Some changes have been going on in the craft beer world, with a wave of corporate buyouts. Not too shocking - the latest one was Golden Road being bought by InBev. Golden Road is kind of a middle-of-the-road, corporate-ish brewery so not too suprising. Smiller thought the Lagunitas one was the most surprising. But an insider type pointed out the me that being bought out by Heineken is at least a little different in the sense that it's family-owned and that they only make two other beers: Heineken and (augh) Heineken light. I guess the Lagunitas deal was a half a billion dollars. The president of Golden Road was quoted as saying "this wasn't a sellout deal for me". It's nice you can just declare that.
As I mentioned, there was 10 Barrel at TBD because of the InBev connection. That meant I had access to a good IPA, but it also maybe meant that local breweries got shut out. InBev is all about profit, it's not like they are nice guys who want to help the industry in general. I work with a guy who worked for Budweiser in the past and he was like "well, there's another beer I'll never drink".
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