Who had “ABI will sell off seven craft properties plus its weird, lame Shock Top brand to a weed company for $85 million” on their bingo card for this fine Monday? It’s pretty big news around these parts, because two of the brands are big in Oregon.

An interesting data point from a company that tracks on-premise alcohol sales. In the months since the Bud Light fiasco, an unexpected beneficiary has entered the frame. 

If you were going to place a bet on one malthouse that might escape craft malting’s difficult economic realities, Skagit Valley would have been the odds-on favorite. That’s why their abrupt closure over the weekend has dark implications for the future of craft malting.

How the story of Cleveland’s Platform brewery—which launched, exploded in popularity, sold out to AB InBev, collapsed and folded—is the inverse corollary to last week’s Anchor Brewing news. In this case, how optimism can be a bad thing indeed.

If you look closely at your beer industry news feed, you see a lot of downsizing, consolidation, and renewed focus on core lines. The expectation of inevitable growth has given way to a new pessimism in beer—especially craft beer. But that’s probably good news.

Bud Light did a great thing: the company reached out to a winsome young woman with a massive social media following. Everything since then has been a disgrace. 

Heineken has a new product aimed at an American audience, but everything about the rollout suggests Heineken doesn’t really get Americans.

In the oscillating cycle of innovation and retrenchment, breweries focus on different things. People aren’t clamoring for the newest, most exotic beer anymore, and breweries will contend with this new normal by training their creativity on their business structures instead.

Technology is disrupting not just how but what we pay, and has the whole enterprise of tipping teetering near collapse. Perhaps it’s time to say good riddance.

For decades, Yorkshire’s Samuel Smith Brewery managed to do things their own, very weird way, seemingly flouting the rules of business, if not physics. But a three-year pandemic may have changed the calculus.

Forty percent of America’s breweries are small neighborhood affairs that, prior to 2020, were fun and rewarding little businesses. With Covid, inflation, supply-chain issues, and difficulties getting to market, how many still are? In Portland, one of them just called it quits.

A massively over-spiced bottle of holiday ale from one of America’s grand old craft breweries, not to mention a cringey line extension at odds with the brand, have me worried.

It appears Elon Musk has actually acquired Twitter after all. But whether that’s good news or bad, the major social media sites are in big trouble. Now that legacy media is good and truly gutted, the troubling question is this: what comes next?

In 2017, the Brewers Association launched the “independent brewer” seal as a way of making customers aware of who makes their beer. Looking back after five years, has it made a difference?

On July 1, New Jersey’s alcohol regulatory issued rules limiting what breweries could do in their own taprooms. They were comically draconian, and outraged New Jerseyans have been filling the internet with disgusted memes. Is it really the case that NJ wants these taprooms to fail, and if so, who benefits? I spoke to one man with some answers.