Beer Used to Own Independence Day. Now It’s Lost the Cooler.
In 2016, Peyton Manning turned some heads by plugging the King of Beers from the field after emerging victorious in Super Bowl 50. “I’m gonna drink a lot of Budweiser tonight, Tracy,” the then-quarterback of the Denver Broncos told CBS reporter Tracy Wolfson. “I promise you that.” Anheuser-Busch InBev quickly followed up with the media to make sure everybody knew it hadn’t paid Manning — who owned stakes in a pair of distributorships aligned with the company — for the shoutout, perhaps to avoid the ire of the Federal Trade Commission, which has rules against undisclosed promotion. In the end, little came of the Bud nod. Even the most fastidious bureaucrat couldn’t really begrudge a football star his call for cold beer after winning the Super Bowl. It’s hard to imagine a more American rite. Right?
What a difference a decade makes. Heading into Independence Day 2026, there’s something wrong with the American rite. It’s not just the Super Bowl, or the football season, though the beer category’s weakening grasp on both the Big Game’s broadcast air and the sport’s audience has contributed to its softening sales and waning cultural relevance. And it’s not something a temporary flash of fútbol fever can fix, either. The hallowed intergenerational habit of fishing around in a Fourth of July cookout cooler for an ice-cold beer has been usurped by a new tradition entirely unfavorable to the trade: deliberating whether to drink beer on the Fourth of July at all.
Hops-and-barley homers may not be willing to countenance this reality. But sticking your head in the sand won’t change what the American drinking public is bringing to the beach bonfire tomorrow. Mixed among the light lager and India pale ale will be a kaleidoscopic range of flavored alcoholic beverages (FABs) across all three alcohol bases. On the country’s 250th birthday, the category’s moat — painstakingly dug over decades with patriotic branding, favorable market access, and self-mythologizing as “the drink of moderation” — is washing away on a tide of hard tea, Techni-Color riot punch, vodka “ades,” and who knows what else.
Thanks to such indignities as “the linear passage of time,” we don’t know for sure what will happen in the beer aisle this weekend. (Those data should hit in the following weeks.) Rest assured, the struggling category will see a sales spike over America’s semiquincentennial, if for no other reason than the sheer surge of thirsty people with a holiday weekend on their hands. The World Cup, with its massive influx of fans and regular reminders of what joy feels like, has also built up a good head of steam for the category heading into Independence Day — though it hasn’t benefited brewers equally.
“World Cup fever is spreading across America, and the much anticipated 250th is just around the corner now, which should surge many highlighted growth brands,” Scott Scanlon, executive vice-president of beverage-alcohol for the market research firm Circana, wrote in a recent research note, per Brewbound. Quite right. Despite the desolation on display at the Trump administration’s cartoonishly corrupt Great American State Fair, John and Jane Q. Guzzler will gather tomorrow in backyards, on boats, and at beaches across the country in large numbers. Beer will be well represented for the celebration.
But representation and domination are two different things, and the beer industry would do well to remember it.
To wit: In Circana’s off-premise scan data for the week ending June 21, only beer lost ground in volume and dollar sales. Even wine — even wine! — managed to eke out dollar growth for the penultimate week before the holiday, and it shed less volume than beer (2 percent compared to 2.6 percent). There’s a lot of noise in these numbers, and a week is just a snapshot. But given the utterly grim outlook for the nation’s grape-juice jockeys, that category’s much higher median price point, and the fact that neither the special nor seasonal “occasions” driving the total-alcohol sales swell play to wine’s strengths, beer shouldn’t be bringing up the rear at all. Ever. Meanwhile, consumer-sentiment firm Numerator just this week revealed that 43 percent of people plan to buy spirits for the Fourth of July — up 7 percent year over year. Beer remained in the lead with 70 percent, down 2 percent in the same period. The tide is turning slowly, but it is turning.
Brewers’ complete cooler control disappeared like Hemingway characters went bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly. Some of the factors are structural, like the generational shift away from macrobrewers’ light adjunct lagers that still — decades on from the end of the Light Beer Wars — represent the category’s biggest style. In keeping with the beach theme, the trade likes to describe this dynamic as a “leaky bucket,” and some of the customer runoff wound up beyond beer entirely. Beer’s longtime hangout hegemony has also been lobbied into something closer to parity by the liquor industry, which has slowly and methodically chiseled away at brewers’ long-held advantages on retail placement and taxation. Don’t miss the consolidation in the middle tier, either: Fewer routes to market puts the nation’s ~9,000 brewers at a disadvantage, even if — especially if — the biggest firms prefer it. Those companies’ forfeiture of the culture-making mantle that beer marketers carried for decades has not helped.
If everything is politics, part of this shift is, too. “The brewers were always very careful to treat the use of beer in the context of ‘it might be alcohol, but by God we’re on the side of right and might here,’” historian Maureen Ogle once told me, describing the industry’s heavy and longstanding investments in rally-round-the-flag marketing, respect-the-troops charities, and the like. But look around you, man. Just 37 percent of respondents to a recent NPR/PBS News/Marist poll said they were “very proud” of being American. The obscenely expensive United States military has been embroiled in a self-inflicted boondoggle in Iran; stateside, military-style squads have turned cities into war zones. Big brewers either say nothing, or sponsor the spectacle. The faux-populist appeals to the heartland and hatchet-burying among political foes, once squarely the industry’s wheelhouse, just don’t work in this ugly era.
The biggest and most concerning contributor to beer’s loss of singular status at the soiree is that there’s just so much good stuff to drink out there these days. Overwhelmed by the second craft-brewing boom’s explosion of choices and emphasis on artisanship, rank-and-file drinkers began drifting back to more straightforward flavors from more commodity brands. We know this helped usher in the summer of White Claw in 2019, and helped High Noon take vodka-spiked seltzers mainstream a couple years later. The pandemic helped exacerbate the shift by disrupting the cultural imprinting of college keg parties — another American rite gone wrong — for what would otherwise have been Gen Z’s precious and formative drinking years. The mini moral panic around borgs was always bullsh*t, but it presaged trouble for brewers of beer-flavored beer. When 21-ish drinkers would rather tote around a slurry of swill in a plastic jug than a 6-pack of beer, it’s an indication that beer doesn’t have what they want. Just one of many.
Of course, it’s an odd Independence Day that heavily features black-out rage gallons. Lately, it’s the spirits-based canned cocktails that have been taking some of beer’s space in the nation’s Yetis. That the explosion of this cohort — your Cutwaters, your Monacos, your Finnish Long Drinks — has unfolded in parallel with the middle-tier M&A mania is no coincidence. It’s “total beverage,” bay-bee! Larded with LinkedIn-brained execs and MBAs who came up through the broader consumer-packaged-goods business, rather than the trade itself, larger brewers’ allegiance to beer as such has taken a backseat to delivering those sweet, sweet shareholder returns every quarter. The result? Most of the country’s macrobrewers have jumped into spirits-based RTDs to grab the growth, even as the category’s key differentiator, draft, withers on the vine bine. Beyond the scramble of inter- and intra-industry incentives, the trend has raised a more philosophical question for the category. Why would a drinker stay loyal to beer when America’s biggest brewers haven’t?
“For 20 years, spirits companies have eaten our lunch,” Jim Koch, the co-founder, chairman, and then-and-now chief executive of Boston Beer Company, has said. “Let’s not let them eat our dinner.”
Mission: not accomplished. They’re eating the barbecue now, too. And odds are good that tomorrow, they’ll be washing it down with a Sun Cruiser or a Cutwater rather than a Sam Adams or a Bud Light. Beer may have bought its way to Super Bowl supremacy and jingo-fied itself into the July 4 favorite in decades past. But the category never had a right to these rites. At some point, it’s going to have to fight for them.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
With the Trump administration’s de facto ban on hemp-derived tetrahydrocannabinol set to take effect this November, you’d have to be a fool to choose now to launch a new brand in the segm— BAH GAWD, is that Four Loko’s music?! Sort of: Phusion Projects, the parent company of the boundary-stepping flavored malt liquor, licensed the marque to a third-party firm, Chuck It LLC, to market a line of non-alcoholic THC drinks under the “Nine Loko” banner. Or, to put it another way: Chuck It said f*ck it.
📈 Ups…
Constellation Brands told analysts this week it’s tracking “a modest reacceleration” in beer sales thanks to the World Cup… Plant-based mylk brand Elmhurst 1925 is launching a hard “spritz” sub-brand as the age of hard milk beckons… BeerAdvocate founder Todd Alström has reacquired the venerable forum from Next Glass, to which he had sold it in 2020… Anchor Union SF workers and supporters turned out earlier this week to call on the brewery’s billionaire owner to reinstate its erstwhile labor…
📉 …and downs
Roughly two years after its Albertsons mega-merger went down in flames, Kroger announced plans to buy Appalachian-ish grocer Giant Eagle for $1.65 billion… Heineken’s new chief executive isn’t even a beer guy… After shuttering its Denver flagship, one-time national brewpub chain Rock Bottom Brewery nears its namesake… Beer Marketer’s Insights reported average beer consumption down 6 percent in 2025, which is somehow still better than the five- and 10-year averages… The New School is reporting Untitled Art will cease operations…
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