The 7 Stories That Defined the Beer Industry in 2025

Here we are again, reader. The last column of 2025. I hope you had a lovely holiday, full of good cheer and other things of that nature. But now it’s back to business: one final recap on the biggest stories driving the beer industry forward or setting it back from the past 12 months. Your humble Hop Take columnist looks forward to this tradition every year, even if the headlines were hardly worth celebrating as such. After all, if we don’t reflect on what just happened last year, how the hell can we foresee what’s about to happen next year? Impossible. That column, a forecast of the key stories to watch in 2026, drops one week from today. But let’s not ring in the new year prematurely. Here, now, and without further ado are the stories that defined the American brewing industry in 2025.

Trump take beer sales.

Whether it was the supply-chain shitshow, the import/export uncertainty, or the downward pressure on demand that came from terrorizing immigrant communities with state violence to the point that they shifted their buying patterns in the on- and off-premises, the second Trump administration’s explicit trade war and implicit civil war created an enormous amount of trouble for the industry this year. It’s a real headwind that high-level brewing executives have categorically refused to face head on. The chaos of the 47th president’s destructive, corrupt “Liberation Day” tariffs subsided a bit thanks to an ongoing court challenge, but absent the flurry, the grinding realities remain. Aluminum and steel are more expensive, the American “brand” is badly damaged abroad, and consumer sentiment is in the gutter here at home. Oh, and as the year came to a close, Trump and his cronies have started telegraphing plans to try to blow up the United States Mexico and Canada Agreement (USMCA) — a major stabilizing force for intra-continental commerce upon which Modelo Especial’s fate rests.

Retreat of the macrobrewers.

Last year started with the news that Molson Coors was shutting down Leinenkugel’s historic Chippewa Falls, Wis., brewery, where the firm — acquired by Miller Brewing Co. in 1988 — had produced beer without interruption for almost 160 years. It set the tone for physical and financial retrenchments from the industry’s Big Five all year. Heineken lost two key executives from its embattled U.S. operation, one to retirement in September, and the other to Lipton Teas and Infusions the following month. (Not to put too fine a point on it, but when a brewer as vaunted as Big Green starts losing talent to the leaf-steeping segment, something has gone seriously wrong.) Constellation Brands was forced to revise down its fiscal guidance not once but twice, dogged by difficulties its head honchos kept insisting were “cyclical,” not “structural.” Anheuser-Busch InBev, having already passed off half its craft portfolio to Tilray Brands in 2024, saw New Belgium Brewery catch up to its remaining craft brands on volume by the middle of this year, then rounded out 2025 by announcing plans to cut bait on three of its 12 megaplants across the country earlier this month. Pabst, after cueing up a promising new light-lager launch in the spring, promptly laid off the new brand’s lead and let it wither on the vine bine. Sources told me that the total layoffs the No. 5 firm conducted this past year tally up to about half of the workforce with which it started 2025. MC itself would bookend the Leinenkugel’s closure with an announcement from the firm’s new chief executive in October that it’d eliminate 400 corporate jobs and exit its one-time marketing whiz.

Consolidation of the middle tier — voluntary or otherwise.

Virtually every beer distributor in the country stands to benefit from the cuts on pass-through entities and inheritance that Republicans baked into the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill this past summer. That’s why the National Beer Wholesalers Association worked so hard to secure them. But all distributors are not created equal, and 2025 saw some serious movement along the invisible fault line that separates the haves from the have-nots. Amid the standard mergers and acquisitions (Stone and Classic to J.R. Hand, Ritchie & Paige to Fedway, Scout to Hensley…), and the steps Reyes Beverage Group took toward total beverage via the wine and spirits brands it plucked from the wreckage of Republic National Distributing Company’s (RNDC) collapse in California, the jockeying within ABI’s legendary “red network” stands out. In May, the company pulled its lucrative liquor-based RTD brands from RNDC and independent distributors in California to hand them to Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits (SGWS), then sold its wholly owned distributorship in New York to that megawholesaler in August. This, as ABI was laying the (beech)wood to independent Bud distributors over alleged out-of-code sales of Busch Light Peach, among other potentially existential infractions. Taken together, the moves suggested ABI’s C-suite was keen to exert more control over fewer, bigger wholesalers — a trend that will likely continue reshaping the middle tier in 2026. But I’ll leave that for next week’s column.

Ecstasies and agonies rocked the hemp-beverage industry.

After steadily building momentum in key states over the past half-decade, non-alcoholic, tetrahydrocannabinol-infused drinks really burst into the mainstream in 2025, with many of them arriving there on beer distributors’ trucks from diversifying craft brewers. There was never any official detente between the craft beer and THC drinks industries, but there is natural overlap among consumer and producer alike, and last year, the upstarts made some real inroads with portions of the beverage-alcohol establishment, signaling a willingness to play by the byzantine rules of the three-tier system. That’s not to say everything was smooth sailing for hemp-derived THC: The product faced bans in California and Texas, escaping the latter only thanks to the Lone Star State’s counterintuitive politics on the matter. Of course, the state action was small beer compared to the de facto ban that Congress dropped on the nascent, multi-billion-dollar trade after a whirlwind November weekend of politicking to reopen the federal government. About 50 beer distributors lobbied to save the hemp-derived THC trade, as did several state craft-brewing guilds, but the Beer Institute and the Brewers Association both pushed for a congressional kibosh, and that’s what prevailed. The industry has a little less than a year before the jig is up, and it’s redoubling its bid for legitimacy with support from longstanding allies (Minnesota Senator Tina Smith) and potential new ones (see Hop-ocolypse Now, below). We’ll see what happens in 2026, but the law as signed in 2025 is potentially devastating to the craft brewers and distributors that have come to depend on hemp-derived THC for revenue in a tough market for beer.

The twilight of the first-wave craft brewers.

Of the 50 columns I published here at Hop Take in 2025, the one that proved out the fastest was this one from late June, “Craft Brewing’s Hotbeds Have a Warning for the Rest of the Industry.” Pegged to the craft-on-craft roll-ups in New England, Colorado, and North Carolina, I made the case that the geographies that once played host to the segment’s break-out energy were the ones getting hit hardest by the so-called “second shakeout” in the industry. Over the remainder of 2025, that call turned out to be truer than even I would have guessed, with once-venerable craft outfits like TRVE (Colorado and North Carolina), Upright Brewing (Oregon), and, of course, Rogue Ales & Spirits (also Oregon) among those going cold in early hotbeds over the back half of the year. Don’t forget Boston Beer Co., where co-founder Jim Koch is trying to steer the Samuel Adams parent firm to calmer waters after years of Truly turmoil; or the ongoing lack of anything going on at Anchor Brewing Co., where billionaire owner Hamdi Ulukaya kept things very quiet after acquiring the iconic steam brewery from liquidation in May 2024. (Though tipsters tell me they’ve lately started seeing a few signs of life at the storied San Francisco firm; if you know more, get in touch: dave@dinfontay.com or dinfontay.11 on Signal.)

The march of the spirits-based ready-to-drinks.

If 2023 was the year the malt-/cane-based hard seltzer segment became a one-brand race after Truly squandered its shot at catching White Claw, and 2024 was the year Twisted Tea reached a zenith (Twea-nith?) two decades in the making, then 2025 was the year it became impossible to ignore that drinkers really want liquored-up versions of those drinks. On the vodka-seltzer tip, it’s High Noon and NÜTRL; for hard tea, it’s Surfside, Sun Cruiser, and maybe Skimmers, too. Spirits-based RTDs aren’t categorically growing, and even Gallo’s mighty High Noon had trouble staying in the black last year. But with few exceptions, fermented-base seltzers and teas are having more trouble. Meanwhile, canned cocktail brands — Cutwater chief among them — went gangbusters in the off-premise and took beer share in the on-premise, too.

The suds-for-chuds market hit a ceiling.

With the untimely-ish passing of Terry “Hulk Hogan” Bollea, his Real American Beer (RAB) brand reported a surge in sales. But a founder’s death does not a sustainable revenue strategy make. There may still be some thirst for right-wing pander brands like Ultra Right 100% Woke-Free American Beer, American Rebel, MAGA Beer, Armed Forces Brewing Co. (AFBC), et al. But brewing is a scale game, and it’s not clear that there’s enough thirst to sustain companies on grievance alone. In March, AFBC abruptly shut down its Norfolk brewery, leaving employees and vendors in the lurch and claiming victimization by a “local woke mob”; financial filings and available reporting suggest lack of demand and basic mismanagement were at least partly to blame. Happy Dad, the shockingly successful hard seltzer brand from YouTube edgelords The Nelk Boys, was the exception that proved the rule: After making itself nearly ubiquitous in the MAGA-verse in 2024, the brand’s non-influencer CEO, Sam Shahidi, seems to have been quietly trying to distance it from both the deeply unpopular U.S. president and its genocidaire-glazing founding f*ckboys in 2025.

🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now

In the congressional blitz to reopen the federal government last month, President Donald Trump sent a message through the press to his majority-holding toadies in both chambers, backing their push to take hemp-derived THC products off the market. “POTUS ‘supports the current language in the bill on hemp’ per WH official,” reported NBC News correspondent Julie Tsirkin on Nov. 10. Just days later, he would sign said language into law, starting the 12-month countdown to enforcement of the de facto ban. But just last week, Trump issued an executive order — his 224th this year alone! — on cannabis that included instructions to various executive-branch agencies to work with lawmakers to effectively undo the prohibition. Yes, the one he had just signed into law. Masterful gambit, sir! Still, the EO could prove to be a “life raft to the hemp industry,” as Hemp Beverage Alliance general counsel Michelle Bodian put it on social media. So… Merry Christmas to all the THC seltzer slingers out there, I guess.

📈 Ups…

After a very uncertain year, Alamo Beer Co. was finally acquired by SKJ Capital this past week… The Clean Alcohol Collective, a coalition oriented around ingredient transparency, was co-launched this week by California craft firm Father’s Brewing… The USDA’s just-dropped annual hops report suggests a ~20-million-pound surplus remains, but with net acreage declines in 2025, supply seems to be stabilizing a smidge… Nominations for the Steel Keg Association’s annual awards are open now…

📉 …and downs

The last batch of CGA data for 2025 shows beer’s share of on-premise dollars for the year down 1 percent, more than any other category… Hemp farmers in Washington State are deliberating whether to switch back over to hops, which, y’know, not ideal for the supply issue…

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