Holding Company Monster Beverage Buys Canarchy Collective

11:11am: Post updated below with a curious statement from the Brewers Association.

Well, this was unexpected:

Monster Beverage Corporation (NASDAQ: MNST) announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire CANarchy Craft Brewery Collective LLC, a craft beer and hard seltzer company for $330 million in cash.

In case you’ve forgotten the whole list, Canarchy included these breweries: Cigar City, Oskar Blues, Deep Ellum, Perrin, Squatters, and Wasatch. According to the press release, everyone’s very excited about the deal. There’s a lot of talk of innovation and new products. Tony Short will continue to lead Canarchy as a “functionally independent” company, which in this case is probably true, since Monster itself is just a holding company.

I have no reporting to add, having been startled this morning to see the news break. My first-blush reaction is that it’s part of the emergent trend of breweries blending operations with soda and non-alc products and I will be curious to see the impacts, if any, on distribution. It does take another big brewery off the board for the Brewers Association. In 2021 it was the 6th largest BA-defined craft brewery—and this comes just months after the 5th-largest, Bell’s, was sold to Kirin.

Update: The Brewers Association just sent out this email commenting on the sale. Bolded text is in the original email:

“The Brewers Association (BA) is aware of CANarchy Craft Brewery Collective’s pending sale to Monster Beverage. Based on our current information, CANarchy meets the Brewers Association’s craft brewer definition under the ownership of Monster Energy as presently constituted. In this instance, Monster is not a beverage alcohol industry member, so this new ownership structure does not affect CANarchy's independence in regard to the beverage alcohol industry.”