This week, MillerCoors announced the closing of its Irwindale brewery which comes as no surprise for beer industry people. Pabst Brewing Co. has an option to purchase the brewery but their window to exercise this option is short. Pabst’s response might give the industry an insight of the brewer’s future. A day after the MC […]

One week into a new decade, the 20s, is for me, the start of my seventh decade in the beer industry. This might seem a little misleading as I started in the last year of the sixties and this is only the first year of the twenties.  It still works out, however, to seven decades! This […]

The interview process I experienced during the late 1980s for the general manager’s position at Coast Distributors was definitely unique. Although I spent the majority of the interview time with owner of Coast, I also had dinner with the GM’s three director reports:  the Director of Operations, the CFO, the Director of Sales, Jim Cline.  I was […]

Almost 50 years ago when the tobacco company Philip Morris was flushed with cash, they purchased the Miller Brewing Company. Miller immediately had access to PM’s marketing expertise along with the resources necessary to attack the beer industry. Miller created Miller Lite just as the baby boomers were turning 21, and the rest is history. […]

In the early 1980s, Stroh Brewing Company purchased the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company.  Stroh quickly reduced market support in an effort to revise Schlitz’s downward trend.  At the time, marketing was limited to media, p-o-s (point-of-sale), and price supports.  Although Schlitz had been declining prior to being bought by Stroh, once Stroh took over, Schlitz’s decline accelerated, and […]

My first assignment, 20 years ago when I joined Glazer’s, was to oversee the statewide rollout of New Belgium for which the distribution rights had been awarded to Glazer’s. Texas was New Belgium’s fourth state with the brewer already having a presence in Arizona, New Mexico, and of course, Colorado.  Glazer’s felt that New Belgium […]

During my tenure as the head of U.S. operations for Warsteiner, the German management team attempted to centralize global marketing and decision making for the brewery. This was a time consuming process which required me to make multiple trips to Germany for face-to-face meetings with the owner and her team.  While we disagreed on many issues, […]

Last week it was announced that the boutique wine, spirit, and beer company, Artisanal Beverage Distributor, is being acquired by Ben E. Keith in Dallas. The small, successful portfolio of Artisanal will ensure BEK’s ability to build their new spirit division in the distributor’s non-AB footprint markets across the state of Texas.  Artisanal Beverage was […]

The SMU football team is currently undefeated and ranked 16th in the nation. As college football fans know, the SMU program was given the death penalty during the mid-1980s for numerous NCAA violations. For over 39 years, the SMU football program suffered severely from that penalty and each year brought the school another losing season. […]

From the 1960s until the early 1980s, when a brewery team announced an upcoming crew drive, it typically meant one thing: the brewery was out to get the wholesaler. The brewery team’s purpose was to document deficiencies within the wholesaler, including out of date beer, out of stock beer, and distribution gaps. Depending upon the […]