Dave Infante

It wasn’t always the case that beer’s middle tier featured the best mergers-and-acquisitions action in the beverage-alcohol industry. Far from it. The world of wholesalers, cloistered by culture and statute, was for much of the 20th century a fairly stodgy one. While suppliers and retailers bludgeoned each other with big-dollar advertising campaigns, cutthroat price wars, and consolidation galore, the humble beer distributor was mostly content to stay above the fray and keep the cash flowing. Things didn’t change all at once, but they did change.

PHILADELPHIA — As the economy struggles through a vibecession and the internet gets enshittified by vibecoding, the craft brewing industry grappled with an unfamiliar vibe of its own this week at its largest annual conference, too. Is that… could it really be…? It could be, and it was. Bona fide optimism was in the air during the 2026 Craft Brewers Conference, which concluded Wednesday evening in the City of Brotherly Love. Whether light is actually visible at the end of the tunnel… well, that depends on whom you asked, and where in the segment they are sitting.

It was easy to be outrageously optimistic about the craft-brewing industry midway last decade. Too easy, in fact. Thanks in part to greater San Diego’s status as a bona fide first-wave craft-brewing hotbed, many of the trade’s toughest cautionary tales from the Terrible Tens/Teens started there. Constellation Brands’ November 2015 announcement of plans to acquire Ballast Point for a cool billion dollars is the biggest boondoggle in the business, bar none. But everybody and their mother knows about Constellation’s glass-half-full-to-ass-half-out Ballast Point catastrophe.

Earlier this week, Narragansett Beer took to social media with a mea culpa for the generative artificial intelligence (AI) age. It read (all sic throughout): CANNED! we saw the feedback, yall were right. Robots are dumb. ⁠ ⁠ Plz like this so we can beat the bot content and its fancy analytics. The image attached to the post was a deliberately low-fidelity collage showing the “prohibited” symbol over a man with a robot head. “Our AI Social Media Robot has been FIRED,” the graphic proclaimed.

In mid-April, a notice was posted on the door at 1621 Montgomery St. in San Francisco. The tenant of the ground-floor commercial unit near Fisherman’s Wharf owed nearly $57,000 on the lease, the bulletin claimed. Behind the plate-glass windows sat a vacant office space with taupe floors and stark white walls interrupted only by maroon block lettering that matched the logo on the door. “RNDC,” it read. Photos of the document — officially known as a notice to pay security deposit or quit — were snapped earlier this week by a longtime tipster who preferred to remain anonymous.

It’s been nearly three years since Sapporo USA (SUSA) unceremoniously shuttered Anchor Brewing Company, and two almost to the day since the billionaire founder of Chobani, Hamdi Ulukaya, scooped it off the scrap heap with the stated goal of returning the historic firm to its former glory. It has not yet reopened for business. But lately, there are definite signs of life at Potrero Hill’s beloved brewery, which has thrilled San Francisco homers and diehard steam beer fans across the country.

Generations are more or less made up. They’re a social construct, much like “time” and “the rule of law.” That doesn’t mean cultural norms aren’t shifting, and it certainly hasn’t stopped the beverage-alcohol industry from collectively freaking the hell out about it. But from Zoomer to Boomer and beyond, this generation stuff is kinda squishy. Seasons, on the other hand, are pretty real. In the United States, winter tends to be cold and summer tends to be hot, unless you are experiencing El Niño, or worse, San Francisco.

The Willy Wonka parallel is hard to miss. There’s the enigmatic foodstuff virtuoso. The iconic factory sitting sadly silent in the middle of a bustling city. The adoring public, watching closely for any activity within. Look, some steam curling from the roof! Lo, signs of workers operating within! Surely any day now the doors will once again swing open to restore delight to a fallen world.

In 2016, Peyton Manning turned some heads by plugging the King of Beers from the field after emerging victorious in Super Bowl 50. “I’m gonna drink a lot of Budweiser tonight, Tracy,” the then-quarterback of the Denver Broncos told CBS reporter Tracy Wolfson. “I promise you that.” Anheuser-Busch InBev quickly followed up with the media to make sure everybody knew it hadn’t paid Manning — who owned stakes in a pair of distributorships aligned with the company — for the shoutout, perhaps to avoid the ire of the Federal Trade Commission, which has rules against undisclosed promotion.

No true Scotsman would drink White Claw, but that didn’t stop the Mark Anthony Brands brand from trying to glom onto the viral tale of the Tartan Army’s unquenchable thirst last month in Boston. Was there a beverage-alcohol brand that didn’t? Boston Beer Company’s (BBC) publicists, perhaps giddy with good fortune after years of pitching into the void, were flogging that story hard the first week of the World Cup. That it’s so unusual to see people drink Boston Lager at volume the local news might pick up the story is not the flex the flacks probably figured it to be.