THC Beverages’ Biggest Enemies Are Going for the Kill
There are some general rules of thumb to follow when contemplating whether to sign an open letter. It’s always a good idea to get a sense of who the other cosigners are, at least at the outset, lest you put yourself on a list of self-important doofuses, intellectual charlatans, and/or former associates of Jeffrey Epstein. Not ideal! More importantly, you ought to closely read the thing, and make sure you fully agree with every line, because that’s what everybody else is going to do. Minnesota’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, learned that the hard way last week.
On Oct. 24, top law-enforcement officers from 39 states sent a letter to members of Congress, asserting that “the entire synthetic [tetrahydrocannabinol] industry rests on a foundation of illicit conduct,” and calling on the legislative body to “to shut down this industry before it metastasizes further into an even greater threat to public.” Strong stuff there, and not much room for misinterpretation. But shortly after the letter, organized under the banner of the National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG), began to receive media attention, Ellison published a newsletter insisting that he only wants what’s best for the Land of 10,000 Lakes’ nation-leading market for hemp-derived tetrahydrocannabinol.
“I want this industry to continue to grow and flourish. I also want products sold in Minnesota to be safe and follow our laws,” he wrote. “I believe that closing the loophole in the 2018 Farm Bill will accomplish both of these goals.”
The epistolary confusion is emblematic of the complex power dynamics and regulatory purgatory in which the THC industry presently finds itself. When the top lawyer in the top market has to scramble out a Substack post trying to clarify a stance he’d just signed onto, you know things are getting messy. Not to mention contentious. Battle lines have been drawn over hemp-derived THC for quite some time. But the NAAG letter is just one of several serious salvoes lobbed at the trade over the past couple weeks by foes both old and new. Naturally, THC interests have launched countermeasures apace. The fight for the future of this nascent industry was always going to play out in the halls of the Capitol, and it was always going to be ugly. But it was never supposed to dictate the terms of the federal government shutdown. Now, somehow, it might.
As Hop Take has previously reported, 2025 is shaping up to be a pivotal year for the THC drinks space. These products, infused with either Delta-8 or Delta-9 THC and often sold in “normal” retail channels alongside beer and other ready-to-drink alcoholic beverages, have become tremendously popular and lucrative in the seven years since Congress, in its infinite wisdom, codified loose language on industrial hemp usage into the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018. To many craft brewers, beer distributors, and retailers looking to make up for lost sales volume as that segment shrinks, THC drinks have been a lifeline, if not a full-blown boon. “Beer is not going to die, but the market is changing, and the consumers are changing,” Bob Galligan, the director of government & industry relations for the Minnesota Craft Brewers Guild, told me in an interview in September, characterizing the calculus his brewery-owning members face as they contemplate whether to expand their businesses into THC drinks. (He estimated some 60 to 70 percent have already done so.) “To me, to fight against that is at your own peril,” he said.
The peril cuts both ways. The congressional oversight (legislative branch joke!) that created an opening for THC drinks — and infused gummies, candy, foodstuffs, etc., which I’ll come back to in a moment — has left it mostly to the states to figure out what to do about this market. Some, like Minnesota, have hashed (cannabidiol joke!) out fairly robust regulatory frameworks in a fairly short amount of time, all with an eye toward legitimizing the trade and benefiting from the jobs and tax revenue it offers. Others, most notably California, have banned it entirely.
And Congress has yet to make its next move. At the 2025 Hemp Beverage Expo this past July, the two biggest problems were “constantly changing regulations” and “threats of bans,” according to a real-time survey of the ~1,200 attendees on hand. I was walking the exhibition floor in Atlanta when word came in that a key Senate committee had effectively punted on prohibitionary farm-bill language pushed by Kentucky’s senior senator, Mitch McConnell. The relief was palpable. But the forces arrayed against the THC industry are well connected, well funded, and have a lot to lose. Since then, there have been other flashpoints. Most dramatically, in early August, Kentucky’s junior senator, Rand Paul, outflanked his Bluegrass State colleague with a parliamentary trick to again strip potential ban language out of the text of the upper chamber’s agricultural package. But even that wouldn’t be the final battle.
With the government shut down, there’s tremendous and mounting pressure on Congress to reopen it. THC’s foes on Capitol Hill appear to be trying to seize the moment to attach prohibitionary language into these spending negotiations, hoping that demands to end the shutdown — from their constituents, and/or the White House — will gather too much momentum for hemp’s congressional proponents to hold out against. Paul, for his part, has told industry players that he intends to prolong the shutdown as long as possible to prevent such an outcome.
“I’ve also told them—and I think they believe me—that we can do this the easy way or the hard way. The easy way is I give my consent, and the hard way is I don’t,” he told the Hemp Industry & Farmers of America at a meeting last week, per Marijuana Moment’s Kyle Jaeger.
The senator urged the trade to join the fray, and it has. The Hemp Beverage Alliance, for example, is currently encouraging its members on social media to “take action” and “speak up for regulation, not prohibition” when contacting their federal lawmakers. The U.S. Hemp Roundtable has spun up a letter-writing campaign under the subject line “Stop Hemp-Killing Language in Congress.” Individual brands are trying their hands at enlisting customers in the pushback effort — “brotesting,” to borrow an old phrase from Uber’s anti-regulatory playbook. Most significantly, on Wednesday, 54 beer wholesalers from across the country sent their own letter to congressional leaders, asking them “to oppose efforts to close the so-called ‘hemp loophole’ through any spending package or Farm Bill.” The grassroots effort came together in a matter of days, Justin Ashby, the chief administrative officer of the Southeast’s Southern Crown Partners tells Hop Take. “I think it’s completely unbelievable as well that this particular issue could perhaps affect the opening of the government,” he says. “We decided to craft a letter and lend our voice to the cause to say, ‘Hey, we know a thing or two about regulating intoxicating beverages.’”
(The National Beer Wholesalers Association has indicated openness to the THC drinks business, but did not sign its members’ letter this week. Its counterpart, the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America, previously sent its own letter to Congress in support of the industry. Letters are flying!)
The hemp-beverage industry and allies like Ashby in beer’s middle tier, aren’t just fighting legislative foes like McConnell and Maryland’s Andy Harris, the chief adversary in the House of Representatives, or public-safety authorities like the NAAG signatories. On its meteoric, underregulated ascent to its present multi-billion-dollar bonanza, it has made powerful enemies in the traditional beverage-alcohol industry, portions of the middle tier, and the cannabis business, too. To varying degrees, these cohorts consider THC to be an interloping substance unfairly undercutting long-established markets with a more lucrative high. Like the AGs, macrobrewers, liquor trade groups, and marijuana multi-state operators (MSOs) bristle at the fly-by-night sh*theadedness of bad actors in the space — e.g, THC-infused edibles packaged like popular candies — and the relatively free hand with which THC drinks brands are shipping their products directly to consumers. Whether this is out of genuine concern for consumers or just run-of-the-mill incumbency is probably a little Column A and a little lot Column B. Either way, they have a lot to lose, and they’re acting like it.
Just yesterday, news broke that the Consumer Brands Association, which represents major consumer-packaged-goods conglomerates like Coca-Cola, Nestle, and Kraft Heinz, sent a letter to Congress back in September demanding that it “close this loophole and protect consumers.” (Guess they’re not as delighted by all the THC-infused knock-offs of their household-name brands as the average deadbeat. Go figure!) In October, a subsidiary of the cannabis conglomerate Jushi Holdings brought an $80 million suit in Virginia court against DoorDash, a Sheehan Family distributor, and Ohio craft brewer and THC drinks producer Urban Artifact alleging they’d engaged in a “business conspiracy” of “unlicensed cannabis sales.” Not only is the marijuana MSO asking the Circuit Court of Arlington County to rule against the legality of the product, but by bringing it against defendants across the supply chain, it’s also targeting the trade as such. It’s a major shot across the bow from a deep-pocketed plaintiff, and you can be sure both industries will be watching the litigation closely.
Meanwhile, just across the Potomac River and just a few days later, the Beer Institute (BI), the American Distilled Spirits Alliance (ADSA), the Distilled Spirits Council of the U.S. (DISCUS), Wine America, and the Wine Institute sent — what else — a letter asking Congress to take hemp-derived THC products off the market until “a robust federal regulatory framework is established.” These groups have all signaled wariness for THC in the past, but never before have they thrown in together for such an aggressive attack. Perhaps the opportunity provided by the government shutdown was too good to pass up.
Who emerges victorious from this legislative, litigative battlefield remains to be seen. But Christopher Lackner, the president and chief executive officer of the Hemp Beverage Alliance, is taking the long view. “We’re going to have whipsaw legislation going one direction and the other direction,” he says. “We’re going to have these moments that, you know, try men’s souls. But in the end [THC drinks] are going to be embraced just like every other adult beverage category has.”
No general tells his troops the war is unwinnable, let alone a journalist. So grain of salt, and all that. But Lackner may be right on, thanks to another general rule of thumb, this one hard-learned by last century’s federal lawmakers: You can’t ban demand.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
Earlier this week, New Belgium Brewery unveiled a slate of new product releases for 2026. Along with two new Voodoo Ranger extensions further into India pale ale — the 6.5 percent ABV Sweet Ride and the 11 percent G-Force — is the sub-brand’s first foray into spirits-based canned cocktails. That would be Vandal, a slim-canned, vodka’d-up, skeletally branded line that clocks in at 10 percent ABV and will start hitting shelves in four states next year. Yes, yes: breweries of a certain size, and so forth. But man, when even wildly successful, macro-backed beer brands are moving into liquor ready-to-drink offerings, what hope is there for craft breweries that just want to make beer?
📈 Ups…
Heineken re-upped its deal with Formula-1 to promote its 0.0 brand, imagine that… Sure, it was only 1 percent per Beer Institute math, but technically tax-paids improved year-over-year in September 2025 — the first growth of the year… Congrats to all these universities for selling an insane amount of beer this college-football season… The Brewers Association has a new federal affairs guy, just in time for the fun buddy…
📉 …and downs
Constellation Brands laid off workers at its Rochester headquarters, but it won’t say how many… The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation is backing a push to decertify the Teamsters’ hard-fought union at Breakthru Beverage Group in Florida… Dollar sales of “innovation” products (i.e., new ones) are down over 20 percent year-to-date, per Bump Williams Consulting… Oh cool, Eli Lilly is projecting Food and Drug Administration approval for an oral obesity drug in March 2026…
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