“The consensus was like: Craft means nothing to AB,” one anonymous former employee told reporter Kate Bernot.
(2016, Houston), Wicked Weed Brewing (2017, Asheville, N.C.), and Veza Sur (Miami, launched in 2017.) A week later, Good Beer Hunting noted that some number of marketing staffers who supported ABI’s craft brewing portfolio from the company’s New York City office have also been laid off. In late February, trade pub Brewbound reported some number of pink slips at Blue Point Brewery (acquired 2014, based on Long Island, N.Y.), Devil’s Backbone Brewing Company (2016, Nelson County, Va.), Golden Road Brewing (2015, Los Angeles), Karbach Brewing Co. The headcount and details are a little murkier, and the company is, of course, keeping mum about them, but they’re very much afoot. Let’s begin at the end (for now) of ABI’s corporate craft brewing foray: the layoffs themselves. It’s a shocking reversal for a company that was buying craft breweries and touting their innovation potential as recently as 2019 - or it would be, if this fall weren’t the predictable result of overextension, underappreciation, and macrobrewer brand mismanagement that took place in plain view. Insiders speculate there are more cuts on the horizon for ABI’s microbrewing-by-proxy business unit, which has struggled mightily as tailwinds turned to headwinds on the overall American craft beer segment over the past half-decade. The company has laid off an unknown number of workers from at least a half-dozen formerly independent breweries across the country, and effectively shuttered one entirely. It’s been a rough few weeks for the brands in Anheuser-Busch InBev’s erstwhile craft-brewing portfolio.
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