If modern-day brewery buyouts had a patient zero, its name would be Goose Island Beer Company.
When the Chicago brewery was sold in late 2011, the buyer, Anheuser-Busch InBev, had not bought a craft brewery since it formed in 2008 (following the merger of Anheuser-Busch and InBev). Prior to that, you’d need to go back to 1997 to find the last Anheuser-Busch investment in what could be described as a craft brand, when it took a 27% stake in Widmer Brothers. Goose Island’s sale has since been described as “the honk heard round the world” in terms of the shockwaves it sent across the industry; according to some analysts, the sale was equivalent to “opening the floodgates” to beer buyouts.
Since then, buyouts have been greeted with big, and oft-repeated, questions: what does an acquisition mean for its respective companies? And for beer generally? Will the beer change? Will the industry? But few conversations have focused on the brewery employees—the people who, when they hear the news, have to turn around and keep selling cases and kegs as the beer world looks on.
Eric Hobbs, now chief operating officer at Solemn Oath Brewery, was a key account manager with Goose Island when it was sold. Prior to the announcement, a potential sale had been driving the rumor mill for months—and at the time, many guessed that the Craft Brew Alliance would be taking control. Hobbs learned the same day as everyone else that AB InBev would be purchasing the brewery. (CBA is now owned by AB InBev; at the time of the buyout, AB had a minority stake in the business.)
“There was writing on the wall, and signs some things were happening,” he says. “You knew something was coming and everyone was coming together in the same room and it was like, ‘This is going to be the news that we think it is.’” Next came the PR briefing on what to say. By that point, however, the industry was already well aware of the breaking news. “[Management] told everyone straight up, ‘You do not make comments to the press, and if you are talking to key accounts, here is what you need to say,’ and they coached us on that—and that was really the only direction we had,” Hobbs says.
“It didn’t feel like it was trying to be something it wasn’t,” he continues. “At the end of the day it was such big news there wasn’t a single account that I was talking to that didn’t already know.”
It happens that fast. Before briefings on what to say to the most important customers are done, they already know. Everyone learns together.
The day of a brewery buyout announcement has a typical sequence of events. Management informs employees, media, and the public. This often happens all at once, or at most within the space of a few hours. Next is the backlash: accusations and anger, mingled with congratulations and a general, public reassessment of the company and its place in the beer ecosystem.
The chaos and negativity from certain corners are assured. But less discussed is the relief that many employees feel behind closed doors. They don’t have to deal with any more speculation. The story is out: now, do you still want the beer, or not?
Lachlan Barter is a state sales manager for Green Beacon Brewing Co. in Brisbane, Australia. In 2019, it was announced that Green Beacon would be sold to Asahi, but stories of a prospective sale had dragged on for years. Everyone knew, or thought they knew, what was going to happen—and everyone wanted his confirmation.
“It was a rumor for almost two years. You hear rumors—some have weight in them, some don’t have weight in them,” Barter says. “More and more people started bringing it up. Really random people as well. At the time [of the sale], it was a sigh of relief. No more rumors. I don’t have to deal with that anymore.”
The brewery was fresh off its third Champion Brewery Trophy at the Australian International Beer Awards: in 2016, it was Champion Small Brewery, then Champion Medium in ’18 and ’19. In the small Australian market, that sort of repeat success garners attention—and also speculation.
On the day of the sale, “I got a phone call from our general manager about 10:30 in the morning. That’s all the facts I knew beforehand, but I think a lot of people knew,” Barter says.
Everyone else “knowing” is a big frustration for front-line staff. As Geoff Hanson, a former sales representative at Feral Brewing Company in Perth, Australia puts it, “We were the first to have it confirmed, but we were the last to know.”
Hanson has been a sales rep for over a decade, and has worked at a handful of Australian distributors and breweries over the course of his career. His former employer, Feral Brewing, was bought by Coca-Cola Amatil in October 2017. While he agrees secrecy isn’t an ideal situation, he also understands the corporate reality underlying many buyouts.
“From an integrity perspective, I don’t think there’s any other way for business to do that. Being looked in the eye and being told something that is true, is untrue, is an unfortunate thing, but also a necessary evil.”
James Balboni had a similar experience. He had heard all of the hearsay around his former employer, Mornington Peninsula Brewery, and was asked by customers and drinkers about the likelihood of a buyout almost daily. Mornington Peninsula’s eventual sale to Tribe Breweries, a larger Australian brewery group, was leaked long before it was confirmed by his bosses.
“I was told very blatantly that no changes were happening. So when I would go and see customers they would say, ‘You’re changing ownership,’ and I would say, ‘No we’re not,’ because I was going on the information I was told.” It got to the point where the lack of confirmation made Balboni’s job difficult. He recalls one account that wouldn’t buy beer unless he admitted the gossip was true. “He would give me so much shit, all the time. He would be texting me and calling to rib me about it.”
Sales reps are often the main point of contact for—and even the face of—a brewery for their customers. If an account doesn’t like a given brewery’s new ownership, sales reps are often the first to feel the impact, or to be greeted with opprobrium.
This worried Goose Island’s Hobbs. At the time of the acquisition, he was making plans to leave and start a new project. He was concerned that being associated with a multinational might not be great for his reputation in certain beer circles. “Is that going to have some sort of negative impact on when I open this small little hometown craft brewery? Is it going to make people think this is disingenuous?” he remembers thinking to himself. Hobbs decided to remain with Goose Island before taking a job directly with Anheuser-Busch, then eventually launching his own project. He says, had he not been planning a move, he would have been happy to stay with the company.
“I also realized that a lot of that stuff seemed worse than it is—and [the negativity] was just a small group of people chirping. I decided it was way more valuable to get the experience.”
For some, however, the negativity can extend beyond business dealings, and play out on personal social media channels. Hanson is active in Australian beer Facebook groups, and he soon learned that being employed by a multinational meant some in the industry automatically branded him a “shill.”
“I found that really upsetting. I was just expressing my views, but whatever the reason, because of who I work for, my views were invalid. It alters the way people see you in the industry,” he says. “If a huge managed fund or private equity bought the brand, no one would care. It’s a really strange, engaged audience, and they have a strange preoccupation. For me it was frustrating.”
He cites Left Hand Brewing Company co-founder and Brewers Association executive committee chairman Eric Wallace’s speech at the 2018 Craft Brewers Conference as an example of the heightened rhetoric around buyouts. (“[R]ampant violations of trade practices and exclusionary tactics in venues and accounts in many markets—these guys are out to eat our collective lunch and take your kids’ lunch money as well,” Wallace told the conference).
Hanson believes this good-versus-evil binary can further stoke tensions in the industry, and lead to difficult scenarios for brewery employees. He relates a story of one key account determined to make a statement after Feral’s sale. “He’d taken all the point-of-sale material I had given him and put it in the bin. I reached out and said, ‘I really respect your decision to only support independent brands, and if you don’t want to stock our product anymore, I totally support that, but I think it’s a bit low to trash the brand.’” The response from the store owner, after the literal trashing? “I didn’t trash the brand."
These tensions within the industry also made things difficult for Sarah*, who worked as a specialty sales manager at a U.S. brewery that sold to a large multinational. Her sales pitch had to change as a result. “There’s this ‘one for all, all for one’ mentality when you are independent, and you are competing against the big guys. The guys that are guaranteed to win. [At the time] we were growing like crazy and there was an air of accomplishment,” she says. “It was a hard thing to feel like I was part of this rebellious little brewery when it’s really not the same anymore.”
After her brewery’s acquisition, Sarah was was laid off in 2018, but at the time was already deciding on her future with the company. The layoff made her decision a lot easier, and she says if anything, it strengthened her own brand with her customers. “I had such a love for that company and the people there, that it would’ve been a really hard thing for me to go sell beer for somebody else, but by being let go it was almost like I was a martyr to some people in the beer community.”
Sometimes fellow sales reps line up for a dig. Barter says while his phone was going off on the day of Green Beacon’s sale, he received passive-aggressive messages from peers, like: “Have fun on the other side.”
“At the time, the person at the other end might think it’s a joke, but when you’re going through it, it’s like, ‘Why would you even bother. I haven’t spoken to you in so long, and on the day you feel like flicking me a message when I’ve got my phone going off.’”
When compared to the U.S., Australian consumers seem to respond more aggressively after a brewery sale. Australian brands don’t immediately benefit from the increased distribution opportunities that U.S. breweries do. Breweries big enough to attract buyouts are usually nationally available already.
Scott McNaughton, senior consultant with market research firm IRI Australia, told BrewCon (the Australian Brewers Conference) this year that after a buyout, Australian brewers see immediate drops in growth. He cited Australian brands 4 Pines Brewing Company and Pirate Life Brewing as examples: both sold late in 2017 to ZX Ventures, AB InBev’s global growth and innovation group. (The brands have since been bundled up with Carlton & United Breweries (CUB), which is owned by AB InBev but is in the process of being sold to Asahi.) In the 2018-19 financial period, McNaughton says “both [brands] entered periods of decline. That ‘core,’ independent consumer leaves these brands quickly.”
These examples stand in contrast with the U.S. IRI data, which frequently shows sales jumps after a buyout. Seattle’s Elysian Brewing Company sold to AB InBev in 2015, after which sales of its portfolio increased 436% through 2019, including its flagship Space Dust IPA, which went from selling about 3,900 barrels of packaged beer in grocery, convenience, and liquor chain stores in 2015 to almost 101,000 BBLs last year. AB InBev purchased Asheville, North Carolina's Wicked Weed Brewing in 2017, with the business increasing its volume sales by 306% in IRI-tracked stores since. Wicked Weed's lead Pernicious IPA went from 700 BBLs of sales in IRI stores in 2017 to about 9,400 BBLs last year.
With a decade of successful sales behind him, Hanson figured he was good at his job. But when Feral’s beer no longer moved off shelves after its sale, his confidence took a hit. “There was a definite softening of demand for the product and it does hit you personally,” he says. It’s "part of what drives you and how you assess yourself in that job. And [even] knowing it’s not you, it still affects you.”
Barter says that, on a national scale, sales for Green Beacon remained steady after the brewery’s sale, while his immediate market, Victoria, saw a dip. Orders that had been in the books were suddenly canceled, and he felt the subtext in those reversals. “Some people were, like, ‘I told you so,’ in the way they were canceling their orders. Something they’d ordered three weeks beforehand, and now they were saying, ‘Don’t worry about it.’” Limited releases are suddenly harder to sell. Barter loves one of the barrel-aged Imperial Stouts he has available, but is struggling to find takers for it. “It’s so good, but literally no one is taking it. It’s one of the best beers we’ve ever put out.”
Balboni also recalls similar interactions. “I became confused about my ability, my goals, what I was doing for the business, what my purpose was and what my value was. Would people believe anything I had to say anymore?”
Conversely, even though Sarah’s role was primarily selling limited releases, she was surprised at how few accounts dropped her brewery after it was sold to a multinational. There were still bars where it was definitely a “line in the sand,” and which no longer wanted to run annual events or host limited annual releases, but she believes that that fallout was in part because the brewery was already losing its place in the market. Newer, sexier breweries had become a more attractive option to some accounts. The scenario just made her work harder.
“The affection [for the brewery] is still there,” she says. “I don’t think people lost those good feelings, but they stopped getting excited about the new stuff. It was easy for a lot of bars to not want to consider bringing my product in, so I made sure to look after [those that did]. It strengthened some relationships.”
Sales reps aren’t the only employees on the front line following a brewery buyout. In the U.K., when Beavertown Brewery sold to Heineken in 2018, things got fierce online. Kamilla Hannibal Kristensen, then Beavertown’s social media person, resorted to responding to criticism on Twitter directly with her own account to try and calm things down.
She recalls saying, “Listen, I’m the media and content manager for Beavertown. You can think what you think, but people have bills to pay or a mortgage, [or] kids to feed.”
Kristensen admits that Beavertown’s image could have played a role in the adverse online reaction. The social media presence she cultivated over her three-year tenure at the brewery was always friendly and personal, but that tone had to change when she began pushing back on trolls. Founder Logan Plant had also publicly admonished “big beer” in the past. However, she says it’s unfair to take out the anger on the entire staff. “You don’t attack the social media person or the sales reps. You should be smart enough to understand they are not the ones who made the decision, or reap the benefits.”
Eventually, the nastiness spilled out of social media and into the physical world. One London-based brewery, Forest Road Brewing Co., began putting stickers on Beavertown sales vans that said “Heinytown.” In the lead-up to the brewery’s Beavertown Extravaganza festival, other breweries withdrew from the event by making public statements about buyouts that Kristensen describes as “riding the wave of our shitstorm.” Posters were put up near the festival by other breweries taking shots at the brand. Kristensen had to pull them down herself. “Their rebellious actions were just being cleaned up by regular-paid staff,” she says. “They were so keen to make themselves look good, but they were feeding into a harassment culture. They were giving people permission to go after us harder.”
To add to the difficulty, Kristensen had also been given a month’s notice on the sale in order to start planning a communications strategy. However, knowing the news earlier than everyone else at Beavertown made the process harder, not easier.
“I couldn’t say anything and that was quite horrible,” she says. “I had to lie to my friends and see my coworkers and my friends worried.” Then there were the questions on social media. “I made an effort to build up a very authentic, and very open, presence for Beavertown. Going from being so passionate, and so invested, and saying, ‘We would never do that, we are all about independence,’ to saying, ‘Ahhh no comment.’ It was a weird one for sure.”
But there was also, eventually, relief, which she likens to the feeling of a long-term relationship coming to an inevitable end.
“You and your partner have been knowing it’s been coming for ages. Even though it’s a sad thing, it means you can move on.”
While everyone interviewed agreed that it’s not ideal to learn about brewery buyouts with the rest of the public, or to hide the news from coworkers, they all understood why these scenarios happen the way that they do. The business machinations of most industries occur parallel to the product.
“We’re all in it for passion, but we’re running businesses at the end of the day,” says Barter. “We all need to look at that. Because there is so much passion it can become very personal, which is good, but can be bad.”
Fortunately, it’s not all bad. Even in the midst of backlash, everyone interviewed for this story found support from friends and peers during their respective buyouts. Barter notes that, alongside the negative messages, he received positive messages from other reps under the Asahi umbrella. Hanson recalls a fellow rep reaching out and offering advice and a friendly chat. And while Kristensen confesses that she cried in the bathroom more times than she’d care to admit, the messages of support, and the people coming to her defense on social media, really helped. She believes, however, that employers should be aware of what their teams might be going through—and that staff often face a great deal of personal fallout following a brewery sale.
“If you’re in any business dealing with this sort of change, it’s important to check in, if not daily, then weekly with the staff that’s on the front line to see how they are doing. It’s also good to remember that a lot of your staff might put on a brave face because they want to do their job.”
*Name has been changed at the subject’s request
Words, Luke RobertsonIllustrations, Cooper Foszcz
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