Boston Beer Co. Still Can’t Shake Its ‘Beyond Beer’ Curse
To the extent that there are any truly legendary press events in the craft-brewing business, Boston Beer Company’s brunch at the Great American Beer Festival is probably one of them. The fact that I even know about it is a testament to its grandeur: After all, in a decade and a half on the beat, I’ve never actually been to the Brewers Association’s annual consumer-facing expo in Denver. But even so, I’ve heard tell of the media brunch.
True to both our forms, Boston Beer Co. (BBC) held its yearly confab in Colorado last month, and I was not present. Dispatches from the scene were light on the typically lavish spread, but heavy on the sense of nostalgia, which was reportedly being laid on pretty thick by BBC co-founder/chairman/prodigal chief executive officer Jim Koch and Dogfish Head Brewery’s co-founder Sam Calagione. (The former acquired the latter in 2019 for $300 million.) “The whole event was a blast from the past, and … brought it back to 2011 with the re-introduction of Savor Flowers, previously a one-off pre-merger production between the companies,” wrote Beer Marketer’s Insights. “ABI [Anheuser-Busch InBev] was trying to put both of us out of business,” Koch told 2025 brunchers, according to an item from Brewbound’s Jess Infante and Zoe Licata. “And, well, guess what? We’re still here.”
No mean feat, that. But ABI has long since stopped being the biggest threat to BBC’s business. These days, that call is coming from inside the house.
Last week, the country’s second-largest BA-defined craft brewer reported its third-quarter earnings. If it were a brunch, you might have sent it back to the kitchen with a stern word for the chef. BBC’s shareholders, with no such recourse, could only steel their stomachs for a whole bunch of bad news. The firm posted a 13.7-percent decline in shipments to its distributors year-over-year for the three-month period ending Sept. 27, with a 3 percent slide in retail depletions, and an overall revenue shortfall of 11.2 percent. “As expected, during the third quarter our shipments rebalanced relative to our depletions, which negatively impacted third- quarter shipments and revenue,” chief financial officer Diego Reynoso said in a press release accompanying the report, adding that BBC had improved its gross margin and would raise its fiscal guidance accordingly. The company’s stock price popped a bit on the silver lining, but quickly gave those gains back. At publication, $SAM was down around 30 percent in the trailing 12-month frame.
These are bad days for the beer industry, and BBC isn’t the only big, publicly traded brewer taking a beating. Heineken’s United States arm reported a bloody third quarter, with double-digit percentage sales dips in both volume and dollars. Yesterday, ABI reported slight declines in shipments and depletions that beat the (slumping) category, a pyrrhic victory that the firm tried to gussy up with hot-shit triple-digit percentage gains for Cutwater canned cocktails. Molson Coors (MC) reports next week; the red ink all over its scan data and the recently announced plan to eliminate 9 percent of its corporate headcount portend trouble. Constellation Brands’ latest earnings report, issued at the beginning of October, actually beat Wall Street’s projections. But it’d already lowered its fiscal guidance twice by then, and its beer division was down 12 percent in operating income and 7.5 percent in shipments, so it’s not like things are de facto good at Big Gold, either.
Even among its struggling peers, though, BBC’s present malaise stands out. Samuel Adams and Dogfish Head notwithstanding, its portfolio is oriented toward the parts of the beverage-alcohol business where firms are still finding growth, flavored malt beverages, chief among them. That’s a credit to BBC’s innovation pipeline — manic though it may sometimes be. But even though it moved early on the “fourth category,” and found some meteoric success there, it has struggled to corner that portion of the national plan-o-gram. Its problems flow from there. As Koch told analysts, “Our issues are Twisted Tea and Truly, to be honest.”
Truly’s many ills have been well documented in this column and elsewhere. White Claw’s perennial second fiddle keeps losing ground: As Brewbound’s Infante recently pointed out, it now trails the segment leader by more than $1 billion in Circana-tracked off-premise retailers. Don’t call it a comeback, because it ain’t happening.
But Twisted Tea? Until recently, the only issue BBC had with its largest, most important brand was brewing the stuff as fast as possible. Not no mo’: It’s been losing ground for much of the year. The brand was nearly flat in Q1, leading one analyst on the line with Koch and company in late April to express “surpris[e] at how fast and steep the drop has been” in its astonishing growth curve. Imagine their horror, then, that the bright-yellow brand family is down 6.9 percent in volume and 5 percent in dollars year-to-date through Oct. 5, per scan data from multi-outlet grocery, mass retail, and convenience stores tracked by market research firm Circana.
“Industry headwinds are impacting our larger brands, particularly Twisted Tea, which are likely to persist for some time,” Koch told analysts, adding that the firm was also “surprised” by the segment-leading hard tea’s poor performance after a strong start to the year. But is it actually that surprising? Just as spirits-based seltzers supplanted malt- and cane-based ones around the turn of this decade, the hard tea segment is now going through a similar vodka-fication process. Surfside, the breakout spirits-based RT(ea)D offering from Philadelphia’s Stateside, hit the market like a tidal wave in 2022, catching BBC with its swim trunks down and inspiring a deluge of imitators. (Including Sun Cruiser from BBC itself, which is doing quite well; and Skimmers from ABI, which is being sued for looking quite similar to Surfside.) This was always a threat to Twisted Tea’s dominance, and it’s now biting into the business in a big way. Citing data from Numerator, Koch said that as much as 20 percent of Twisted Tea’s lost shelf space this year was going to vodka teas. “To the extent that Sun Cruiser sources volume from Twisted Tea, this is revenue and gross margin accretive for us,” he said. But when it’s Surfside, or any other brand, it’s a loss, and a big one.
Again, Sun Cruiser really is selling well, and it will likely sell even better once BBC rolls it out nationally in a 19.2-ounce stovepipe, which it plans to in early 2026. And there are other bright spots for BBC, from sources old and new. Angry Orchard, hard cider’s mainstream pioneer (and non-mainstream pariah), is back in the black with a new ad campaign and a sponsorship deal with Worldwide Wrestling Entertainment. Sure, it’s only +0.9 percent volume and +2.1 percent dollars year-to-date, but hey — that’s a big denominator, and up is up. Less surprisingly, the higher alcohol-by-volume line extensions from Twisted Tea and Truly are both gaining share. Samuel Adams and Dogfish Head are hanging onto it. It could be worse.
Still, it’s rough right now, and some of BBC’s pain is self-inflicted. Truly’s ongoing decline — down 16.2 percent and 14.4 percent in volume and dollars year-to-date through Oct. 5, per Circana — is more blood from wounds the firm opened and reopened with disastrous overextensions, bad rebrands, and tone-deaf advertising. Twisted Tea’s stupendous growth couldn’t have lasted forever, but BBC waited two years after Mark Anthony Brands released White Claw Surge in 2021 to start testing the higher-ABV Extreme. (It only launched Truly Unruly last year!) The most damaging delay, though, was Sun Cruiser, which the company put out in select markets in 2024, two years after Surfside had begun making waves. This, despite the fact that the firm had been “noodling” on the vodka-tea segment “for a long time,” per Twisted Tea’s senior brand director. And it’s cost Sun Cruiser growth that might have offset more of BBC’s Q3 losses. “This year, we really missed most of the chain sets in the spring and had to kind of limp in during the fall resets,” Koch told analysts, promising that the brand would have “full representation” in major retailers in 2026.
For a long time, craft brewers have joked that Boston Beer Company is no such thing, owing to its reliance on sales of stuff other than beer. Nobody really makes that joke anymore; everybody is too busy trying to stay afloat. But it’s true that BBC is really a beer company in name only at this point. “We are heavily weighted away from traditional beer towards what people call ‘beyond beer,’” Koch told analysts earlier this week. “We believe that we are playing in what will be a growth category over the long run, and we’re investing accordingly.”
Yes, and: the firm’s two biggest brands are currently both “beyond beer,” and outpacing their respective segments’ declines. BBC’s positioning isn’t the problem. It has seen around more bends than most, and admirably so. But its execution has been nothing to reflect fondly upon.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
Word came this week via the often-right rumor-mongers at Page Six that George Clooney is preparing to launch a non-alcoholic beer brand with his one-time Casamigos amigo Rande Gerber in early 2026. The actor has flirted with abstinence over the years, and the New York Post claimed the forthcoming beer “has a similar origin story to Casamigos,” in the sense that the two co-founders still own neighboring Mexican estates and still like making money off credulous rubes. I guess? But let’s not let a little sober-minded marketing scrutiny overshadow this historic moment. A white male celebrity endorsing an NA beer?! And they said it couldn’t be done!!!
📈 Ups…
After five years in business, Atrium Brewing in Louisville is now brewer-owned… Circle K will start carrying THC drinks in as many as 3,000 stores starting next year… Heineken’s woes aside, its nonalcoholic beer is hot, so it’s rolling out fruited versions in 2026… Look at all these suckers responsible industry stewards who want to join the BA’s board of directors… Look at Yuengling, punching above its weight to win on-premise share on a big denominator…
📉 …and downs
Nearly 40 attorneys general called on Congress last week “to shut down this industry before it metastasizes further into an even greater threat to public safety than it already is”… Rand Paul (R-Galt’s Gulch) is threatening to keep the government shutdown going over the proposed THC ban… Ballast Point is laying off 37 workers as it exits its Miramar location… Surfside’s wholesaler in New Jersey acquired Anheuser-Busch InBev house Ritchie & Page… Chicagoland beer bar chain HopCat was acquired by a private-equity firm, best of luck…
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