For the time being, the Brewers Association (BA) restricts its membership to craft brewers which are small, independent and traditional. This means that brewers’ annual production must be 6 million barrels of beer or less; that Big Brewers can only own less than 25 percent in them, and that the majority of their total sales volumes must be beer. Flavoured alcoholic beverages are not considered beers.

Brewers Pabst and MillerCoors are currently seeing each other in court. MillerCoors has been brewing Pabst beers under a 1999 contract, and seems reluctant to renew the contract, which reportedly expires in 2020. Pabst has asked the Wisconsin court to award it USD 400 million in damages and force MillerCoors to renew the contract.

The wheels of justice grind slowly. Three years after AB-InBev jumped on rival SABMiller, the acquisition got approved at last. In October 2018, the US District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan signed what is called a Modified Final Judgment, which means the Department of Justice, or DoJ (which is in charge of anti-trust issues), and AB-InBev managed to hammer out a consent, albeit with some modifications, which are meant to limit the deal's impact on the US beer market.

Constellation Brands, the number three brewer in the US, may be looking to offload some of its wine brands for over USD 3 billion, according to industry rumour. While still speculation at this point, such a move would not be surprising, but radical nonetheless. Constellation’s origins are in wine. It was founded as a wine company after World War II. Today it is stock market-listed, yet it continues to be controlled by the Sands family.

The good news is: Canada’s cannabis companies are worth billions of dollars and US brewer Constellation Brands can feel smug about its timely investment in Canopy Growth. The bad news is: It could take years before the legal supply of cannabis will meet demand.

The three biggest beer trade organisations – the National Beer Wholesalers Association (NBWA), the Brewers Association (BA), and the Beer Institute (BI) – launched their “Beer Growth Initiative” on 24 September 2018, in an effort to fight against beer’s dwindling market share in the face of other alcoholic beverages.

First, you got Game of Thrones beer (by Ommegang brewery). Then you got Game of Thrones wine. Now, spirits company Diageo and HBO have partnered on a new scotch dedicated to the humanoid creatures.

Don’t trust promises of “nothing changes”. In September 2018, Heineken-owned craft brewer Lagunitas not only announced a major round of redundancies affecting over 100 employees, it also will soon be brewing Heineken-owned Newcastle Brown Ale at its Petaluma and Chicago facilities, US media report.

Lagunitas Brewing, the fifth-ranking US craft brewer, is laying off 12 percent of its staff, blaming a softening US craft beer market. The brewer was bought by Heineken in two tranches in 2015 and 2017 for allegedly USD 1 billion. It sold over 1 million hl beer in 2017.

It was only a matter of time before Coke would show an interest in the cannabis market. Brewers like Molson Coors and Constellation Brands have already declared their interest in the billion dollar industry. According to a report by Bloomberg in September 2018, Coke is weighing its cannabis options as a possible alternative to its sugary drinks, which are becoming more and more discredited by consumers.