Anheuser-Busch Takes the Corporate Craft Throne From Molson Coors and New Belgium
It seemed like it wasn’t a question of if, but when, Voodoo Ranger’s parent company finally caught up to Blue Moon’s on corporate craft volume. And according to one long-running brewing industry magazine, the answer is now.
But that answer appears to be wrong. And a miscommunication around New Belgium Brewery’s “total beverage” ambitions may be to blame.
Every year around Memorial Day — that much-monitored kickoff to beer-selling season — The New Brewer publishes an issue with the overall production volume figures of all the biggest breweries in the country from the previous year. It’s a more trade-focused sketch of the brewing landscape than the Brewers Association’s annual top 50 list, though it’s based on the same underlying data; the trade group has published the mag since 1983. This year, for the first time, New Belgium Brewery (NBB) surpassed Molson Coors (MC) in total craft-beer barrelage, according to The New Brewer’s May/June 2026 edition. The outlet reported the two brewers’ craft beer output at 1.805 million barrels and 1.725 million barrels, respectively. If this was indeed a changing of the guard, well, there’s certainly been a lot of that lately. As I noted briefly here at Hop Take in mid-April, 2026 was the year Sierra Nevada Brewing Company finally overtook Boston Beer Company (BBC) on craft beer volume. But the trend runs deeper. Almost exactly 12 months before NBB deposed MC in The New Brewer’s pages, it did likewise to Anheuser-Busch InBev’s (ABI) craft portfolio, at a split of 1.864 million to 1.79 million barrels, respectively. It’s déjà vu all over again! Here’s Hop Take from May 30, 2025:
The reason ABI was outstripped by NBB on craft volume has as much to do with the latter’s transformative Voodoo Ranger vision, smart single-serve/c-store strategy, and pretty darn good execution as it does with the former’s flailing. It’s true. It’s also true that NBB has struggled to figure out what to do with Bell’s; that portfolio has been delivering single-digit swings from red to black and back since the acquisition, closing out 2024 down 2 percent. And it’s not like Molson Coors is doing better in the craft segment than its forever foe! Blue Moon is still the segment leader, thanks to its colossal base, but it was down another 5 percent last year. Leinenkugel’s, treated more like an afterthought by MC’s c-suite now maybe ever since getting acquired way back in 1988, was down 9 percent. The firm is now just 83,000 barrels ahead of NBB, and falling. Another changing of the guard looms.
Make that two. This year, the mag put ABI at 1,731,000 barrels, which would have it shedding a little less craft volume than NBB in 2025, and bumping its perennial second fiddle MC into — ouch — third.
But! There’s some real intrigue going on in all this barrelage-based leapfrogging, and not just because the segment’s big dogs are duking it out. Earlier this week, the eagle-eyed editors at Brewbound spotted a couple discrepancies in The New Brewer’s data, right at the tippy-top not one but two charts. First, the magazine published an inaccurate total for D.G. Yuengling & Son, logging a 25 percent volume decline for the BA-defined craft leader. Not so, the Pottsville contingent told Brewbound journalists Jess Infante and Zoe Licata; not so, the trade org conceded to the same. “We have updated our reporting to reflect the brewery’s actual production for 2025, which was 2.44 million barrels,” BA staff economist Matt Gacioch told the outlet in a statement.
Over in what The New Brewer calls its ”Regional Brewing Companies/Brands Owned By Large Breweries” cohort, there was more statistical trouble. On Wednesday evening, Brewbound’s Justin Kendall reported that the BA’s 2025 total for NBB was about 70,000 barrels higher than what the brewery itself had told him: 1,737,575 barrels “includ[ing] its flavored malt beverage (FMB) brands, such as Voodoo Ranger Hardcharged Tea,” which shouldn’t count towards its total.
A spokesperson for the BA, Jessie Vandenhouten, confirmed the Yuengling error by email midday Thursday, and told Hop Take that NBB had provided the 1,805,000-barrel figure to the BA. As this column goes to press, the BA’s most up-to-date individual volumes for the New Belgium and Bell’s brands are 1,378,000 and 427,000 barrels, respectively — numbers that match neither those in The New Brewer, nor those reported most recently in Brewbound.
“We cannot speculate on the discrepancy, but we can share the number reported to us is supposed to be only inclusive of beer,” the BA tells Hop Take.
A representative from NBB shed more light on the number jumble. The firm’s entire volume “across our portfolio, including New Belgium brands (Hardcharged Tea and Lightstrike included), Bell’s brands, Kirin, and smaller volumes of Upper Hand and Steinlager” totalled 1,805,000 barrels in 2025, Michaela Eagan tells Hop Take via email Thursday afternoon. “New Belgium and Bell’s combined produced 1,737,575 barrels in 2025, including our FMB portfolio.” The splits were 1,329,048 and 408,527 barrels, respectively.
On a follow-up, Ryan Van Fleet, NBB’s senior director of business insights and analytics, provided the missing link. Removing FMBs and other non-beer stuff from the equation entirely, NBB’s total is 1,672,120 barrels — 1,263,593 for New Belgium and 408,527 for Bell’s.
Neither ABI nor MC responded to requests for confirmation that their respective totals reported in The New Brewer were accurate.
It appears all but certain thatABI regained the overall lead of the corporate-craft pack in 2026. (It’s doing pretty well, after all!) The beer-only volume figure for NBB puts it nearly 60,000 barrels behind ABI in craft beer — assuming the number for the larger brewer holds. (This also throws into question whether NBB actually overtook ABI in 2024, as The New Brewer’s data showed in May 2025. More to come on that.)
More surprisingly, it doesn’t look like NBB’s beer volume overtook MC’s this year, either. The firms’ trends in the craft-beer segment are impossible to miss when you zoom out. In 2024, MC shed a bunch of craft volume all at once when it sold four of its breweries to Tilray, much like ABI did a year prior. It wasn’t technically an abandonment of the segment, but despite executive protestations, it was unmistakable writing on the wall.
“Just to be clear: This doesn’t change anything related to Blue Moon or Leinenkugel’s,” MC’s then-chief commercial officer Michelle St. Jacques wrote in an August 2024 memo to wholesalers obtained by Brewbound. “These brands continue to play an important role in our premiumization plans and there are no changes to our commitment to them.”
Thing is, those brands have continued to tank. In January 2025, MC shuttered Leinenkugel’s 157 year-old plant in Chippewa Falls, Wis. The shandy maker, which was acquired by Miller Brewing Company way back in 1988, has hemorrhaged in the intervening year since: According to scan data from the market research firm Circana, its flagship seasonal is down 13.6 percent in dollars and 15.8 percent in volume year-over-year in multi-outlet grocery, mass retail, and convenience stores for the 52 weeks through May 17.
Blue Moon, meanwhile, has almost given up more ground over the past decade than Leinenkugel’s ever had to begin with. The country’s most prominent “crafty” corporate interloper has lost some 881,000 barrels in a decade, per Brewbound’s analysis of The New Brewer’s data — though, given all the confusion, take those data with a big grain of salt. Leinie topped out at around a million barrels midway through the 2010s. (The brands’ volumes declined at roughly the same rate last year: -11 percent and 12 percent, respectively.) Blue Moon’s rebrand, which was honestly pretty good, may have helped, but it has hardly stopped the bleeding. The brand family is down 9.1 percent in dollars and 14.1 percent in volume in Circana-tracked grocery channels year-over-year through May 17, outpacing the category’s declines by a serious margin. Now, thanks in no small part to the yeomanly on-premise efforts of Keith Villa and company, the flagship has a strong draft presence that scan data can’t capture. And Blue Moon Extra, the no-brainer high alcohol-by-volume extension MC waited until 2025 to introduce, has been going gangbusters, but it just doesn’t have the base to backfill losses across the group, and won’t anytime soon. On craft beer’s horizon, the Moon is sinking very low indeed.
Given that, you might have expected Voodoo Ranger’s maker to blot out MC sooner than 2026. But the reality is, NBB itself has been struggling against some headwinds of its own lately. No matter how you slice the barrelage totals — and believe me, I’ve sliced them a lot of different ways over the course of reporting this column — the company’s 2025 output was down. Voodoo Ranger’s rapid-fire releases earlier this decade created conditions ripe for cannibalization, and competitors have long since caught onto its convenience store playbook. Bell’s ongoing declines are a drag; its flagship was essentially flat in the Circana-verse for the year through mid-May. NBB is not exactly coming from a position of unalloyed strength, in other words. It would make sense that it took until now to catch MC’s craft output.
But the best available data says it still hasn’t. There’s always next year.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
There’s debate within the academy about how much to credit Karl Marx for mainstreaming the aphorism, “first as tragedy, then as farce.” But there’s no debate within Hop Take HQ that it applies uncannily well to the latest developments in the long, sordid, and somehow still-ongoing BrewDog saga. Former co-founder and noted LinkedIn power-user James Watt announced late last week that he plans to launch a new beer brand, Second Best, and allocate “up to 19.3” percent of its shares to erstwhile “Equity Punks.” (Recall, those are the retail investors who mostly got rinsed in the company’s disastrous, partly self-inflicted decline, which concluded earlier this year with a fire sale to Tilray Brands.) On one hand, it’s a transparent ploy to save face and score attention after fleecing credulous marks on both sides of the Atlantic and putting over a thousand people out of work. On the other, imagine how much Marx, who everybody pretty much agrees coined the term “fictitious capital,” would have enjoyed this!
📈 Ups…
Highland Brewing Company renamed its oatmeal porter after its family founder, Oscar Wong, who passed away last year… Non-alcoholic comer Go Brewing doubled its volume to ~21,000 barrels last year, per the latest edition of The New Brewer… Vermont’s legislature sent a self-distribution bill to the governor’s desk…
📉 …and downs
Warren Buffett cashed out of some 95 percent of his stake in Constellation Brands, that was fast… Also per the new, er, New Brewer, just 20 of the top 50 craft brewers posted volume growth last year — and two were Garage Beer and Outlaw Light, which don’t identify as “craft”…
The article Anheuser-Busch Takes the Corporate Craft Throne From Molson Coors and New Belgium appeared first on VinePair.