Consolidation Watch: North American Breweries Sold

And the snowball that is Pyramid/MacTarnahan's/Magic Hat continued to roll along gathering new owners:

KPS Capital Partners, LP ("KPS") announced today that it signed a definitive agreement to sell its portfolio company, North American Breweries Holdings, LLC ("NAB" or the "Company"), to Cerveceria Costa Rica, S.A. ("CCR"), a subsidiary of Florida Ice and Farm Company, S.A., for $388 million in cash. NAB is one of the largest independently owned beer companies in the United States and the owner of a diverse portfolio of brands including Labatt, Genesee, Seagram's Escapes, Magic Hat, Pyramid, the Original Honey Brown Lager, Dundee and MacTarnahan's. NAB operates four state-of-the-art breweries and seven retail locations located in New York, Vermont, California, Oregon and Washington.

I'd like to write more, but I'm on the road (New England for the holiday) and Google's latest version of the iPhone blogger app is absolutely unusable. But please discuss. This is big news--at least at the level of augury. We're seeing the ghost of breweries future, I think.