Corporate hatchet men were never going to save craft beer

Editor’s note: Stickers are going out later this week to the winners of last week’s giveaway. If you won, you should get them in the mail in the next week or so. If you didn’t, you shouldn’t—but we’ll do another one of these soon!—Dave.

Late last week, Tilray Brands announced the upcoming closure of Hop Valley, the craft brewery it acquired from Molson Coors in a fire sale last summer. On Monday, the latter firm’s chief executive announced his retirement after a six-year stretch that roughly coincides with the period that craft brewing went from the end of its second boom to the beginning of its second shakeout. Just yesterday, the Brewers Association released its annual list of the top 50 craft breweries by volume; despite the closure, Tilray had climbed two spots from its 2023 slot. It is the fourth-largest craft brewer by volume in these United States, at least as far as the trade group is concerned.

You can explain away all these developments as discrete bits of information. Craft brewing is not doing so hot as a segment—the BA puts the 2024 volume estimate at 4% less than 2023, which was ~3% less than 2022, etc.—which explains some of the jockeying within the pack. There’s zero indication that MC’s chief exec, Gavin Hattersley, is exiting as a result of the absolute haircut the company took on its misadventures in craft brewing, and I don’t see why it would be. Available reporting suggests it’s a proper retirement: the guy’s been at it for three decades and plans to abdicate his board seat, plus MC never went quite as berserk on its craft-brewery buying bonanza as did Anheuser-Busch InBev.

As for the closures—times are tough. Craft breweries across the country are closing, so Tilray is hardly alone in that. But the Canadian cannabis conglomerate is climbing the American craft brewing charts as it shuts down breweries (it closed another, Texas’ Revolver Brewing, in February 2025), which makes it somewhat unusual. No other firm on the list—from which ABI, even now still the owner of a passel of IPA slingers, is excluded, per the BA’s rubric—has nearly as many breweries to close. Really, there’s only one at this scale that comes close: its fellow mid-major interloper, Monster Beverage Corporation, which slipped down a slot on the BA list since last year but remains the 10th-largest craft brewer in the country despite closing facilities in Texas (Deep Ellum, Oskar Blues) and Florida (Cigar City.)

There’s no major conspiracy here. Something I want to mark for posterity, though, is how these turns of the screw reiterate that nobody is coming to save the American craft brewing industry.

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