Every once in a while in the American beer business, there comes along a truly groundbreaking new product. Corona almost single-handedly created the Mexican import segment in the ‘80s. Four Loko almost single-handedly created a national crisis in the aughts. Twisted Tea has been around since 2001, but it has only hit its stride more recently — and what a stride it is. It’s one of those groundbreaking products. Liit, a new hard tea line extension from an old also-ran brand, is not. But when the game is stealing share and stacking cash, you follow the leader.
Last August, Canadian cannabis conglomerate Tilray Brands acquired eight beverage marques from Brazilian Bud Light-bungler Anheuser-Busch InBev. The fire sale included a bunch of craft breweries from the macrobrewer’s gluttonous, 10-figure-ish buying spree of the 2010s, a mothballed energy drink line, and Shock Top.
Shock Top! The beer, a brazen, decade-late knockoff of Blue Moon, first hit shelves in 2006, peaked in 2017, and had been hemorrhaging volume ever since, at least according to off-premise scan data analyzed by Brewbound when news of the sale broke last summer. Who would actually acquire Shock Top in 2023? And why?
It’s the very question I tried to answer with VinePair managing editor Tim McKirdy, who joined the Taplines podcast (subscribe, leave a review, tell your friends, thank you) a week after the deal was announced for a special episode to work out the potential implications of a Tilray-backed Shock Top future. He hypothesized that the
