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1 day agoWhy Malt Liquor Is Struggling To Survive - Tasting Table
Malt liquor's popularity has declined due to changing consumer preferences and the rise of alternative alcoholic beverages.
In 2025, Cider sales performed well at plus 2%, led by top brand Angry Orchard (plus 3.6%). For the 52 weeks ending Dec. 28. 2025, hard cider sales reached $502 million in total U.S. multi-outlets, grocery, drug, mass merchandisers, convenience, military, and select club and dollar retailers, according to Circana data. Of the brands, eight of the Top 10 showcased growth.
In 2014, Leon opened his brewery's first location inside a tiny warehouse space in the city's north-east. It was good timing. All over North America, millennials were going crazy for craft beer, and in Alberta, the government had recently changed rules to help microbreweries get their product to market. "There was a huge thirst in Alberta for craft beer," said Leon, who recalls getting emails about new breweries opening nearly every week. "It was a pretty wild time."
The venture capital industry fought for years to persuade state lawmakers to impose strict restrictions on noncompete agreements. The VC crowd eventually succeeded in 2018, with the Massachusetts Legislature adopting a one-year limit on all noncompetes - contracts that prevent employees from working for a rival for a certain period of time, often in a specific region. And they were outlawedoutright for lower-paid hourly workers.
Chris Buck isn't your typical home brewer - he's a virologist at the National Cancer Institute, known for discovering several human polyomaviruses, a family of viruses linked to cancers and serious infections in people with weakened immune systems. Buck's day job involves developing vaccines against these viruses, but he took things in an unexpected direction: using yeast engineered to produce viral proteins, he brewed a beer that delivered those proteins orally.
Our bar was founded to be a third space for our local Brooklyn neighborhood - somewhere other than work or home where friends could gather, have a drink and connect more deeply. Our business model was built around earning the trust of repeat guests from our community, not charging tourists $22 for a cocktail. But today, tariffs are making that model more difficult to sustain.
BrewDog has been put up for sale after the Scottish craft beer group appointed restructuring specialists to explore fresh investment and strategic options. The Aberdeenshire-founded brewer has hired AlixPartners to oversee a structured process that could result in new investors coming on board or parts of the business being sold off. Founded in 2007 by James Watt and Martin Dickie, BrewDog grew from a small Ellon-based brewery into an international brand with operations in the US, Australia and Germany, alongside around 60 bars across the UK.
The days of having great liquid alone? Those days are behind us now. It's really that total guest experience, so we've really leaned into that and really focused on training our employees, making our environment as approachable and inclusive as possible, and just not taking any customer for granted.
It helped redefine modern craft beer through bold innovation, fearless creativity and an unwavering commitment to great beer. As we begin a new chapter for this great brand, our priority is to refocus BrewDog on the craft beer excellence that made it beloved in the first place and strategically invest to return the operations to profitable growth.
After a lengthy delay that included much fretting among industry insiders, the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) were unveiled earlier this month. Any fears that anti-alcohol activists had infiltrated the quinquennial process were eased, as the new guidelines preach moderation over specific daily drink allowances. Beer Marketer's Insights senior editor Christopher Shepard, who has followed the process closely, joined the Brewbound Podcast to discuss the DGA, the fraught path to publication and what this could mean for brewers.
No trip to the brewery is complete without sampling the wares. Even if it's a place you visit regularly, you'll likely want to sample most of what it has to offer at least once. But while a greater variety may seem more enticing, it can also signal a potential red flag. Every kind of beer they have on tap means another tap that needs to be maintained. The more tap lines they have, the more likely it is that maintenance or cleaning gets neglected.
Bell's, famous for its Two Hearted IPA and summer-coded Oberon, was founded in 1985 as Kalamazoo Brewing Co. in Michigan. In that first year, it brewed 135 barrels. Today, it brews nearly 500,000 barrels annually. A barrel is roughly 31 gallons, or about two kegs' worth of beer. So the brewery's production went from around 270 kegs in 1986 to around 934,000 kegs today.
John Molson founded Canada's oldest brewery on the banks of the St. Lawrence River in Montreal in 1786. Ever since, the Molson brewers have been passionate about brewing beer for Canadians to enjoy.