California

Premium craft lager brand House Beer is revving things up in 2023 with new ownership. The decade-old company is set to be acquired by motocross athlete Carey Hart.

Golden Brands – the Reyes Beverage Group’s Northern California subsidiary – has acquired rights to the Constellation Brands and Sierra Nevada portfolios from Sacramento-based Markstein Beverage Co.

California craft breweries Bear Republic Brewing and Drake’s Brewing will merge, according to reports. In the transaction, which is expected to be announced on Thursday, Drake’s will acquire Bear Republic’s formulas, recipes and intellectual property, according to SiliconValley.com.

Starting in December, Stone Distributing will once again sell San Diego-headquartered Coronado Brewing Company’s portfolio of brands in Southern California, after several years apart.

Members of the California Family Beer Distributors (CFBD) gathered for the first time last week in Palm Desert, California, to discuss goals and highlight their differences from the Reyes Beer Division. “The members in this room are independent family-owned beer distributors,” CFBD executive director Kevin Luckey said in his opening address.

Beverage industry veteran Brian Fried will take the reins at Stone Distributing Company (SDC) on October 31, the company announced.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a myriad of bills Friday before the end of the 2021-2022 legislative sessions, including an update to two laws that give more flexibility to craft brewers in the state by expanding the number of satellite taprooms and allowing distribution of their own products to retail locations nearby.

The California Craft Brewers Association’s Lori Ajax and Chris Walker discuss a pair of bills awaiting the governor’s signature that would benefit the state’s craft brewers. Those bills — expanding the number of satellite locations and bonafide eating places, and adding on-sale privileges — were among the CCBA’s priorities this year. Ajax and Walker also dish on middle tier consolidation, direct-to-consumer sales, supply chain issues and much more.

Scout Distribution announced today that it will acquire Classic Beverage beverage-alcohol portfolio in the greater Los Angeles territory, covering LA, Santa Barbara, Ventura, San Luis Obispo, Orange, Riverside, Kern and San Bernardino counties. The transaction is expected to close in November.

Sierra Nevada announced last week the closure of its Berkeley, California-based Torpedo Room satellite taproom after nearly a decade in business.

Anheuser-Busch InBev has struck a deal to sell its Oakland, California-based wholly owned distributor to two independent wholesalers, Markstein Sales Company and Matagrano, Inc.

Figueroa Mountain Brewing Co. has taken over operations of three Los Angeles brewpub properties from Artisanal Brewers Collective (ABC), and will convert each into specialty Figueroa Mountain taprooms, the Buellton, California-based brewery announced June 17.

The 2022 release of Russian River’s Pliny the Younger generated $6.1 million in economic impact, a record for the brewery and a $1 million (+20%) increase compared to 2020, the last year that the triple IPA was released.

Court records filed in the wake of last Friday’s auction for San Diego craft brewery Modern Times give a closer look at bidding play-by-play, and the tension between qualified bidders MTD Asset Acquisition and BX MT BAMF LLC. Earlier this week, MTD (the group referred to during the auction as North Carolina brewery Tru Colors), whose $20.1 million bid was not accepted as the winning bid, filed an objection to the sale of Modern Times to BX MT (an affiliate of Brewery X in Anaheim), and submitted a new bid of $21 million. MTD claims priority was given to Brewery X’s bid due to its inclusion of a shorter closing period, despite what it believes was a previous guarantee that such conditions would not be weighted in choosing a winning bid. Those efforts caused a federal judge to table a hearing Monday set to confirm the sale of the brewery.