The 8 Stories That Defined the Beer Industry in 2024
Deck the site with one more column,
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‘Tis the season to re-view ‘um
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Post we now Hop Take’s 2024 recap,
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And hope next year that beer gets less crap,
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Don’t you just love the holidays? Your humble Hop Take columnist sure does, reader. But I don’t have a whole lot of cheer for the American beer industry to share in this, our final column before Christmas and Hanukkah. The upshot of 2024 was: another tough year for beer. Is there a silver lining in the fact that it wasn’t a great year for beverage alcohol across the board? Maybe? But this column is about The Drink of Moderation™️, and things went moderately poorly for it these past 12 months.
As is holiday tradition around these parts, below I’ve put together a shortlist of what I believe to be the most important storylines and turning points for the industry in 2024. Think I missed something? Shoot me an email: dave@dinfontay.com. I’d fa la la la l-ove to hear from you.
The big ol’ macro reshuffle continuing apace.
Coming off last year’s brutal performance, Bud Light’s losses have kinda-sorta moderated, and Michelob Ultra is cooking, with the latter beer actually outperforming the former in dollars, off-premise volumes, and even draft by some measures. Coors Light and Miller Lite didn’t do the best job at locking in those supposed generational shelf-shifts they picked up last year while Bud Light bled, but Coors Banquet came on strong. Then there’s Modelo, which came into 2024 hot as a pistol and heads into 2025 a little cooler, and a lot more concerned about the potential for a trade war on the United States-Mexico border.
The FTC taking on — and shutting down — the Kroger-Albertsons merger.
Let’s start with some good news that’s fresh in the mind. Earlier this month, Albertsons, one of the country’s largest grocers, broke off its troubled $24.6 billion merger with Kroger, suing its also-enormous rival for billions of dollars for allegedly biffing the deal. The collapse came just a day after both the Federal Trade Commission and the state of Washington won favorable rulings in separate cases attempting to block the two-years-in-the-making tie-up on antitrust grounds. It’s a good outcome for craft brewers feeling the squeeze of overcrowded beer aisles and middle-tier consolidation — not to mention the thousands of workers whose jobs would’ve been jeopardized by a combined Kroger-Albertsons, or the American drinking public writ large.
Tilray’s shopping spree in the corporate craft-brewery bargain bin.
With the possible exception of New Belgium Brewery (NBB) Tilray Brands was the most fun big craft brewer in the business to cover this past year. (NB: NBB is not a craft brewer as defined by the Brewers Association, for those of you originalists reading.) Whether Tilray or its maverick chief executive Irwin Simon are having fun being covered, I’m less sure: When I poked at his strategy/lack thereof for turning the conglomerate’s portfolio of misfit brewhouses, scooped up on the cheap from Molson Coors and Anheuser-Busch InBev this summer and last (respectively), he accused me of being a “naysayer.” I have deepening doubts that the Canadian-American vice conglomerate can square the circle on decentralized, scaled, distributed craft beer, and its slate of knock-off “innovations” doesn’t inspire confidence that its not-great sales are poised to bounce back. But Simon is in the arena, man. He’s trying stuff. And between the Nova Scotian’s contrarian streak and the hundreds of millions of dollars he’s put into this gambit, Tilray sure made for what newspaper types call “good copy” this year.
The rocky “total beverage” transformation of Boston Beer Company.
On the other end of the “fun to cover” spectrum is the second-largest BA-defined craft brewer in the country. I’m not sure a month went by in 2024 that I didn’t mutter “what the f*ck is Boston Beer Company doing?” From its dismal noncompete lawsuits, to its flailing Truly rescue effort, to the fact that it let Surfside eat its lunch on the logical spirits-based extension to Twisted Tea even though it supposedly had Suncruiser ready to go before the upstart from Philly hit shelves, the House That Samuel Adams Built (and Is Still Allowed to Hang Out in Even Though It’s No Longer Really His) was the source of one perplexing move after another this year.
Finding the limits on the Voodoo Ranger-fication of craft brewing.
It’s not much of a stretch to put NBB’s skeletal India Pale Ale brand family in the same conversation as Corona in the ‘80s or Michelob Ultra in the early aughts when it comes to generation-defining beers. But this year, we started to see the strategy it pioneered — big, honking flavor-bombs with high alcohol-by-volume in 19.2-ounce cans optimized for the convenience-store channel — show up across the craft segment, which may have accounted for some of the lackluster sales within the Voodoo Ranger ranks. The expansion of said ranks with under-differentiated liquids bearing similar-sounding names (quick, what’s the difference between Tropic Force, Fruit Force, and Juice Force?) probably didn’t help. Nor did the fact that flavored malt beverages are running the same playbook at lower costs per serving. So… uh… Mini Rippers?
The macrobrewers giving up on craft brewing.
With Heineken’s shutdown of laggardly Lagunitas’s Chicago taproom and brewery in June, MC’s sell-off to Tilray in August and closure of Leinenkugel’s 157-year-old plant in Chippewa Falls, Wis., in November, 2024 was the year we saw Big Beer really retreat from the segment they panic-bought into during the salad days last decade. Sure, ABI still has a bunch of pedigreed craft brands to its name, and you’ll have to pry Kona Brewing from its cold dead fingers, but moves like abruptly shutting down and laying off Wicked Weed staff in Asheville, N.C., and shuttering Elysian’s Georgetown, Wash., production facility suggest those “assets” are in for de-prioritization and consolidation. On balance, whatever the marriage of craft and corporate brewing might have produced, it already has. Now, as Jeff Alworth put it earlier this year at Beervana, we’ll see what follows the “divorce.”
The best era for unionizing America’s breweries closing — with few additional unions.
The basic dynamic for organized labor in the brewing industry is that some of the country’s biggest macrobrewers are unionized, and very few of its nearly 10,000 craft breweries are likewise. With the macros more or less cutting bait on the craft segment, the bridge connecting legacy brewing unions like the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the International Association of Machinists to smaller breweries’ workers is crumbling. (Credit to non-legacy unions, like UNITE HERE, for making inroads into the craft brewing segment anyway.) Meanwhile, President Joe Biden’s unusually labor-friendly term ended on an extremely sour note, with the National Labor Relations Board falling to anti-labor President-elect Donald Trump’s control two years before it should have thanks to outgoing Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. It has never been easy to organize a craft brewery — just ask workers at Sapporo-Stone Brewing’s Richmond plant, where outside union-busters helped the firm swing the vote against joining a Teamsters local earlier this year. It’s about to get harder.
The trade groups mobilizing against ‘neo-prohibitionism.’
The term is in smart quotes because I’m skeptical of the popular contention that dark global forces are fomenting a coordinated political movement of meaningful significance against beer and drinking in general. That’s an argument for a different column. For this column, I’ll note that 2024 was the year beer’s Big Three lobbying groups — the Beer Institute, the National Beer Wholesalers Association, and the Brewers Association — mostly settled on an intra- and inter-industry messaging strategy to advocate against unfavorable recommendations on hard drinks in the United States Department of Agriculture’s 2025 dietary guidelines.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
I know people contain multitudes, but even that basic truism about the variety of human experience wasn’t enough to prepare me for the information that Bart Watson, the Brewers Association’s longtime data don and incoming president/CEO, also happens to be one of the best Ultimate Frisbee players these United States has yet produced. We’re talking back-to-back national championships, two World Games appearances, Ultimate Hall of Fame-caliber stuff. Did you know this, reader? Have I just been living under a 175-gram hot-stamped DiscCraft UltraStar this entire time? Life’s rich tapestry… truly breathtaking…
📈 Ups…
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine finally dropped its Congressionally-funded study, and it broadly (if qualifiedly) affirmed that moderate drinking tracks with lowered cardiovascular risk… Congrats to the California Craft Brewers Association’s new executive director, bev-alc outsider Kelsey McQuaid-Craig… Congrats to the BA’s two incoming at-large board members and three elected members… Hard cider-maker Bold Rock is launching a non-alcoholic cider, sure why not…
📉 …and downs
The craft beer segment’s all-outlet Circana scans will exit 2024 not with a bang but a whimper… Oregon’s hotly contested alcohol task force filed its final report without a specific recommendation on taxes, a major point of said contestation… A new CGA report indicates drinkers are dabbling more with ready-to-drink products in the on-premise, where draft needs all the help it can get…
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