craft brewers alliance

So after watching Beer Wars I decided to look into what beers actually are independent. I came across the company named Craft Brewers Alliance. I thought hhhhmmmmmm that must be some small brewers working together. Nope just Red Hook and Widmer merged together (news to me). I decided to give the annual report a read (my natural inclination as an accountant). In the report I found out that Anheuser Busch controls their distribution, has people on their board, and is involved in decision making. Specifically regarding growth AB has to approve. So essentially they traded company control for distribution.

Its funny how even a company named "craft brewers alliance" is under BMC control.

It's not as evil as it sounds though. This sort of thing goes on in any healthy industry. Lets say you have product X...it's amazing...it's the best thing since sliced bread....but no one knows who you are. Who is this XYZ company?

What you do is partner with someone already in that market. ACME Corp says "that's one hell of a product you have there. We'd love to market it for a cut of the profit or for X number of shares". This is business. There are worse things than getting the attention of a big brewer and having them want a piece of you.

I imagine you will see much more of this as Inbev tries to increase it's market here. You are probably going to see a lot more small shop / Inbev partnerships or outright buyouts. It's just the way business works. At some point (assuming you are growing) you come to a place where private funds cannot give you the growth you want, so you have to look at an IPO or a partnership.

AB had stake in Red Hook well before the merger, since about 1994. In the early 2000s, Redhook was about to go under, if it wasn't for AB.