republic National Distributing Company, 2 Towns Ciderhouse’s acquisition of Seattle Cider and the somewhat heartening data Circana published in the past month. Listen here or on your preferred podcast platform.

A new year means it’s Brewbound’s annual roundtable conversation with our peers in beer industry journalism. This year, the Brewbound team is joined by Kate Bernot, lead analyst for Feel Goods Insights, and David Steinman, VP and executive editor of Beer Marketer’s Insights. The discussion covers the biggest bev-alc news stories of 2025, including middle-tier consolidation, overall category health and consumer sentiment. Although full-year scan data has yet to arrive, the beer category is poised to finish 2025 with low- to moderate-single-digit declines in dollar sales and volume, if the trends of the first 11 months hold. “We’re looking at decline after decline after decline – it’s something like 30 million barrels down from our recent peak,” Steinman said, adding that “some of that was inflated from the pandemic gains.” “It felt like it was going to normalize at least multiple times over, and it just keeps on declining at this rate,” he continued. “It’s hard to really put a finger on exactly one thing, but it’s easy to look at the broad-brush of impacts on the trends, and it’s just a tougher business now than it really ever has been for a consistent stretch.” The usual suspects of health and wellness trends, Gen Zs’ alleged broad aversion to alcohol and the rise of intoxicating hemp dominate conversations elsewhere, but Bernot posited that there’s something bigger at play. “The story that maybe went under-discussed for me last year was the broader macroeconomic factors going on in the U.S. and the pressure on the average consumer and how that fits into the choices people are making,” she said. “We hear so much about health. We hear so much about cannabis, THC, etc, competing categories. “I just didn’t hear enough about how pressured the average U.S. consumer feels,” Bernot continued. “We’ve known for a long time that well-off Americans are carrying a lot of water for the U.S. economy, but they can’t do it forever, and especially not in general CPG. You can only go out to a restaurant so many times. You only need so many cases of beer if you’re a wealthy family.” In addition to high-level impacts on the beer business, the conversation also explored granular topics, such as the rise of Guinness in the on-premise, seismic shifts in California distribution and Anheuser-Busch InBev’s growing strength in beyond beer. Listen here or on your preferred podcast platform.

Pizza Port wants to be a staple of your Southern California grocery run. “I call it the Southern California grocery basket,” Pizza Port director of sales Jill Olesh said on the latest episode of the Brewbound Podcast. “It’s your chicken, your tortillas, your black beans, your spinach and your 6-pack of Swami’s [IPA].” Pizza Port is riding a wave of momentum as the 38th-largest craft brewery by volume in 2024, growing 9% to 53,450 barrels of beer. Olesh credited the connection the brewery has forged across generations, as well as the value of the brewery’s flagship 16 oz. can 6-pack format, which the company launched in 2013. “Part of the magic recipe, the lightning in the bottle of Pizza Port, is we’ve been so many things to so many people throughout their lives and a lot of those people who were coming as kids are now bringing their kids here,” she said. In the conversation, Olesh discussed the pillars of Pizza Port’s sales pitch – “consistency, quality, affordability, availability” – as well as the mindset that carried her through the recent SoCal distributor consolidation as Hand Family Companies bought and merged Stone Distributing, Classic Beverage and Scout Distributing into Sunset Distributing earlier this year and why she’s optimistic for 2026. Plus, hear the real-time reactions from the Brewbound team on Anheuser-Busch InBev’s $490 million deal for 85% of party punch maker BeatBox, as well as quick recaps on a proposed class-action lawsuit against Boston Beer and how the night before Thanksgiving busted this year. Justin, Jess and Zoe also share their Spotify Wrapped results, with some surprising – and not-so-surprising – results. Listen here or on your preferred podcast platform.

Smog City Brewing co-founder Laurie Porter is a prepper. Even during craft’s days of double-digit growth in the middle 2010s, Porter, who calls herself “an incurable optimist,” was eyeing a future when that growth wouldn’t be there. So Porter and her husband, Jonathan Porter, built Torrence, California-based Smog City with diversified revenue streams – distribution, exports to international markets, four taprooms with over-the-bar sales and an intentional cap on production around 10,000 barrels – that allow the company to shore up its business if things go sideways. “At our level, between the 5,000 and 12,000, 13,000 barrel, a lot of our revenue is built off the taproom, direct-to-consumer, which has a little bit higher profit margin, it helps us float that wholesale,” Porter says in the latest edition of the Brewbound Podcast, recorded on location at the California Craft Beer Summit. “So if wholesale is struggling or we’re seeing dips and changes in seasons and customer changes, we have a little bit more buffer.” Porter admits that Smog City has looked at what life would be like as a 15,000-barrel brewery but has been “apprehensive to break that” ceiling due to the loss of the ability to pivot, flex and manage costs. “When you hit 15,000 barrels, you are playing so deep in the chain world because it’s all about volume,” she explained. “Chain can be very fickle. It can be really difficult to maintain. A beer buyer changes and boom, you’re off the shelf. And that’s now, whatever, 450 barrels of beer for that one style of beer that you had committed to that grocery, and it’s gone. And you can’t just predict it.” In the interview, Porter discusses the pressures on LA locations, consumers heading back into taprooms, the impending closure of its Steelcraft Long Beach facility after a decade due to being unable to extend the lease and the launch of a new restaurant concept in December to replace it. Before the interview, Jess, Zoe and Justin cover the latest news, including the Siebel Institute of Technology’s planned exit from Chicago and move to Montreal; Athletic Brewing’s big 2025 and new products coming in 2026; and a Gen Z take on the rumored Anheuser-Busch InBev acquisition of BeatBox. Listen here or on your preferred podcast platform.