Acquisitions and Their Aftermath
When Corporations Buy Craft Breweries
Corporations have been buying craft breweries at least since 2011, when AB InBev acquired Goose Island. Lagunitas (Heineken), Ballast Point (Constellation Brands), Camden Town, and Birra del Borgo (AB InBev) followed. Under the US definition, such breweries lose their craft status—though their beer can still be good.
Which craft breweries belong to corporations today?
The list of notable acquisitions is long. In 2011, AB InBev, the world's largest brewing conglomerate, bought Chicago's Goose Island. In September 2015, Heineken acquired half of California's Lagunitas, then the fifth-largest craft brewery in the US; the other half followed in May 2017. Also in 2015, Constellation Brands, the US distributor of Corona and Modelo, paid a billion dollars for San Diego's Ballast Point.
Pioneers in Europe changed hands too. AB InBev bought Camden Town in London in December 2015, for a reported £85 million, and Birra del Borgo in Italy in April 2016. Heineken took a minority stake in London's Beavertown in 2018 and agreed to full acquisition in 2022. In 2019, London's venerable Fuller's sold its beer business to Asahi for £250 million, while keeping its pubs under the original company.
Why do brewing conglomerates buy craft brands?
The reasons work both ways. Large brewing groups mainly sell pale lagers in enormous volumes. A craft brand brings them recipes, know-how in hops and barrel aging, and a customer base willing to pay more for a bottle. Developing a new style from scratch takes years; buying an existing brewery is faster.
Sellers, in turn, gain capital and access to distribution networks a small brewery could never build on its own: supermarkets in every state, export warehouses, their own truck fleets. Some founders want to step back, others want to grow. Financial investors get in too, without brewing themselves. The investment firm TSG Consumer Partners, for instance, bought a 22 percent stake in BrewDog in 2017 for around $265 million.
What happens after a craft brewery is acquired?
The stories vary widely. Ballast Point is the clearest case of a failed deal: four years after the billion-dollar purchase, Constellation sold the brand to the small Illinois brewery Kings & Convicts in December 2019, for around $41 million. Anchor in San Francisco belonged to Japan's Sapporo from 2017 and closed in July 2023. In May 2024, entrepreneur Hamdi Ulukaya bought the brewery, though it had not reopened as of June 2026.
Other brands carried on fine under new ownership. Goose Island has released its Bourbon County Stout every year since the takeover and now sells in far more countries than before. Within the scene itself, sales sparked strong reactions. When AB InBev bought Camden Town, BrewDog pulled its beers from its own bars. Many fans see a sale as a betrayal of the whole idea of standing up to the big players.
Is beer from corporate-owned breweries worse than craft beer?
Not automatically. The Brewers Association's definition describes size and ownership, not quality. By that standard, Goose Island has not been a craft brewer since 2011, even though often the same people brew the same recipes in the same brewhouse. A corporation can even improve quality, through better labs and cold chains, for instance. But it can also simplify recipes to cut costs. What actually happens is rarely visible from the outside.
Germany shows that the line was never entirely clear-cut. Braufactum, one of Germany's first craft brands, was a Radeberger Gruppe project from the very start. Anyone wanting to know a beer's true origin should read the fine print: if the label says 'brewed for' instead of 'brewed by,' the beer comes from a different facility. Company registries and annual reports reveal the actual owners. But in the end, the verdict on taste is reached in the glass, not in the corporate register.