Trump’s Tariffs Are Hurting U.S. Beer Exporters — and America’s Beer ‘Brand’

A grim joke they tell in South Carolina is that it’s a good thing Mississippi and Alabama exist, because otherwise they would be the worst state for education, healthcare, poverty… you get it. Things are not good per se in the Palmetto State, but they could be worse.

Taking stock of the American beer industry’s overseas outlook after the first few months of President Donald Trump’s chaotic, corrupt, and contradictory trade war, a riff on the Deep South’s interstate one-upmanship comes to mind: It’s a good thing the wine industry exists.

Earlier this month, the American Association of Wine Economists published an analysis of the United States Department of Commerce’s export figures for the category from March 2025 — the second full month of the Trump administration’s economic rage-room routine. The upshot: International wine shipments had declined almost $90 million compared to the same month a year prior, a 28.2-percent nosedive. Domestic exports to Canada, a ~$434 million annual market and the world’s largest buyer of American wine, tanked an astonishing 72.5 percent in that period; China, over 83 percent, on a denominator about a quarter the size.

It’s proof positive that things could be worse for U.S. beer exporters, which collectively shipped $383.3 million in 2024, according to figures published by the United States Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service. The Beer Institute (BI), the category’s largest trade group, published figures for March 2025 showing 9.7 percent volume growth on exports, potentially driven by the release of pent-up supply after the administration suspended some of its early tariffs on Mexico and Canada and announced that goods compliant with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) would be exempt from additional levies. Compared to American wine, it was a downright solid result. But that doesn’t mean things are good, either. Zoom out, and trouble looms. The BI’s figures showed American beer exports down 9.7 percent for 2024 and 13.3 percent year-to-date in 2025. Because the latter data only run through the end of March 2025, they don’t reflect the effects of Trump’s “Liberation Day” goat rodeo on April 2, or any of the embarrassing rake-stepping that he, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have done since.

We’ll be able to gauge those consequences as export numbers for April and May roll out, and your humble Hop Take columnist will be keeping an eye on them. (The BI did not make Andrew Heritage, its chief economist, available for an interview.) But data only ever tells part of the story. So in the meantime, I called up Peter McNulty, a beer-industry veteran and the co-founder at Brooklyn’s Crafted Exports, to get a better feel for how this is all playing out on the front lines.

“There’s a massive degradation in the demand for American-made products because of the distrust in how we are doing business as a country,” he tells Hop Take in a recent phone interview. “Our partners do not want to be left holding the bag on product.” Or the shipping container, as it were. The logistical challenge of maintaining the quality of domestically brewed beer — in Crafted Exports’ case, Samuel Adams, Other Half Brewing Co., and a handful of other brands — while shipping it across oceans is considerable. It requires being able to predict how quickly containers will move through customs at foreign ports, and how much they will cost when they get there.

Since launching their firm in 2014, McNulty and his business partner, Qurban Singh Walia, have navigated generational challenges like Brexit and the pandemic, as well as less direct problems like unfavorable currency conversions and the first Trump administration’s less sweeping, and less successful, attempts to touch off a global trade war. “The other headwinds, you could forecast them, you could plan for them,” says McNulty. But this time around, it seems like “prices may go up 10, 40, 145 percent at any point in time” between the moment a customer places an order, and the moment Crafted Exports’ shipping container arrives on foreign shores. “We’re having those conversations 90 days in advance,” McNulty continues. That’s only once the firm has formalized an arrangement with international partners, which can take years to cultivate and three to 12 months to negotiate. “All those things take a lot of time to develop and grow, and [the status quo] has been disrupted very quickly in a way that people can’t get comfortable with.”

Long lead times or high-levies beer exporters can model out and manage. But the Trump administration’s trade policy-by-post has generated a lack of clarity that’s damaging America’s longstanding role as a reliable trading partner, and nobody knows how to price those operational and reputational costs into an India Pale Ale margin.

For McNulty, it’s frustrating watching hard-won relationships with long-running international partners thrown into disarray. All the more so given that Crafted Exports had yet to enter China during the first Trump administration, while by the start of the second, it’d become one of their most important markets, giving the firm more exposure to a major target of the tariffs. Having work that’s been gestating for years be thrown into jeopardy once it starts bearing fruit is agonizing stuff.

Steve Parr, who manages the Export Development Program at the Brewers Association, is hopeful that the sheer arc of the beer export timeline may actually work in its favor. “Export is a long game,” he tells Hop Take via email. “This isn’t the first trade disruption, and it won’t be the last. Despite current headwinds, export remains a strategic way for U.S. brewers to diversify revenue, expand brand visibility, and reach engaged consumers worldwide.” He points to the in-person attendance of Chinese and Canadian buyers in last month’s 2025 Craft Brewers Conference as proof of the “lasting reputation of U.S. craft beer for quality and innovation — even amid ongoing trade uncertainty for markets,” while conceding that importers from those two countries in particular have scaled back or stopped down on ordering in the opening months of Trump’s trade war. This, after craft exports saw a 15 percent decline in 2024, outpacing the category. Still, Parr argues, “for breweries with a long-term, quality-driven approach, global markets continue to offer meaningful opportunities.”

It’s his job to stay positive, but it strikes me as a fair bet. The history of globalized trade has been a mostly inexorable march in one direction, and Trump’s tariffs are already unpopular now and apt to become more so if/when product shortages start manifesting on American shelves this summer. Wall Street was laughably wrong about Trump’s obsession with tariffs, but global capital still has vast power and influence over the house rules of American capitalism. We’ll see if the Masters of the Universe can browbeat and bribe Trump and his toadies into a more stable trade policy, but I don’t think that’s an unfathomable outcome. (It’s certainly the one Constellation Brands is hoping for.) The bigger question looming over American beer’s export outlook can’t be answered by the introduction of a more coherent set of policies or more adults in the Oval Office, though.

American beer is, well, American. This has been a major selling point, given this country’s historic role in cultural production (movies, rock ‘n roll, etc.), and in craft beer’s case, its foundational role in creating the segment. But Trump’s economic stove-touching, in parallel with its geopolitical chauvinism and domestic authoritarianism, has tarnished America’s “brand” with foreign drinkers in ways we’re only beginning to understand. For example, a mid-March report from Morning Consult showed “a staggering upswing in anti-American sentiment,” which scans with empirical evidence borne forth in headlines about Canadians proudly canceling American vacations and Europeans talking up full-blown boycotts on stateside goods. “There are a few countries that have discontinued selling American beer all together,” Steve Grossman, Sierra Nevada Brewing Company’s longtime international brand ambassador (and older brother to co-founder and owner Ken) told the audience at Parr’s panel in Indianapolis last month. “There are a few other European markets that sentiment is not very positive about American products, so those sales are starting to diminish.”

McNulty describes a similar softening of demand from some of Crafted Exports’ biggest international markets. Beer is a deeply personal product, and craft beer in particular relies heavily on its provenance to justify its premium price points. Regulatory consistency and expedient access to foreign markets are important for American beer exporters, but only insofar as drinkers in those markets want to buy American beer. “What you really want is, ‘Oh, this is American, this is a high-quality product, it’s worth spending time to seek it out and pay a premium price for it,’” McNulty says, describing the ideal foreign customer’s perspective. “We’re now creating an environment where that’s no longer worth it.” Or worse still: one where foreign drinkers go out of their way to avoid American beer because of how the American president behaves.

🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now

Of all the acquisitions Anheuser-Busch InBev cocked up over the past decade and a half, SpikedSeltzer might be the biggest missed opportunity. The firm had the hard seltzer boom in its grasp, buying the segment-founding flavored malt beverage in 2016, the very same year White Claw hit shelves stateside. The macrobrewer majorly missed that moment, but the corporate hangover has stuck around. Earlier this month, a Connecticut trial judge ruled that ABI would have to face a lawsuit brought by SpikedSeltzer’s co-founder alleging that the launch of Bon & Viv! (now defunct) was part of a scheme to sandbag the deal’s earnout clause to the tune of $74 to $90 million. Barring a settlement, this thing could go to a jury trial, which… I mean… we should all be so lucky.

📈 Ups…

Sure, it required a price cut, but CANarchy Craft Collective brands grew 35 percent by volume and 17 percent by dollars in Circana’s off-premise scans for April… One-time on-premise powerhouse Hooters cleared an important hurdle on its march out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy… American ales gained a staggering 38 percent in poured kegs over Kentucky Derby/Cinco de Mayo weekend, per on-premise data from BeerBoard… Those clowns in Congress are giving the CHEERS Act another try this year…

📉 …and downs

The CANarchy boost notwithstanding, Monster’s bev-alc division declined almost 40 percent in net sales in Q1, holy smokes… Anheuser-Busch InBev pulled Cutwater from Republic National Distributing Co. in Calif. and 13 other states, but moved it to Southern Glazer’s… District Brewing Co. in Columbus, Ohio, paid what appears to be a whole decade’s worth of back taxes to the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau…

The article Trump’s Tariffs Are Hurting U.S. Beer Exporters — and America’s Beer ‘Brand’ appeared first on VinePair.