The Beer Industry Needs a 2026 Turnaround. Here’s What’s at Stake
Well, we made it. 2026. Happy New Year to all, and unhappy Dry January to some. Will you be abstaining this month, reader? Your humble Hop Take editor will. (Bring on the hop water!) Best of luck to all the breweries trying to coax customers into their taprooms over the next four weeks. (Make hop water!) Of course, January — damp, dry, or otherwise — is but one month of 12. As has become tradition, I’m using my first column of the year to lay down my predictions for what 2026 has in store for the American brewing industry. From what I understand, I’m supposed to be putting money where my mouth is by conducting this sort of forward-looking hypothesizing on an unregulated gambling platform online prediction marketplace, but that’s a) wildly unethical, b) exhausting to consider, and c) deeply gross. Somebody should tell CNN.
In lieu of more “financialization,” let’s do some good old-fashioned editorialization. Here are the seven stories that I’m expecting to shape the beer business in 2026.
How Anheuser-Busch InBev’s middle-tier strategy shifts once its consent decree expires.
Way back in 2016, ABI acquired SABMiller in what was then the biggest corporate merger of all time — $107 billion. To get the deal past American antitrust officials in the Department of Justice, the former agreed to certain stipulations from the feds, chief among them that it would not “acquire a distributor if doing so would result in more than 10% of its annual volume being distributed through wholly-owned distributorships [WOD] in the U.S.” for 10 years. So much has changed in the trade in the intervening decade, including, apparently, ABI’s thinking on WODs. The surprise sale of its New York WOD to Southern Glazers Wine & Spirits in August suggested the macrobrewer might be angling to hand more/all of the in-house houses off to a like-minded leviathan. Either way, ABI is clearly once again feeling its oats barley, after almost three years of post-Bud Light fiasco flailing, enough to resume throwing its weight around in the middle tier. And that was before its consent decree expired — which it does midway through next year. What does that mean for the independent distributors in the “red network,” an increasing number of which last year faced not-so-veiled pressure from corporate to cash out? Ask me again in July.
Whether the National Beer Wholesalers Association gets behind hemp-derived THC.
Hemp-derived tetrahydracannabidol drinks were a major boon last year for the beer distributors that got hip to them, right up until Congress issued a de facto death sentence on the nascent segment in November 2025. At the time, over 50 wholesalers from across the country signed a letter to federal lawmakers urging them not to ban hemp-derived THC products, citing in part their experience handling alcohol. That 11th-hour bid wasn’t enough to prevent the prohibitionist legislation’s passage, especially not with powerful groups like the Consumer Brands Association and the Beer Institute lined up on the other side of the aisle. But when it comes to lobbying, there’s virtually no group more powerful than the NBWA — in the beverage-alcohol industry, or beyond it. Having secured its long-coveted tax cut last year, will the middle-tier’s mighty political machine follow the lead of some of its members and throw its muscle behind the THC drinks trade’s appeal for congressional clemency? Crossing an ad-hoc group of 50 distributors is one thing; crossing the NBWA in toto is quite another.
What the finalized Dietary Guidelines for Americans say about drinking — if they’re ever actually published.
Coming into 2025, the beer industry was abuzz with angst over the contradictory findings of two key public-health reports on alcohol. As you may recall, those studies — one from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the other from the Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Prevention of Underage Drinking — were going to inform an update to the DGAs, which the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is congressionally mandated to revise every five years. Heading out of 2025, the beer industry was not abuzz about the new revision of the DGAs, because they simply never got published. Pretty cool? An HHS spokesperson who was definitely not disgraced journalist Olivia Nuzzi moonlighting as personal flack to Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. again told Reuters in early December that the document should be published “soon after the first of the year.” What will they say about alcohol consumption, now that Roadkill Bob ratf*cked the ICCPUD study and telegraphed preference for a more vibes-based approach? Will anybody even care? Even if the captured HHS reversed years of precedent and told Americans to start drinking more, it’s hard to imagine it helping the industry. But hey, at least that would throw up another obstacle for the plaintiff’s bar!
Whether Modelo can regain its footing under the second Trump regime.
“What would it take to dim Modelo’s rising star?” I wondered in an April 2024 column. And the monkey’s paw curled. After a remarkable rise, Constellation Brands’ red-hot Mexican lager cooled in 2025, thanks in no small part to the White House. The Trump administration’s belligerent, grifty trade war has injected chaos into the global economy and in particular heightened tensions at the U.S.-Mexico border, across which Modelo must flow as a condition of a different consent decree involving ABI and the DOJ back in 2013. Meanwhile, its racist, deadly assault on immigrant communities has scared core Modelo customers away from the beer aisle, lest they be kidnapped by masked shock troops and deported to third-country concentration camps. Modelo still has plenty of runway nationwide, and the backing of the country’s largest beer distributor, Reyes Beverage Group, in many markets. It has a path forward. Can Constellation navigate it, or will Trump’s erratic economic gyrations throw the firm off course again in 2026? We’ll see.
Which national craft-brewery rollers-up decide to cut bait.
It was a tough year for craft brewers across the board. But man, Monster Brewing Company — the bev-alc arm of the energy-drink giant — really took a beating, with the network formerly known as CANarchy yielding very few wins and something like 18 percent net sales losses in its most recently reported quarter. Meanwhile, the segment’s other major scavenger, Tilray Brands, muddled through 2025 with brewery closures, SKU rationalization, and mixed sales results, not to mention the off-again, on-again reverse stock-split it was forced to execute in order to maintain its listing on the NASDAQ. I think Monster’s thesis in acquiring CANarchy (turnkey distribution) made more sense than Tilray’s in acquiring the cast-off craft breweries of ABI and Molson Coors (national scale for regional brands), but neither came to fruition in 2025. Both Monster and Tilray are publicly traded, but both are structured in such a way that their chief executives have a lot of leeway. Still, at some point, you stop throwing good money after bad. Will one of them throw in the bar towel in 2026? And how? And when?
How much more blood the Big Three lose (and to who).
Bud Light, Coors Light, and Miller Lite were all trailing the market in off-premise dollars and volume headed into the final month of the year, per multi-outlet grocery, mass retail, and convenience store scan data through November 30 tracked by market research firm Circana. It’s just one more indication that the soldiers of the Light Beer Wars are not made for this market. Those brands’ once immoveable market shares now seem to be moving everywhere: Michelob Ultra, Modelo, Coors Banquet, Garage Beer, Outlaw, the growing half of the craft segment… you name it. And that’s just within the beer category! Can MC, down its one-time marketing whiz Michelle St. Jacques, get its dual flagships back on track in 2026? Can ABI successfully reposition Bud Light into a supporting role where it can shine again? For my money, it’s “maybe” and “probably not.” But we’re not financializing, remember?
Whether craft brewing finally finds bedrock.
For the second straight year, closures will outpace openings in the struggling segment. While devastating to the owners and workers of those shuttered craft breweries, such contraction is probably fine, even necessary, for the overall industry, which still includes nearly 9,800 firms, per the Brewers Association’s count. Less fine are craft’s sales and volume declines, which appear likely to outpace the category’s for 2025. No serious observer expects a total turnaround in 2026. The question is whether the segment starts showing signs of emerging from its second shakeout — volume and dollar growth tracking with or beating the category, fewer closures year-over-year, maybe even some expansionary months on the NBWA’s Beer Purchasers’ Index — or sinking further into it. Stay tuned.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
The MAGA-ficiation of Generation X is fairly well-established at this point, but it turns out the nation’s latchkey kids-turned-reactionary boat-owners do have at least some redeeming qualities. To wit: new survey results from CGA by NIQ suggest Gen Xers are the least likely age group to abstain during Dry January. Just 38 percent of them said they would participate in the temporary teetotalling, putting them behind Boomers (44 percent), Millennials (49 percent), and Zoomers (50 percent). The usual caveats about expressed versus reveal preference still apply, of course, but brewers hunkering down for another tough start to the year may take heart that the kids who were “raised on hose water” grew up to become adults that are at least considering raising pints next month.
📈 Ups…
Just a fun little item outta Cincinnati, where Rheingeist’s brewery renovations uncovered a century-old mural celebrating the city’s beer-making history… The National Beer Wholesalers Association’s final Beer Purchasers’ Index of 2025 shows cider (!) losing the least amount of ground in the middle tier…
📉 …and downs
The state of Ohio will ban all hemp-derived THC products by the end of March, thanks to a bill signed last week by Gov. Mike DeWine… Rest in peace to Arthur J. Libertucci, the first administrator of the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, who passed away last week at 78…
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