Newly Appointed Boston Beer Company CEO Dave Burwick will earn a base salary of $750,000 and take home a hefty $1.6 million signing bonus, according to an SEC filing. Burwick, already a member of Boston Beer’s board of directors since 2005, was announced as the company’s new CEO on Wednesday. He is expected to replace outgoing CEO Martin Roper, who has been with the company for more than 17 years, on April 2, according to the filing.
New data from market research firm Nielsen CGA suggests that on-premise food and drink sales declined significantly on Super Bowl Sunday. The firm — which compared sales data from February 4 and January 28 — found that U.S. bars and restaurants “saw an average sales drop around a third” on the day of the big game.
The distribution rights to a pair of notable craft beer brands were recently swapped in Illinois after multi-state alcohol distributor Breakthru Beverage traded Ballast Point to a cluster of MillerCoors wholesalers in exchange for Dogfish Head.
After a yearlong search, Boston Beer Company has named its next CEO. On Wednesday night, the company revealed that Dave Burwick, the CEO of Peet’s Coffee & Tea, Inc., would depart the Bay Area-based specialty coffee maker for the producer of Samuel Adams — a pioneering U.S. craft beer brand that in recent years has struggled to grow as thousands of new offerings have flooded the market.
Constellation Brands today announced that CEO Rob Sands has relinquished his role as “president,” appointing current chief operating officer Bill Newlands to the position. Sands will continue to serve as CEO, a press release noted.
Just four hours into the launch of its new “Z series” automated brewing appliance, Seattle-based PicoBrew has already pre-sold more than $1 million worth of equipment. The company, which was founded in 2010 by former Microsoft executives Bill and Jim Mitchell, today announced the launch of what it is calling the “first professional-grade, all-grain brewing appliance line.”
Stone Brewing also released a nearly five-minute-long video of Koch, who began promoting the so-called “scrap” in a series of cryptic tweets last week, making his case. In the video, Koch explains that “Big Beer” companies such as MillerCoors, faced with dwindling sales of their core domestic lager brands, embarked on a multi-year spree of craft brewery acquisitions in an attempt to offset declines.
At the of January, Constellation Brands announced that its Corona Extra brand would become the exclusive import beer of the Kentucky Derby for the next two years. The deal, according to John Alvarado, Constellation’s vice president of marketing, was driven in part by the date of this year’s race: May 5 (Cinco de Mayo).
The slowdown in craft beer category growth has undermined an investment and created tension between the founder of a prominent Texas brewery and his newest partner. After initially agreeing to purchase a majority interest in fast-growing, Dallas-based Deep Ellum Brewing, Storied Craft Breweries, an upstart growth capital group, paid penalties to back out of the full investment, saying it has altered its strategy in light of slowing craft growth trends.
Craft Brew Alliance (CBA) has shut down its emerging business division and, in the process, let go of a key executive who had been with the company since 2011. In an SEC filing, CBA today announced that John Glick, who most recently served as the vice president of the company’s emerging business unit, would leave to “pursue other business opportunities.”
As Craft Brew Alliance (CBA) continues to execute on a Kona-Plus strategy that led to 10 percent depletion growth for the Hawaiian-themed brand in 2017, CEO Andy Thomas is working to transform the publicly traded craft beer company into a “smaller, but healthier” organization that prioritizes profitability over increased shipment volumes.
New Belgium Brewing today announced the hiring of Shaun Belongie as its new vice president of marketing. Belongie, who joined the Colorado-headquartered craft brewery earlier this month, replaces Ruairi Twomey, who departed last July.
Columbia Distributing, one of the largest beverage wholesalers in the U.S., today announced it would acquire Oregon City’s General Distributors for an undisclosed sum. The transaction, which is set to close on March 31, will add approximately 3 million cases to a multi-state Columbia business that surpassed 62 million cases in 2016.
When Baxter Brewing opened inside of the 168-year-old Bates Mill Complex in Lewiston, Maine, in 2011, the state did not allow breweries to sell beer directly to drinkers for on-premise consumption. State laws loosened in 2012, but Baxter – which is ranked as the third-largest brewery in Maine — had already dedicated the vast majority of its facility to production.
