A decade ago, in a time when it often felt like the U.S. craft beer boom was never going to slow down, the presence of Anheuser-Busch InBev provided a perfect ideological foil for the average beer geek. They were the evil empire, the giant corporate outsider determined to buy its way into scene legitimacy by gobbling up as many small breweries around the country as they could. We feared AB InBev’s influence as an existential threat to the craft beer scene, particularly in their ability to squeeze smaller brands off the shelf by flooding package stores with Anheuser-owned “craft” brands, or lobbying in the halls of state government against craft-friendly legislation. We didn’t imagine, at the time, that there was anything out there that represented a bigger threat than AB InBev.
Those thoughts were, of course, naive. The craft beer scene that exists today is much more fragile and perilous, and it wasn’t really AB InBev that got us here. No, it was an economic tale as old as time–receding consumer interest, sky-high costs of production, and high prices that the consumer simply doesn’t want to accept paying for a product that was once seen as an affordable luxury. Or in the other words: Craft beer lost its cache with consumers in the last decade, and by no means were those brands snapped up by AB InBev spared. If anything, many of them were among the hardest hit.
These days, it doesn’t feel like the average beer geek even stops to think about the fate of most of those AB InBev-owned former craft brands at all–they have disappeared entirely from our radar, only reappearing via headlines when they are shut down or sold off. And my, what a culling the Belgian conglomerate has undergone in the last couple of years. The latest casualty? That would be Miami’s Wynwood Brewing Co., one of the city’s original craft brewing presences, which opened in the titular neighborhood in 2013 and was acquired in 2019 when AB InBev acquired the entirety of the Craft Brew Alliance, which also included the likes of Redhook, Widmder Bros., Kona Brewing Co. and Appalachian Mountain Brewery. Wynwood’s facility will close for good in February, though beers such as their GABF gold medal-winning porter will still reportedly be produced in Miami at Veza Sur, also owned by AB InBev.
The fate of Wynwood Brewing Co. reads as collateral damage in AB InBev’s 2010s-era quest to piecemeal a craft network of breweries all over the country. They likely acquired the Craft Brew Alliance primarily with the intent of turning Hawaii’s Kona into a prominent national craft brand–the likes of Wynwood were just along for the ride. Did that make Wynwood’s ultimate closure a matter of inevitability when the deal was signed in 2019? Did anyone at AB InBev ever have the most basic intention of preserving this Miami staple’s legacy? It seems unlikely.
Elsewhere, Ab InBev has continued to pick and slash at its own holdings. Last week, it closed the Golden Road Brewing taproom in Sacramento after five years in operation, belatedly giving local beer scene activists what they wanted when they went all out in protesting the opening of Golden Road Sacramento back in 2018. It shut down Ohio’s Platform Beer Co. last year, after purchasing it in 2019. And just a few months ago, AB InBev sold Michigan’s Virtue Cider back to original owner Greg Hall, one of the major figures from Chicago’s Goose Island … which famously kicked off the era of Big Craft Beer acquisition when Anheuser bought it at the beginning of the 2010s.
And that’s not even mentioning the veritable horde of holdings that AB InBev unloaded on Canadian cannabis/alcohol giant Tilray back in August, which included both some of its craft acquisitions (Blue Point Brewing, 10 Barrel Brewing, Breckenridge Brewery, Widmer, etc.) and home-grown faux craft brands like Shock Top Belgian White. Those brands join other Tilray acquisitions such as SweetWater Brewing Co. in another huge, confusing complex menagerie, the likes of which have made it effectively impossible for the average consumer to know who owns the beer they’re drinking.
Put it all together, and it’s been a dramatic flight for AB InBev from the now moribund craft segment, a field they were seeking to dominate and obfuscate as much as possible a decade ago. Nowadays? It barely seems like they want any association with the craft beer world at all, and looking at the ongoing wave of closures and generally pessimistic industry outlook, it’s not too hard to see why. They’re not likely to be investing in the hope of a “next craft beer wave” in the coming decade; not when investors expect dead weight to be cut immediately. They probably consider it a win that they never paid $1 billion for a craft brewery at the height of the mania, as Constellation somehow did when they purchased Ballast Point in 2015.
Given all that, it seems only natural to feel more empathy now than we ever did before for those brewery owners who sold their brands to AB InBev throughout the 2010s. Many of these owners were people who had invested a decade or two in building a legacy, looking to retire and leave their brewery behind in the hands of a company with endless resources. They no doubt likely expected that the likes of AB InBev would at the very least be able to keep the lights on–or in the case of a brewery like Wynwood Brewing Co., they may very well never have had any choice in the matter at all. Regardless, I can only imagine the pain and regret that some of these guys probably feel in watching AB InBev shut down their passion projects now, a few years later.
When it comes to a megacorp in the alcohol industry, though, there’s no such thing as a secure legacy. Every brewery is an invaluable part of the portfolio … right up until the moment it isn’t. How many more AB InBev brands will ultimately share the same fate in the 2020s?
Jim Vorel is a Paste staff writer and resident liquor geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more drink writing.