Large global brewers have been slowly selling off their acquired craft brands in recent months. That trickle is now a deluge as Anheuser-Busch announced that they will sell eight craft beer, cider, and energy drink brands to Tilray Brands Inc. The sell-off includes 10-barrel Brewing, Widmer Brothers, Redhook, Breckenridge Brewery and Blue Point Brewing along with the AB in-house craft brand Shock Top.
Other brands include Square Mile Cider and HiBall Energy.
Tilray Brands is a pharmaceutical, cannabis and consumer packaged goods company headquartered in New York City. Tilray also has operations in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Latin America, Germany and Portugal. They are not a new name in the craft beer industry having previously acquired SweetWater Brewing Company, Montauk Brewing Company, Alpine Beer Company and Green Flash Brewing Company.
In May Constellation Brands sold two acquired craft breweries back to the original owners just two weeks after AB announced it was selling back an acquired craft brewery and in February AB closed the doors and shut down operations of an acquired brewery.
The times they are certainly changing, and with global brewers scrambling to keep up with rapidly changing consumer preferences, we may see more ‘out-with-the old and in-with-the-new’ strategies among the big brewers.
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