This has the stuff of an award-winning PR campaign. It does not have any of that foam-at-the-mouth shrillness. It’s more tongue-in-cheek if anything. On 16 October 2017, the Brewers Association, the not-for-profit organisation that represents America’s 5,000+ small and independent brewers, announced the craft brewing community’s intent to “Take Craft Back” from the Big Brewers.

Is this the future? Constellation Brands, which sells Corona Extra beer in the US, is attempting to create cannabis-infused drinks, after the number three brewer in the US on 30 October 2017 reported it had acquired a 9.9 percent stake in the Canadian medical marijuana company Canopy Growth.

The Long Trail East

Westward, Ho! The story of the United States has always been one of westward expansion, beginning along the East Coast and continuing until it reached the Pacific. For over two centuries the American West has promised progress and new opportunities. Its laid back, relaxed, entrepreneurial attitude has been instrumental in boosting the growth of craft beer, turning the West Coast IPA into the quintessential American craft beer style.

Are we alone in wondering if AB-InBev want to have the whole of the brewing industry covered from “AB”-InBev to “ZX” Ventures? Recall that AB-InBev launched the “disrupter” ZX Ventures (the Z reportedly stands for Zythology, the study of beer, and the X stands for eXperience) in February 2015, with the goal of investing into higher end and non-traditional areas of the beer category.

“Independence” is such a hallmark of beer industry identity that the Brewers Association created a seal to designate which breweries are and are not independently owned.

From September 4th to 6th RMI Analytics conducted a crop tour of hop production facilities in the USA’s largest production region, the Yakima Valley in Washington State. By the start of the tour the harvest was unusually well advanced, about two weeks ahead of usual. The outlook from farmers and merchants was for a good harvest mainly due to the acreage expansion with yields looking around the average but as yet there’s no clear view from the field though Barth-Haas has pegged the USA crop at 45,000MT, a 5000MT increase on 2016.

With most of the growth in the craft beer segment going to those “one-of” local breweries these days, it was only a matter of time before the Big Brewers like AB-InBev in the US and Lion in Australia would be trying their hands at local brewery-plus-taproom concepts too.

For the 36th time, beer lovers gathered from 5 to 7 October 2017 in Denver, Colorado, at the annual Great American Beer Festival (GABF), the renowned American beer festival and competition, to sample some 3,800 beers from more than 800 craft breweries around the country. 60,000 tickets were sold for the event.

“Creative destruction” is one of those buzz terms corporate leaders like to pay lip-service to. But for AB-InBev it’s a modus operandi. In early September 2017 the industry was shocked to read that AB-InBev had laid off around 90 percent or 380 sales force employees from its High End division in the US, which is the arm of the company that deals with import brands like Stella and Leffe as well as its US craft brewery acquisitions.

American craft brewers are not just making beer, they also use their beer sales as a force for good. Craft brewers donated an estimated USD 73.4 million to charitable causes in 2016, up from USD 71 million in 2014.