Barring a resolution before next week, President Donald Trump’s escalating trade war with China — and increased tariffs on aluminum can sheet — threatens to further impact U.S. beer companies’ bottom lines. On Friday, Trump announced via Twitter plans to increase tariffs on $550 billion of imported Chinese goods over the next two months in retaliation for China saying it would impose $75 billion in tariffs on goods imported from America beginning October 1. And aluminum can producers are bracing for the higher aluminum costs and passing them onto their customers.

In this week’s Last Call: Breakside Brewing Implements Employee Stock Ownership Plan; The Brewers Association Shares Brewery Employee Diversity Data; Guns N’ Roses and CANarchy Settle Lawsuit; Anheuser-Busch Rolls Out Bud Light College Branded Packaging.

The beer industry’s efforts to make federal excise tax relief for brewers permanent received a boost Tuesday when members of a bipartisan congressional task force expressed support for the cause. U.S. Senate Finance Committee chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and ranking member Ron Wyden (D-OR) released a report from the Individual, Excise, and Other Temporary Tax Policy Task Force, which called for the Craft Beverage Modernization and Tax Reform Act (CBMTRA) to be permanently enacted.

Halfway through 2019, volume growth for small and independent U.S. craft brewers has remained steady at 4 percent, according to data released today by national trade group the Brewers Association (BA). BA chief economist Bart Watson, in a press release, characterized craft brewers’ low- to mid-single-digit craft brewer volume growth as “a similar pattern” to recent years.

Tickets for the 2019 Great American Beer Festival (GABF) are still available a day after going on sale to the public, despite the event’s history of quick sell outs. The slowdown in ticket sales for the Brewers Association’s (BA) largest consumer-facing event of the year, which takes place October 3-5 at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, comes as craft beer volume growth has slowed to single digits over the last four years.

It’s an age-old question: What does a “craft beer drinker” look like? According to market research firm Nielsen, which presented findings from its newest “Craft Beer Insights Poll” (CIP) during a Brewers Association-sponsored webinar last week, the average weekly craft beer drinker is primarily male, between the ages of 21 and 44, and makes between $75,000 and $99,000 annually. However, those demographics are beginning to shift among less frequent consumers of craft, with 79 percent of women considering themselves monthly drinkers.

The Brewers Association (BA) has severed ties with longtime New York-based PR firm The Rosen Group. The Colorado-headquartered not-for-profit trade association representing small and independent U.S. craft brewers today announced it has chosen Backbone Media as its new public relations agency of record. Backbone, based in Carbondale, Colorado, supplants The Rosen Group, which had served as the BA’s public relations firm for more than a decade.

The Brewbound team hit the 2019 SAVOR event to ask several brewery owners — including James Beard Award winners Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery and Rob Tod of Allagash Brewing Company — and other industry stakeholders how SAVOR and events like it help elevate the beer category.

In this week’s Last Call: Heineken makes a minority investment in Amsterdam’s Oedipus; Bumble announces plans to open a brick-and-mortar bar in SoHo; the SEC lifts its ban on alcohol sales at sporting events; the future of Breckenridge’s brewpub is uncertain; and more news.

Alcohol producers’ efforts to make excise tax relief permanent reached another milestone today, as a majority of Congress now supports the Craft Beverage Modernization and Tax Reform Act (CBMTRA). In a joint announcement, seven alcohol industry trade groups said a bill to permanently enact tax cuts for alcohol producers and importers now has 218 co-sponsors in the U.S. House of Representatives.

More than half of the top 50 Brewers Association-defined craft brewing companies didn’t grow in 2018, according to data published in the May/June edition of the not-for-profit trade group’s New Brewer magazine. It’s the third consecutive year that at least half of the top 50 regional craft brewing companies — those producing between 15,000 and six million barrels of beer a year — didn’t grow. In 2018, 28 of the top 50 small and independent breweries either declined or remained flat. In fact, just seven companies in the top 20 posted mid-to-low single-digit growth.

In this week’s edition of Last Call: Brewers Association CEO Bob Pease weighs in on the Boston Beer-Dogfish Head deal; Rob Tod wins a James Beard award; Bell’s and Loveland head to arbitration; the Texas Senate strips to-go-sales amendment from a bill; and more industry news.

A growing number of U.S. craft breweries are not locking in long-term hops contracts and that leaves those companies vulnerable as supply tightens, according to industry trade group the Brewers Association (BA), which surveyed 250 members to gain insight into how beer makers are managing one of the industry’s most important raw materials.

Slower growth and increased competition are the “new normal,” Brewers Association (BA) leaders hammered home on the second day of the trade group’s annual Craft Brewers Conference (CBC). “This is not a blip,” BA chief economist Bart Watson said during Wednesday’s State of the Industry presentation. “This is the new normal.”