Branding and marketing—boring. Maybe so, but it’s also essential, and Brewers Association economist Bart Watson tells you why. Also, a helpful guide from a branding agency.
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A very sad announcement today that Czechia’s Pivovar Kout na Šumavě has closed. It was one of the most interesting breweries in the world.
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A two-year-old Chicago concern that touts “great craft beer and golf simulators,” today announced it had purchased Ballast Point. Named Kings and Convicts in honor of its Australian and English founders, the company has 334 Instagram followers. Upon hearing the news, every living being on the planet responded: “Who?”
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Decisions have consequences that may not be evident for years or even decades. Widmer started discussions with A-B in 1995 and the brewery wasn’t fully acquired for another quarter century. Here’s the story of one fateful decision.
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Six weeks ago, Portland cidermaker Abram Goldman Armstrong sent out a press release seeking investors for his cidery, Cider RIot! I am sad to report that he was unable to find any and has announced the closure of Cider RIot effective November 9th.
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Lompoc Brewing, founded 23 years ago, becomes the fifth Portland brewery in recent months to announce it’s shutting down permanently. Is the end nigh, or is this the new normal?
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In separate incidents this week, Founders and Lagunitas engaged in behavior that boggles the mind. And they’re the kind of things one can’t imagine them doing if they were still corner breweries in Grand Rapids and Petaluma.
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A lot of changes announced in the beer industry this week. Boulder Beer is scaling back, and Legacy Breweries—Ninkasi’s new parent company—has made its first two acquisitions in Porltand’s Laurelwood and Colorado’s Aspen breweries.
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What causes us to like certain beers and certain breweries? What force guides our hand to one product at the store and not another? We think we are the masters of these choices, but something deeper is at play. In the second of a two-part series, I examine the role of breweries in this process.
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Yesterday, Dogfish Head and Boston Beer announced they were planning to merge. How will a legacy brewery with an old flagship, one increasingly focused on non-beer products, integrate with a company that has for two decades defined experimentation and reinvention for American beer? I guess we’re about to find out.
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Constellation was crazy to spend a billion dollars on Ballast Point in late 2015. But what if hazy IPAs had never become a trend?
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A new economics term will unlock the secrets of beer.
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With apologies to Tolstoy, successful breweries are all alike, but each failing brewery fails in its own way.
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The news is shocking, but it isn’t terribly surprising. BridgePort has lost over three-quarters of its Oregon volume since 2010, and hasn’t adapted to the modern market.
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10 Barrel Brewing recently released a fantastic video that has been viewed broadly. But what if you lack the funds an AB InBev-backed brewery has? Creative Director Jordan Wilson describes how Old Town Brewing gets its exceptional results on a budget.
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This morning, London’s last Victorian-era cask brewery announced it had sold its beer business to Asahi. That news should alarm anyone interested in the health of cask beer in Great Britain.
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Less than a year after Craft Brew Alliance turned the Widmer brewpub into a taproom, it’s shutting the whole thing down, citing “profitability challenges.”
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The Brewers Association has proposed a change to the definition of “craft brewer” that poses an existential question. What does it mean when the largest member of an organization dedicated to beer mainly doesn’t make it?
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The success of beers like Firestone Walker 805, Dogfish Head SeaQuench, and Ballast Point Grapefruit Sculpin seem to come out of nowhere. But success is not entirely random. It comes to breweries that have put the time in beforehand.
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