I think this is the first time I’ve heard of a brewery buying out AB’s ownership stake. They just earned two medals at the WBC, but I truthfully haven’t tried any of their beers since AB became involved.
And Constellation (aka Modelo in the US) made moves to shut down their craft division and allowed Funky Buddha and 4 Corners to be repurchased by their founders.
i havent done research in this since 2022 and that data was from the 2010s up until only 2020/2021. but hard seltzer category sales were growing massively while brandname leader NAILs were slowly and steadily losing ground with random craft offerings selling in smaller amounts but showing growth.
maybe those guys just think hard seltzer etc is the way forward and that they can forget about all that craft fad (it was just a fad!!)
People I know in beer sales say the seltzer market is on the decline while canned cocktails are taking off. Maybe people finally realized they were looking for vodka and soda in a convenient format all along.
Mad Fermentationist is gonna have to update his poster again…
I thought FMBs only existed because the byzantine labyrinth of the combined alcohol and tax code made (a) canned cocktails illegal for a brewery to produce (i.e., seltzer + vodka isn’t “beer”) and (b) FMBs cheaper to produce because FMBs are “beer” from a federal perspective. Or something like that. I’m not a lawyer.
That’s my understanding, as well. I assume it would be much simpler to mix vodka and seltzer, but that would either get slammed with a much higher tax rate or would simply be illegal in certain jurisdictions.