BeatBox Is Turning Anheuser-Busch into a Top ‘Wine’ Seller
A lot of people lost their minds in the ’80s. Compared to the decade’s cocaine-addled and clinically insane, August Busch III, the legendary head honcho at the macrobrewer that bore his name, stayed very much in control. But even the steely “Three Sticks” was not totally immune to the siren song of flash-in-the-pan fads, slick marketing, and consumer-goods yuppification then dominating the American zeitgeist. Case in point: Dewey Stevens.
Name not ringing a bell? Yeah, that tracks. Launched in 1986, Dewey Stevens was a line of wine coolers meant to be Anheuser-Busch’s answer to the success of California Coolers and E. & J. Gallo’s own copycat, Bartles & Jaymes. Even as Bud Light and Miller Lite did battle atop the beer sales charts during the bloodiest stretch of The Light Beer Wars, by the mid-’80s, mixing wine with sparkling water and fruit flavors and packaging it up in a premium bottle with a flashy label was becoming big business. As the New York Times reported in 1986:
Only five years ago, chilled, low-alcohol wine coolers entered the market. Today, coolers – blends of white wine, carbonated water and fruit juice, concentrate and sometimes free-floating pulp – are perhaps the hottest alcoholic beverage around: 1986 sales may approach $1 billion.
Having watched Coors Brewing Company lose a bunch of refrigerator space to California Coolers in the Golden State during the boycott on the Colorado firm, mighty A-B would have understood that wine coolers posed a small potential threat to its portfolio — and an opportunity to grab some cash. Enter Dewey Stevens, billed by the macrobrewer as “the nation’s first low-calorie wine cooler” that “was not a yuppie product” despite “advertising aimed at ‘mid- to upscale’ consumers.”
“A lot of people who drink wine coolers were surprised to find they had more than 200 calories,” an A-B vice-president told the United Press International wire service, touting the 135-calorie slurry of white wine and fruit juice. “So there’s definitely a market for a light cooler.”
There was not: A-B discontinued Dewey Stevens a year later in the face of anemic sales, a full two years before rival Miller Brewing Company threw in the towel in 1989 with its even-more-bizarrely named Matilda Bay. That year, an industry analyst predicted to the now-defunct trade magazine Modern Brewery Age that the entire segment would “disappear in five years.”
And it did. Sort of. Then it came back. Sort of. The high-octane descendants of the ’80s wine coolers have been dominating the shelves for much of this decade. It’s a lucrative redemption — or is it a revenge tour? — for the formerly ridiculed flavored alcohol beverage. And exactly 40 years after embarking on its Dewey Stevens disaster, the descendant of Anheuser-Busch is finally cashing the hell in.
In November 2025, news broke that Anheuser-Busch InBev was in talks to acquire BeatBox, the 11.1-percent alcohol-by-volume wine-based riot punch of Shark Tank fame that had been launched in 2011. The deal would ultimately get done in February 2026, and it was a doozy, with ABI paying $490 million for an 85-percent stake and a path to full ownership of the technicolor TetraPak’d brand. “I’m confident that their entrepreneurial spirit, their commitment to consistent innovation, and their ability to connect with their consumers will be a strong complement to our existing team and capabilities,” said Brendan Whitworth, the macrobrewer’s North American chief executive, in a press release at the time. “Anheuser-Busch has a proven playbook for building winning brands, and I look forward to embarking on the next phase of dynamic growth together.”
This was a funny thing for Whitworth to say. After all, when it comes to wine-based stuff, ABI has a proven playbook for building losing brands. Dewey Stevens was the company’s original sin in what was then an unserious pseudosegment, but it wasn’t the only effort. In 2018, the company acquired a chunk of Babe Wine, the affinity plonk brand launched by Web 2.0 social-media hustlers Josh Ostrovsky (The Fat Jewish) and Tanner and David Oliver Cohen (the brothers behind White Girl Problems), and scooped up the rest of it the next year.
It was the biggest investment in wine that ABI had ever made, reported Bloomberg at the time. And it was another miss. The macrobrewer discontinued Babe in 2023, having never really figured out how to fit a canned wine into its portfolio or the brand’s sh*tposting co-founders into its org chart. “As we take a more focused view on our portfolio assortment, we are prioritizing investments and execution behind key brands that will drive long-term growth and create value,” ABI wrote in a letter to distributors, as first reported by Beer Business Daily. Its investment in wine didn’t fit the bill.
What a difference a few years makes. Last week, Shanken Daily News published an analysis of sales figures from its Impact Databank platform showing that being under the ABI umbrella hasn’t dampened BeatBox’s rise. To the contrary:
Wine’s 2026 declines would be even steeper without the contribution of wine-based cocktails, which surged to 18 million cases last year, led by labels like Beatbox and Buzzballz Chillers. In fact, the growth of Beatbox has catapulted brand owner Anheuser-Busch into the sixth position among all wine marketers, with the company’s 2025 wine volume registering seven million cases.
Run that back. BeatBox accounted for around 40 percent of all the “wine-based cocktails” (is Cranberry Dreams a cocktail? What about Mystic Grape?) tracked by Impact Databank, and singlehandedly turned ABI into one of the category’s top suppliers just by virtue of its acquisition. In terms of dollar sales, it still trails BuzzBallz, its arch-enemy in other-than-standard wine effluents by a significant margin. But the spherical gas-station superstar has a significant head start on scaling with a deep-pocketed parent company, having been acquired by The Sazerac Company in 2024. (Both brands now have since diversified to offer wine-, malt-, and spirits-based versions of their respective products.) Remember, ABI only got its hands on BeatBox this past February: the knock-on benefits of alignment with the macrobrewer’s fearsome red network and sharp-elbowed sales force have yet to be fully realized.
Already, though, there are signs that ABI’s latest oeno-outing is going better than the previous ones. In the last 52 weeks through mid-April 2026, BeatBox was up around 30 percent in both dollars and volume year-over-year, according to scan data from multi-outlet grocery, mass retail, and convenience stores tracked by the market research firm Circana analyzed by Brewbound. By the same metrics, its three top-earning flavors all growing at rates above 40 percent in both dollars and volume year-to-date through mid-July. Cherry Limeade, the biggest BeatBox varietal in the Circana-tracked off-premise, has outsold Bud Light Lime-a-Rita in dollars, and will soon overtake Golden Road’s Mango Cart Mango Wheat Ale.
The brand is not quite delivering the 2026 performance that Cutwater is, but then again, nothing is delivering the 2026 performance that Cutwater is. (The canned cocktail juggernaut “grew revenue triple digits and was the number-one share gaining brand in the total spirits industry in the second quarter,” global CEO Michel Doukeris crowed on ABI’s second-quarter earnings call in late July.) But BeatBox will soon be a billion-dollar brand, and its runway is long — so long as ABI doesn’t fumble the bag Pak.
It is odd to see a company so synonymous with American brewing history hurtle headlong into the “total beverage” future. But just like the American drinking public is chasing flavor, ABI is, too. BeatBox sits at the confluence of three major trends that play to the strengths of the world’s biggest brewer. It’s a flavor-forward commodity that demands nothing from the consumer but money and a mouth; it’s a high-ABV, no-carbonation hitter that communicates bang-for-buck value iN tHiS eCoNoMy; and its natural habitat is the convenience store channel, where single-serve packages and high velocity are paramount and beer-selling salesforces tend to thrive. For wine-based ventures, maybe third time really is the charm for ABI.
Eat your heart out, Dewey Stevens.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
For years, the beer industry has neglected investment in the draft channel, a key point of differentiation in the off-premise. That’s despite the spectacular success of Guinness furnishing a real-time showcase of how such an investment can pay returns. If the trade keeps taking taplines for granted, though, another trade might take said taplines. To wit: in its quarterly call with shareholders, the CEO of the Campari Group announced that a pilot program to put Aperol Spritz on draft in the conglomerate’s home market of Italy had already captured 1.5 percent volume share of premium beer after just three months, calling the category “exactly the profit pool we want to penetrate further.” Gulp.
📈 Ups…
Guinness will be a central component of Diageo’s comeback plan, per CEO Dave Lewis’ shareholder presentation earlier this week… Indie red-networker Heimark Distributing acquired Alford Distributing, picking up 900,000 cases in Southern California… The Beer Institute calculated June’s tax-paids down 2.1 percent, an improvement over May’s 3.9 percent…
📉 …and downs
Ball Corporation’s chief exec continues to distance the firm from the struggling beer industry, calling it “an important category [but] not our only category” in its latest earnings call… Molson Coors’ losses grew in the second quarter, with both depletions and shipments down worse than Q1… Heineken, too, had a tough quarter in the U.S., reporting to analysts a “high-single-digit” decline in stateside volume….
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