By just about any standard, Tony Magee should be considered one of the most successful Americans to have ever worked in beer. The soon-to-be 64-year old entrepreneur started California's Lagunitas Brewing Company in 1993, grew its IPA-focused portfolio into one of the largest breweries in the country, and sold to Heineken—one of the largest brewing companies on Earth—in a two-part deal valued at a reported $1 billion. He has been a featured speaker at industry and private events all over the world and has long been cited for his prescient takes on a growing, maturing, and eventually challenged American craft category. He’s thought of as a “king” and “legend” of craft beer.
Magee—one of craft's contemporary founding fathers—has also been a ghost for almost five years. And while the 2017 sale of his company certainly provided a clean-cut sendoff into whatever sunset he might have sought, it feels strange that one of the most outspoken and oft-quoted beer businessmen of the last 30 years would just ... disappear.
Yet here we are, a craft beer industry not rudderless but more adrift than it has been in a generation, and one of its best success stories nowhere to be found.
“There are many varying views of Tony at this point, and I think there has always been,” says Christopher Shepard, senior editor at Beer Marketer's Insights. “He’s always been a figure in craft that’s universally idolized in the way that some [early] craft founders were. I think he’s embraced it—it doesn't seem he had a problem with that. When I think about Tony I think about foresight. I think of a seer. He had a vision. And that vision worked for a really long time and took Lagunitas to the places it went.”
The search started with the simple question: Where in the world is Tony Magee?
I thought the answer would be just as easy. The famed founder of the storied, irreverent, 4/20-friendly, and foundational Northern California brewery shouldn’t be all that hard to find. Magee has a reputation that doesn’t suggest a tendency toward introversion: In his brewing heyday, he’d often appear at industry events and hang around the Petaluma brewery.
Despite the fact that the Bay Area has what feels like a small brewing scene, I’ve never met him myself. But I’ve been told he’s quite a presence: He might have an average height and build, but his bombastic personality makes him loud and larger-than-life. Around San Francisco or Oakland, someone like that who’s also brilliant and opinionated tends to stand out. Or, at least, tends to pop into famed beer bar The Toronado from time to time.
Looking back, much of Magee’s mystical prognosticating about the ebb and flow of brewing industry success came to pass as he said it would: The unstoppable rise of IPA, a fight over shelf space and category management, and how “personal, generational and cultural” themes would be more important to the success of small breweries than the idea of “craft.” He got out before hardships really hit. These days, he doesn’t need to spend any time worrying about prolonging the viability of his business. And maybe he’s all the happier for it now. He’s retired—he can just kick back and blaze up. He doesn’t owe the industry any more breath. But it does make you wonder: How did someone with so many fervently held opinions about beer just suddenly leave it all behind?
“When I think about Tony I think about foresight. I think of a seer. He had a vision. And that vision worked for a really long time and took Lagunitas to the places it went.”
Internet searches typically offer some breadcrumbs to the whereabouts a celebrity, even if they’re from the world of beer. But in this case, Google and social media barely provides that. An initial search showed Magee was at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, California, just five miles north of Lagunitas’ Petaluma HQ. He was an Entrepreneur in Residence, a position befitting a Californian of his fame lending his considerable experience of building a brand to mentor business school students considering a career in entrepreneurship. A press release from 2020 credited him with “ignit[ing] the current status of the IPA as a leading beer segment through his creation and marketing of the iconic Lagunitas IPA.”
But he had no direct listed contact information. And an assistant at the School of Business and Economics couldn’t provide it, either, although she did imply his involvement in the program was a hit with students. I was told an email would be passed along to him on my behalf (since she said he had no physical mailbox and he didn’t really come to campus much), but it never got a reply. Nor did a second, sent a week later. That was in April 2023.
It appears the lone public remnant of his time at Sonoma State is mostly confined to a 2020 interview archived on YouTube, where Magee begins with an update on life. He had spent the previous two years, from 2018-2020, “pretty much just living at home here quietly, planting as many trees as I could, and working on trying to become a better musician and getting my body back in shape after 26 years of just constantly living off of cortisol and adrenaline.”
By spring semester 2024, Magee had been removed from the school’s website. His tenure was over and this became a dead end. This, unfortunately, became a theme.
On the whole, it’s a tough time for American craft beer. In chain retail stores, volumes are down, 2023 dollar sales were flat compared to the year prior even though prices got higher, and no or slow growth for a brewery is today’s “new normal.” It’s a far cry from the rapid expansion of the early 2000s and 2010s, partially led by Lagunitas and Magee, beer’s “stoner savant.” Even as ownership from Heineken tries to turn around recent years of decline for Lagunitas, it’s positioned the brewery as trying to recapture what’s been lost: It’s about regaining the Magee-led ideals that once defined the brand, leadership told Good Beer Hunting.
Gone, but not forgotten, Magee has left a spectral presence for the brewery.
“How did someone with so many fervently held opinions about beer just suddenly leave it all behind?”
Over the past year, my hunt for Magee felt like tracking Bigfoot. I sent dozens of emails to unresponsive recipients, left unreturned voicemails, made interview plans with sources who then never showed up, and even sent a few unsuccessful LinkedIn messages to current and former employees, including Magee himself. The website for his band, Alice Drinks the Kool-Aid, is dead. Several of Magee’s friends declined to talk or stopped responding to messages. Lagunitas’ press office wouldn’t answer my emails. And then, the California Craft Beer Association declined to even talk about Lagunitas’ legacy. I started to wonder if this was some sort of very specific and weird industry conspiracy, if there was a secret vow of silence preventing anyone from speaking to me about Magee. As if even whispering his name would anger beer’s celestial beings, summoning some bad omens for one’s zymurgist pursuits.
One of the only publicly available examples of photographic proof of Magee engaging with the world in recent years is a series of images posted in January 2024 of Magee playing with his band at a venue called The Funky Biscuit in Boca Raton, Florida. Before that, it was a black-and-white photo posted to Facebook on May 10, 2022, by Michelle Wilson, a current Entrepreneur in Residence at Sonoma State who was a judge with Magee at a college pitch competition for young entrepreneurs.
I couldn’t wrap my head around it. Magee is often cited as one of the most important and influential figures in craft beer, a renegade and counterculturalist who did things in his own way and actually got paid. Whatever feelings friends, former colleagues, or even trade groups may have had about an industry-rattling sale of Lagunitas seven years ago, nobody seems to deny that Magee was an inspired leader, visionary, and businessman. So why do so many people have so much reticence about speaking about him?
February 2020 may have been the first time someone wondered aloud about Magee’s whereabouts, when writer Jeff Alworth noted how willing the businessman had been to share his feelings and ideas with the public for years, but then just … stopped. Magee used to write “thousands of words on business, art, culture, and success” on a now-defunct Tumblr blog, but his musings disappeared. “He’s an interesting guy with 27 years of experience who once had a lot to say,” Alworth wrote at the time. “What happened to Tony Magee?”
When Magee founded Lagunitas Brewing Company in 1993, it was a different sort of business. Craft beer was an emergent space led by young, creative entrepreneurs. But even among the chilled-out microbrewing class of the ’90s, Magee was a bit of a radical. Lagunitas was known for its brash stoner vibe and regularly giving a middle finger to buttoned-up corporate culture. On its own company history page, Lagunitas touts the story of getting secretly investigated and then raided for hosting parties where attendees smoked marijuana. “The brewery kind of divides down the middle: burners and non-burners,” Magee once explained. “But there's no space between us.” Until its first half of an acquisition by Heineken in 2015, Lagunitas’ annual barrel production was always reported as ending with “420,” a nod toward cannabis consumption.
But this was all internal company culture. On the more straightforward business front, Lagunitas was ahead of its time with its future-looking brewing tactics and excessively hopped ales.
“IPAs were pretty exotic things back then,” Magee told The Brewing Network in 2015. “That was the thing that we did early that only Grant Johnston at Wren Brewing at the time did. These … small early [hop] additions, late heavy [hop] additions, and that was the model I built our thing on. That yielded an opportunity to make an IPA that didn’t taste like anything anyone had ever done before.”
For the few people who would talk about Magee, the primary—maybe only—consensus is that while he was at the helm of Lagunitas, he was a savvy, charismatic, often avant-garde leader. He talked about Lagunitas creating beers "that have never been made on planet Earth before” and that acted as “beers of the future,” which of course, they were. Lagunitas’ various IPAs put the company on a tear in the 2000s, highlighting Magee’s smarts and foresight. The brewery grew 10 times over in production size from 2008 to 2014, turning it into a national powerhouse beloved for its hop-forward portfolio.
“He was selling kegs out of his pickup when I met him,” says Ron Lindenbusch, who was among the first to work at Lagunitas and spent almost 24 years at the company, eventually becoming its chief marketing officer. “He had a 200-gallon system made for an overseas brewery made to fit in a container. It was amazing he could make great beer out of it.”
Getting to know him a bit better, Lindenbusch was struck by Magee’s approach to business. His first impression was how “very, very intelligent” Magee was, especially how he thought about beer as a business. It was different from what Lindenbusch had expected. In that 2020 Sonoma State interview, Magee credits two factors to Lagunitas' success: First, he was able to "see over the horizon" of where the industry was going, and that was definitively IPA. So that's what he would build his brewery on. The second was, of course, "smoking pot," which would allow the world to "just be quiet enough that I could hear the music of the spheres and have some idea of where [the industry] was heading."
“He had a pragmatic approach along with the artistic vision, whereas most brewers have just the artistic vision,” Lindenbusch says. “His pricing was fair, almost too low at the time. [But] he was right at the time [about that] like he was right about a lot of things.”
Those early days at the brewery were, in a word, “chaotic.” Like most startup craft breweries with a limited budget, Magee was buying equipment where he could find it or adapting dairy production machinery for his purposes. That was “usually successful,” Lidenbusch says.
Lagunitas’ approach to company structure and titles was equally unconventional. Lindenbusch didn’t have a job title, which eventually became an issue when he was out selling beer, so Magee joked he should “tell ’em you own the place.” Lindenbusch ultimately embraced the title of “Beer Weasel,” a title officially displayed on his LinkedIn profile.
The tone at work was just as playful. “We were all in it together,” he recalls. “It felt like everyone was as important as everyone else. We were—I don’t want to say unskilled; we were very skilled. But [we were] untrained. [The staff] sure worked hard. Tony told them everything they needed to know. It felt like we were family.”
Magee’s insights and inputs paid off. But as Lagunitas grew, it became clear the company needed more of a traditional structure. Employees wanted translatable job titles so they could grow their careers if and when they moved on. Lindenbusch remembers that moment as when “we needed to gracefully surrender the things of youth.”
“He had a pragmatic approach along with the artistic vision, whereas most brewers have just the artistic vision.”
Still, Lindenbusch felt they were able to retain the company culture of the early days. They regularly had happy hour parties with live music—another hallmark of Lagunitas’ brand vibe—that were so popular they often tended to grow into the hundreds. (They also tended to get shut down, due to the wafting presence of cannabis smoke.) People wanted to buy Magee’s beer and share time in his presence amongst what he built, literally and culturally.
The party continued to grow, and in 2014, Lagunitas opened a new brewing facility (and eventually a taproom) in Chicago, Magee’s hometown. At the time, Magee called it “a great thing,” adding that “it’s nice to come back now with something to offer.”
Michael Roper watched Lagunitas roll into the local industry from his bar, Hopleaf, located in Chicago’s Andersonville neighborhood. He’d worked with the brewery’s new local reps, finding them to generally be pretty happy with their work. Hopleaf has long been considered one of the best bars in the country, and adding Lagunitas beer to his tap lines emphasized how Magee’s return to Chicago was a big deal at a bar known for its excellent lineup of Belgian draft offerings. Roper says keeping Lagunitas on rotation was a part of feeding the growing appetite for hop-forward craft among his patrons, and that the addition “coincided with an absolute explosion of brewery openings in Chicago and elsewhere.” And occasionally, he’d see Magee around town. Roper knew he had a bit of a reputation.
“People say Tony can be a wacky guy, he can be obsessive about his band [Alice Drinks the Kool-Aid],” he says, adding that Magee was “really excited” about the prospect of working as a professional musician. “I can’t not mention he’s kind of a pothead. He divides the world into two groups of people: people he’s smoked pot with—the cool people—and the people he hasn’t, the unknowns, or, not the cool people.”
Roper also recalls that he found Magee “sort of mercurial,” excitable about something for a short time before quickly moving on, and recalled that he was bullish about maintaining Lagunitas’ innovative reputation. In one instance, Roper says Magee called him out of the blue at 10 p.m. (despite them never having exchanged numbers) because Roper was going to be on a podcast the following day to talk about Lagunitas’ ill-fated lawsuit against Sierra Nevada over a trademark of the use of “IPA” on packaging.
“He tried to run interference and see if he could change my mind about it,” Roper recalls. “He really believed there was a plot at Sierra Nevada to steal draft lines and take his customers away because the typeface on their cans looks vaguely familiar to his cans. I was like, ‘Really? I don’t think that’s the case.’”
Lagunitas eventually dropped the suit, but Magee maintained he was right. “He didn’t really talk about it much except that he made a little comment that he still thought he was right,” Roper recalls. “He still thought he was right.”
In any event, it didn’t appear that the perceived label similarities were much of a threat to Lagunitas’ growth. Sales were booming, its footprint was expanding, and as Magee told the Chicago Tribune at the time, “At the rate we’re growing, we need to keep finding new sites.”
But at this point, there was a bigger problem: It started to become clear that company leadership needed to think more long-term about their strategy.
Magee began exploring options. He said in interviews and to industry peers that he wasn’t pursuing a sale of the brewery, and was instead looking into work with banks to grow. In one instance, when asked during a September 2015 recording of The Beer Temple Podcast if he was mulling a sale to MillerCoors or AB InBev, he gave a colorful response. “No, no, not in a million years,” he said. “The ABIs did come and I ate the burger and I drank the beers and I told him I’d rather put out my eyes [than sell to them].”
Weeks later, in an extremely lucrative deal that valued Lagunitas at $1 billion, Magee and stakeholders sold the first half of the brewery to Heineken.
“We didn’t have a succession plan that made sense,” Lindenbusch says. “The one that made the most sense was a strategic partner, to build a brand that would exist 100 years after our death. Heineken was the right partner for that. [Lagunitas] is the #1 IPA in the world. We won. [But] the painful part that came along with that, having a company that took over that didn’t behave the same was going to be inevitable. No other company was going to take the risks we did.”
In 2017, the remainder was sold. Lagunitas was folded into Heineken USA with Magee maintaining a role at the company. The reason, he explained later on, was simple. "The industry is becoming extraordinarily crowded," Magee said in 2020, calling back to the early- and mid-2010s. "The barriers to entry are so low that the competition was only going to get deeper and deeper and deeper."
When Lagunitas opened, there were about 450 breweries in the country. When Magee finished his sale in 2017, that number was about 6,800 and has added about 3,000 more since. The increased pressures he saw were just starting to tighten, and he didn’t just step back from the company, but the industry at-large.
After the sale, Magee seemed to feel the need to explain himself. He took to his now-defunct blog, Fermenting Ideas of Order, to give context around the decision to sell in a nearly 2,000-word post.
“Some who don’t fully understand it all may say it is selling out. Truth is that we did then, and are now ‘buying in.’” he wrote in November 2018. “Money has value and equity has value too. I am using Lagunitas’ equity to buy deeper into an organization that will help us go farther more quickly than we could have on our own. You hafta imagine Jonah standing on the gunnel of the storm-tossed ship and intentionally leaping into the mouth of the whale to embrace the transformation and emerge to become his own destiny.”
Elsewhere in the post, Magee paints Heineken as a benevolent “partner,” rather than Lagunitas’ owner, a hands-off benefactor “who wanted to give us the latitude to pursue these global opportunities.” He assures consumers he will remain present, if in a different capacity, as Heineken’s “Director of Global Craft.” Lagunitas, he says, is just taking its next step. “This is the most humbling and simultaneously energizing ‘next-phase’ imaginable to me.”
Despite Magee’s attempts to be transparent, the most vocal segment of beer consumers were not having it. Even harsher was the response from some industry peers who decried the two-part sale as, predictably, “selling out,” or pointed out the hypocrisy of the whole deal.
“[Magee’s] not alone in this, but first-generation craft brewers who were profoundly independent really jumped on Goose Island when they sold,” Roper recalls. “[Magee] was one of those people too … He was so strident about selling out to the man and not being independent. And then he did it.”
Roper remembers that “a lot of people gave [Lagunitas] a hard time” after the sale, though in group conversations, Magee would say, ‘Our deal is different.’”
And then there was the reaction from Lagunitas employees—described as shock followed by a range of emotions, including confusion and a deep disappointment. They claim the sale was then accompanied by a change in culture wherein some former employees say they couldn’t openly express their discontent. Layoffs came next, which didn’t improve morale, and eventually, former employees say that things just seemed more a lot more buttoned-up and corporate than they used to be.
In a 2018 interview with Australia’s Radio Brews News, Magee continued to defend the sale. “Independence is a funny thing … what does it really mean?” he said. “Everyone has partners and everyone has obligations to those partners. I had a bank before and I had obligations to them and now I have Heineken as a partner instead.”
Pressed by the interviewer on the significant difference between a bank and a corporate owner, Magee minimized Heineken’s involvement in Lagunitas’ operations and denied that he was giving the sale any kind of “spin,” adding that others’ “perceptions [of the sale] are bounded by the limits of a person’s experience.”
One thing people lose sight of when talking about this or any brewery sale, as Christopher Shepard notes, is that for all brewery owners’ talk about “their tribe and ethos and specialness of craft,” they’re also business owners, needing to provide for their families and their employees. “It is certainly worth acknowledging: Can those two things live together—that he wanted to lead a tribe and he also saw an opportunity to sell his company for $1 billion?”
Spin or not, the company continues to find top-line success. Lagunitas IPA is still the best-selling draft IPA in the U.S. despite headwinds. It’s sold on multiple continents across the world. And a range of Lagunitas cannabis drinks are commonly sold in dispensaries across California and Colorado, including, since 2017, varieties of its Lagunitas Hi-Fi, a cannabis-infused sparkling hop water.
The company’s continued ubiquity since the sale has bolstered the idea that Magee is a prognostic businessman, one who executed a sale of this magnitude better than peers at Goose Island (who sold to AB InBev in 2011) and Anchor Brewing (which sold to Sapporo in 2017 and closed in 2023).
In the time during Magee’s tenure and since his disappearance from the beer industry spotlight, industry talking heads have continued to mythologize his business tactics, painting him as a genius. Ad Age, the global media and marketing company, included him as part of its featured speaker lineup for its 2018 “Ad Age Next” conference, meant to tackle pivotal questions for growing companies and entrepreneurs.
“I think Tony would say he sees lots of brewers emulating his business tactics,” Shepard says. “I think he would say he wrote the book in a lot of ways. Maybe he wouldn’t now, but he would have [at some point].”
Shepard believes that so many of Magee’s core theories are now so ubiquitous in craft beer culture that newcomers may not even attribute those ideas to him. He recalls a now-famed concept Magee often spoke about in interviews and speeches, about finding one’s “tribe” among beer fans.
“That speech about the ‘tribe’ is so baked into what I call the sort of ‘amorphous basket of promises’ that craft makes,” he says. “It’s part of the mythology of craft beer. Some of the things he talked about were so important to the building of Lagunitas and are so closely tied to the growth and evolution of craft and what a craft brewery does. I don’t think it's fair to say Tony invented it but … [He] was tapping into and articulating a set of values and ideas that have been there all along and are closely tied to what craft brewers have tried to do all along.”
For all the attention Magee has received for his shrewdness in business, he’s more complex than that. No one who would speak about Magee describes him in exactly the same way, other than to underscore his business acumen or tendency to fill a room. In the brewing industry, many players offer themselves at face value. Not Magee. Despite all that time in the spotlight, he remains somewhat enigmatic and reclusive—Magee hasn’t engaged in an interview with a beer publication since 2018. Once active on Twitter (now X), Magee last posted on Oct. 26, 2017, a vague, coincidental offer shared just before his self-imposed exile from craft beer: “if it can work out I’d meet there....”
Some might think that anyone who sold a still-popular brand like Lagunitas for $1 billion dollars might not shy away from giving his takes on an industry he was so deft at navigating. But maybe not.
“I think Tony would say he sees lots of brewers emulating his business tactics. I think he would say he wrote the book in a lot of ways. Maybe he wouldn’t now, but he would have [at some point].”
“I have to say that I’m just as curious as many other people as to where Tony is and what he’s doing,” says Roper. “Is he still involved in the brewery? If someone put $1 billion in my hand I’d buy an island somewhere and no one would ever see me again. Every once in a while, his name comes up, and someone will say, ‘Hey, you ever see him?’ ‘No, have you?’”
Lindenbusch understands Magee’s backing away from the industry. These days, Lindenbusch has taken the title of “Doer” for the nonalcoholic brewery Best Day Brewing, in a position he says is far removed from the “pressures that I had helping run Lagunitas.”
Lindenbusch thinks it’s a bit of surprise he’s back in the industry, since after Lagunitas he had no intentions of getting back into brewery life.
“I’m guessing [Magee] gave [Lagunitas] everything he had,” Lindenbusch says. “What’s he going to do [now], something … better? I felt the same way. I wasn’t going to get back into it. All my best ideas have been used.”
“Every once in a while, his name comes up, and someone will say, ‘Hey, you ever see him?’ ‘No, have you?’”
So there it is: Magee did what he set out to do. Lagunitas is all over the world. Magee found, as he called it in 2015, “an open door to a planet filled with beer-lovers and a conduit to meet them in our own way.” That was nearly a decade ago. So today, where on Earth is Tony Magee?
“He’s playing a lot of music, going on tour with his band, opening with different bands,” Lindenbusch says.
Fair enough. If I was that wealthy, I would spend my time doing what I loved, too. Before we hung up the phone, I asked Lindenbusch if he thought Magee might talk to me for this story.
Probably not, he said. “I don’t think he’d be interested.”
Words by Alyssa PereiraIllustrations by Colette Holston
