Focus was one of the tips for craft breweries from Brewers Association chief economist Bart Watson during last week’s Craft Brewers Conference. Few brewers knocking on the door of 100,000 barrels are as focused as Montucky Cold Snacks. The Bozeman, Montana-headquartered craft brewery has one liquid and four SKUs.
The whirlwind that is the Craft Brewers Conference is finally over. Through a haze of honky-tonks and jet lag, I’m still unpacking the week of beer business talk in Nashville.
The first Brew Talks meetup is set for Sunday, May 7, at Nashville Underground. We’re going to start off Craft Brewers Conference week with two big talks, plus beers and networking.
Another week, another consolidation of small breweries. The week started with New Jersey’s Cape May Brewery announcing plans to acquire Flying Fish, one of the Garden State’s oldest breweries.
We don’t have the production numbers just yet, but the rankings are in for the Brewers Association’s (BA) annual list of the top 50 craft breweries by volume in 2022. This isn’t a best of list but a ranking of output for the breweries that meet the BA’s small and independent craft brewery definition.
This week was a bit of deja vu, from non-alcoholic beer and higher ABV products aimed at convenience stores, to building out brand families and making partnerships, to filling out distribution maps.
As the craft beer segment matures and sales slow, a lot of brewers are trying to figure out the path forward. That seemed to be the unofficial theme of the week.
The job cuts in the tech sector have finally touched beverage-alcohol. Drizly, the Uber-owned alcohol e-commerce delivery platform, underwent “company wide” layoffs that affected around 100 roles. Brewbound’s Zoe Licata first to reported.
This week, we have a tale of two market expansions and one is off to either a great start (selling more beer than expected) or a rough one (running into out of stocks), depending on your perspective.
As the Brewbound team gets ready to embark on another road trip next week, Zoe and Jess are wrapping up their own recent journeys. Zoe ventured to Maine for the New England Craft Brew Summit in Portland, and she picked up more than a few nuggets from that trip. Notably, Brewers Association chief economist Bart Watson offered an early read on 2022 production numbers.
For only the second time in its 43-year history, Sierra Nevada has invested in another beverage company, albeit for a minority stake. The Chico, California-headquartered craft brewery announced it has made a minority investment in Riot Energy, a Venice, California-based energy drink maker.
Craft brewers have been living in turmoil for a few years now. Slowing growth, increasing competition, a pandemic, shifting consumer focuses, a consolidating middle tier, shrinking retail shelf space, supply chain turmoil, inflation, layoffs, increased minimum wage, skyrocketing rents have all taken a toll. So craft brewers continue to try to figure it out.
In a heavy Boston Beer Company news week, I wouldn’t blame you if you missed out on some of this week’s headlines. Chief among them: I believe we have our first craft-on-craft deal of the year.
Hard seltzer searching for its floor has been a theme of Wall Street analyst reports over the last year. That line appeared again in the most recent “Hard Seltzer Dashboard” by Jefferies’ Kevin Grundy, which noted that hard seltzer’s share of total beer category dollar sales in Q4 2022 was the lowest point the segment had seen since the start of the pandemic.
