Brewbound Podcast

Fingers boozeletter author Dave Infante joins the Brewbound Podcast to deep dive Diageo's ongoing restructuring and workforce slashing under CEO Sir Dave Lewis (aka "Drastic Dave" for his reputation for making big cuts at previous stops). Infante shares insights from his reporting and conversations with Diageo employees, many of whom wondered why the Guinness and Johnnie Walker maker was so slow to adapt to the modern bev-alc competitive landscape. "The frustration that I heard from current and former Diageo employees was mostly about why weren't we doing this before we had to start laying everyone off," Infante tells Brewbound editor Justin Kendall and managing editor Jessica Infante (no relation). "You don't have to get to this point before you start pivoting to RTDs." The trio also hit recent headlines, including Garage Beer and Liquid Death tapping into the real world animosity around data centers and BuzzBallz's recent Pop-Tarts partnership. Jessica offered a theory on the BuzzBallz-Pop-Tarts team up: "Kids aren't eating Pop-Tarts. You know who's eating Pop-Tarts? Sad, elder millennials who can't afford anything else and want a tiny treat. The moms who would be out marching on the capitol up in arms against this aren't feeding that to their kids." "They're the ones who are intrigued by the BuzzBallz Pop-Tarts that they saw on Instagram," Dave adds. "That's definitely going into their Stanley tumblers," Jess says.

The decade-long consent decree that allowed Anheuser-Busch InBev's (A-B) MegaBrew merger with SABMiller to go forward expired in July, removing guardrails that had been placed on the world's largest beer manufacturer by the Department of Justice to ensure competition in the marketplace. Chris Jones, managing director of Central Market Strategies, joins this week's Brewbound Podcast to explore what competition looks like in a post-consent decree beer industry. Jones argues the consent decree did its job, creating a competitive environment that allowed new brands over the last decade such as Athletic Brewing, Mark Anthony Brands' White Claw and Boston Beer's Truly Hard Seltzer to become category leaders in non-alcoholic (NA) beer and hard seltzer, respectively, while also preventing A-B "from using its massive size as the world's largest brewer to disrupt the market." WIth the consent decree's guardrails down, including the removal of an independent monitor who maintained compliance by handling claims of interference and coercion, there now exists "a lot more risk in the system of this market power and abuses of market power that could result from the size and scale of the largest brewer," Jones said. Going forward, it will be important to track national market share in an already "highly concentrated market" and middle-tier consolidation in the years ahead, he added. Listen to the full conversation with Brewbound managing editor Jessica Infante here. Before the conversation, Brewbound editor Justin Kendall and senior reporter Zoe Licata join Jess to run through the latest news, including Lawson's Finest Liquids' first NA beer, what distributors say is on their cut lists, a distributor territory swap in the Northeast and "warm beer takes" on the latest NFL beer marketing.

Republic National Distributing Company (RNDC) is leaving a big unpaid tab. The distributor filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this week, with liabilities between $1 billion and $10 billion, and more than 100,000 creditors. In this episode of the Brewbound Podcast, Brewbound editor Justin Kendall and senior reporter Zoe Licata dive into the bankruptcy filing, as well as the fallout, with many suppliers left wondering if they'll ever get paid back. Justin and Zoe also catch up on the other big headlines, including the Brewers Association's (BA) 2026 mid-year report, with projected craft volume declines of 4%. They discuss why the news isn't all bad – with a majority of respondents reporting growth – and why it's not all good. The conversation shifts to Boston Beer's second-quarter results and Sun Cruiser's growing importance to the company's bottomline. They also explore Boston's growing fast-follower innovation strategy, including Rally Dog, a potential hard sports drink challenger brand. Plus, they touch on if beer companies might be walking back their opposition to the spirits industry's equalization efforts. Finally, seasonal creep is here and real as pumpkin beers are already popping up on store shelves. It's a quick, fun recap of the latest news. Listen here.