If you’re looking for a good beer, you might want to go to Maine, the most north-eastern U.S. state. Breweries from that state had a remarkably strong showing at the Great American Beer Festival Awards, winning medals in 21 percent of the categories local brewers entered – the most of any state, the Brewers’ Association announced on 27 September 2015.

Does Greg Koch, the co-founder and CEO of California’s craft brewer Stone, really only want to take Tuesday afternoons off? On 11 September 2015 Mr Koch, 51, announced he will become Chairman of Stone, while rejecting all speculation that a sale was in the offing.

It probably just suited them fine that with all the hullabaloo over the Heineken-Lagunitas combination, SABMiller’s announcement on 10 September 2015 that they are purchasing a majority stake in Californian craft brewer Saint Archer from San Diego received far less attention than it otherwise would have got.

And we thought the announcement of the deal between Heineken and the Californian craft brewer Lagunitas would be followed by a mass suicide. But lo, there was just outrage that one of the craft brewing industry’s best loved companies, Lagunitas, willingly fell into the arms of a Big Brewer.

With all that heady deal-making in the U.S. craft beer sector, the world’s largest brewer AB-InBev did not want to be left out. However, AB-InBev’s subsidiary Goose Island decided to buy into the booming cider category by taking a majority stake in the Virtue Cider Company, which is located in Michigan and known for its barrel-aged ciders. Virtue Cider's brands include RedStreak, an English style cider, and The Mitten, a bourbon barrel aged cider.

Hark his words. Boston Beer, the maker of Samuel Adams beer and Angry Orchard hard cider, would be worth more to a foreign owner unburdened by the U.S. tax structure, founder Jim Koch, 66, told a Senate committee on 31 July 2015.

So it’s craft cocktails now. The number three brewer in the U.S., Constellation Brands, with brands like Corona and Modelo, has acquired a minority stake in bottled cocktail brand Crafthouse Cocktails through its new start-up investment arm, media reported on 19 August 2015. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

The Brewers Association’s definition of a craft brewer stipulates that in terms of ownership less than 25 percent must be controlled by a Big Brewer. This implies that craft brewers could keep their clout as the better beer guys if they were to take in non-beer investors, right?

The Coca-Cola Company has promoted an insider to the number two job which got media pundits and analysts speculating that Chairman and CEO Muhtar Kent needed a powerful deputy to help manage the far-flung business and try to reverse flagging soda sales.

How hard is this? After the “hard ice tea” craze, the U.S. is falling for another fad: “hard soda drinks”. The first such drink to see alcohol added to it is root beer.