With Bans Looming, Booming Hemp-Beverage Business Eyes an Alliance With Beer
The panel was called “Building the Category Together,” and it almost went off without a hitch last Thursday at the second annual Hemp Beverage Expo. A couple hundred makers of THC-infused drinks and their fellow travelers had gathered in a conference hall deep inside the Omni Atlanta Hotel to hear boyars from the beverage-alcohol industry hold forth on how the booming segment might find a legitimate place among beer, wine, and spirits, the traditional pillars of pourable vice. For 45 minutes, the conversation stayed more cooperative than contentious. Then, with moments to go before the session let out, Dawson Hobbs, executive vice-president of government affairs at the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America (WSWA), decided to blow up the cross-category kumbaya.
“I’ll just throw the real Molotov cocktail here,” said the lobbyist, responding to an open-ended question from the audience about which bev-alc rule panelists might rewrite, were it up to them. “If I could change one law, there would be a national ban on interstate direct-to-consumer shipping from retailers.”
People who’d been half-listening as they packed up their laptops and took final sips of coffee (hemp-infused or otherwise) took half a beat to clock Hobbs’s comment. Then, they began booing the shit out of him.
Such is the state of the hemp-derived tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) industry midway through 2025: bursting with opportunity and eager for a spot at the table in the American bev-alc business, but still plenty skeptical of the power brokers who lay down the place settings and dictate the etiquette. Over three days last week at the Hemp Beverage Alliance’s (HBA) expo in Atlanta, I spoke with dozens of producers, equipment and ingredient vendors, and retailers on and off an overstuffed exhibition floor. The air was thick with the exhilaration of an industry on the make. At the networking happy hour following the conference’s kick-off speeches Wednesday evening — delivered by a handful of hemp- and hemp-adjacent luminaries, including the commissioner of Georgia’s Department of Agriculture — the Omni’s ballroom was buzzing so loudly that I initially thought I’d misheard HBA associate Anna Edgren when she told me just a couple hundred people had attended the previous year’s event in Minneapolis. But it’s true: The trade group said that attendance at HBE 2025 came from 45 states and four countries and topped 1,200, a ~500 percent increase in a single year.
“We are a proper movement at this point,” crowed Ted Whitney, the chief beverage officer for Cheech and Chong and the chairman of the Hemp Beverage Alliance’s board of directors, basking in the exponentially larger crowd on the conference’s first day. “We are making this happen!”
This hemp-infused “we” includes all sorts. The craft (alcoholic) beverage industry was very well represented beneath this big green tent: Your humble Hop Take columnist spotted Scott Hunter of Urban Artifact (which makes an eponymous line of THC-infused drinks), Adam Ruhland of Wild State Cider (which makes Birdie), craft brewing consultant Julie Rhodes of Not Your Hobby Marketing (Kickfizz), as well as folks from Big Grove Brewery (Climbing Kites) and veterans of Boston Beer Company, Harpoon, Blue Point, and more. True believers like sexagenarian husband-and-wife pair Rhyno Stinchfield and Mary Bernuth, who launched Pharos Premium Infused Beverages in 2023 to bring the THC gospel to the silver-haired consumer, rubbed shoulders with savvy multi-door brick-and-mortar retailers like Joe Samone (The Georgia Hemp Company) and David Spang (Coastal Green/Nine Dot), and entrepreneurs like Thomas Cutler (Gentlemen Smugglers) and Angus Wittenberg (Wynk.) Edible Arrangements — yes, the Edible Arrangements — was on hand: it launched a THC e-commerce business earlier this year called Edibles.com. I don’t know, man, just go with it.
Winding among them all were links in the growing value chain of firms doing business with America’s hemp-beverage business. There was John Gross of Next Glass; there was Keegan Sellers of Iron Heart Canning; there was Ross Sloan of Dart Bank, a major lender to the sector. “Come on down to Asheville!” the banker told me upon learning I lived just a road trip away in Richmond, Va. The city’s craft brewing business may be struggling, but hemp beverages are going gangbusters there. And almost everywhere else, too.
Having covered the beer industry during the heady days of craft brewing’s second boom, I was struck at times by echoes of that segment’s evangelical language bouncing off the walls of the Omni Atlanta. The hemp-beverage “movement,” I learned, was being marched forward by “brothers and sisters” within striking distance of changing the way America drinks forever. “I believe it is the single biggest innovation I’ve ever seen in my [many] years in the consumer products space,” said Rick Craig, vice president and sixth-generation co-owner of North Carolina’s R.H. Barringer Distributing. “This message is one that we all need to carry forward.”
After all, preaching to the converted only goes so far. There are plenty of nonbelievers out there, and they’re plenty powerful.
If you’re reading this, you probably already know legislative idiosyncrasies that opened the door to the hemp-beverage boom last decade. Without getting too in the weeds (hemp joke!), the upshot is that when Congress finalized the 2018 farm bill, it left a gap wide enough to drive a multi-billion-dollar industry through. A lot of states adopted that language, oopsie and all, for their own agricultural omnibus bills, and, well, here we are.
Many politicians, including those responsible for that market-inciting legislation, do not like being here! And so: At least five states have banned hemp-derived THC, and more are moving in that direction. This congressionally induced clusterf*ck has created a bizarre political economy that doesn’t easily map onto the two-party system. For example, last month, just a week after California’s Democratic governor announced the state would pursue a permanent ban on the industry, Texas’s Republican governor vetoed a prohibitionary bill muscled to his desk by his own party. Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, those clowns in Congress are trying to thrash out a 2025 farm bill, and hemp’s future hangs in the balance.
No wonder a spot poll at HBE, taken in real time within the conference hall, found that attendees’ two biggest problems were “constantly changing regulations” and “threats of bans.” The entire damn industry exists in a series of loopholes that may be tightened or closed entirely any day now — or already have been. Last Thursday, though, the hemp-beverage business got some good news. I was sitting with HBA’s founder, Chris Lackner, when early reports hit the wire indicating that in a key subcommittee session, hemp industry foe Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Hell) had failed to kill the industry he inadvertently helped create in 2018. “Do we have the language?” Lackner asked Michelle Bodian, HBA’s general counsel. A short, agonizing time later, she got ahold of it, confirming what it sounded like: The subcommittee had effectively punted the question for another year. Relief washed over the floor. Federally, at least, hemp-derived beverages would live to fight another day. Or: a few hundred of ‘em.
It’s a shot in the arm for the lucrative segment, but not a mandate from heaven. There are still myriad battles to be fought in the country’s statehouses over retail placements, dosage caps, taxation — and of course, those aforementioned bans. To win those grueling fights, the hemp-beverage business will need allies that know the battlefield, the weaponry, the opposing armies. The booze business has waged this war for nine decades since Prohibition, winning more battles than it’s lost and carving itself out a favorable niche apart from other major vices (tobacco, pornography, etc.) in the process. Within it, nobody has more combat experience than distributors.
Return with me now to the blast zone of that DTC “Molotov cocktail” the WSWA’s Hobbs lobbed from the dais in Atlanta last Thursday morning. The text was booing; the subtext was that bev-alc wholesalers have different incentives than hemp-beverage producers; the super-text is that the latter’s path to legislative, regulatory, and cultural legitimacy will probably require some compromises with the former. And the trade-offs are considerable, as any craft brewer can attest. The WSWA doesn’t like interstate DTC shipping; the National Beer Wholesalers Association (NBWA), which earned the title of “the toughest lobby you’ve never heard of” in the ‘90s after a series of forceful wins on Capitol Hill, likes franchise laws. With Hobbs on stage were Sam DeWitt, state government affairs director for the Brewers Association, and Paul Pisano, senior vice president of industry affairs and general counsel at the NBWA. Before there was tension in the crowd, there was tension between those two over matters like franchise reform and self-distribution. Same as it ever was.
This is the messy power dynamic hemp-beverage firms would be walking into if they embrace the three-tier system. And remember, the three-tier system has to embrace them, too! There’s a philosophical divide in the middle tier over whether the upstart category is a boon for wholesalers because it’s putting cases on trucks at a time when traditional bev-alc sales are slow, or a curse because it threatens to usurp bev-alc’s grip on America’s fridge at a time when tastes are changing and public-health scrutiny is rising. To some extent, this divide is “generational,” Ed Johnston, second-generation president of North Carolina’s Tryon Distributing, told me. I suspect some middle-tier shotcallers might object on ideological grounds as well — reefer madness, and all that. Whatever it is, if the hemp beverage industry wants its bev-alc industry’s lobbying firepower in its fights ahead, leaders like the HBA’s Lackner will have to find a way to sell it to his trade-group counterparts and their members — not to mention his own.
“Maybe three-tier [compliance] is a hindrance in some people’s eyes, but with that comes a lot of benefits that you might not even realize,” he told the crowd that Thursday morning, preaching a detente with the bev-alc constituencies represented alongside him on stage. The hemp-beverage industry, he argued, “is in that whipsaw period of the one year after Prohibition,” and could benefit from the political savvy and institutional legitimacy that the bev-alc business has developed over nearly a century. “Let’s focus on [the policy positions] we have in common, and worry about the differences” down the road.
Like interstate direct-to-consumer shipping, for example.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
On the Fourth of July, we discussed the regrettable phenomenon of flag-humping “suds for chuds,” as well as its limitations. The upshot is that merely launching a right-wing pander-brand and getting a lot of social media buzz from hooting rubes does not ensure success in the complex, competitive contemporary American beer business. Performative hyperpartisanship only goes so far; you’ve got to have a plan, man. And, ideally, intellectual property that you own. Which, a lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois earlier this month alleges the parent company of Terry “Hulk Hogan” Bollea’s new-last-year Real American Beer brand does not. The plaintiff, licensing firm Carma HoldCo, had some sort of ambassador deal with Bollea, and claims that former employees swiped the concept for RAB and brought it to the 2024 Republican National Convention speaker and third-party litigation funding enthusiast, who subsequently “began neglecting his duties under his ambassador agreement and refused to communicate” with the firm. It’s asking for $10 million in damages.
📈 Ups…
Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. is launching its Euro-style PILS in 8-packs of 8.4-ounce cans, we love a mini-serving, don’t we folks?!… Year-over-year beer sales still slid for Fourth of July 2025, but not nearly as poorly as Memorial Day 2025, per new Circana data… Reyes Beverage Group picked up some wine volume from Gallo as it fled RNDC, so the country’s biggest beer distributor is now moving grape juice, too…Rest in peace to Jack McAuliffe, co-founder of the pioneering New Albion Brewery…
📉 …and downs
Canadian attendance to the Vermont Brewers Association’s annual festival this weekend is trending down, likely due to horror stories about Trump’s masked shock troops… The CEO of Guinness maker Diageo resigned this week after a tough two years for the conglomerate… The Y2K f*ccboi brand Von Dutch is now private-equity-owned, and — I guess — making hard soda…
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