Brewers Association ends campaign to buy AB-InBev

No one seriously believed that the Brewers Association (BA) would reach its lofty goal of collecting over USD 200 billion to buy the industry behemoth AB-InBev.

In December 2017 it ended its crowdfunding campaign “Take Craft Back” by admitting that it had fallen short of its goal. However, over the course of three months the BA managed to scrounge up an impressive USD 3.8 million in pledges from nearly 12,000 craft beer lovers.

Nonetheless, the campaign was considered a success because it proved a major win for member engagement.

As said Julia Herz, the BA’s craft beer programme director: “We’re grassroots and scrappy, and our goal with this digital campaign was to move it from our brewers outward. […] We have yet to do the audit, but it’s fair to say that we had strong buy-in from our community of members. And it went beyond that, trickling all the way down to the consumer level.”

Ultimately, the campaign gave a boost to the BA’s independence seal, launched in June 2017, which the BA will continue to build. Only about half of the BA’s members – approximately 2,800 breweries – are using the seal in some way, Ms Herz added.

According to the BA about 6,000 breweries were in operation during 2017, with 98 percent of them small and independent craft brewers.