Just when you thought the year in beer couldn’t get any weirder, a small brewpub in suburban Chicago buys one of the country’s biggest and best-known brands—from the company that bought it for $1 billion just four years ago.
The announcement that heretofore unknown Kings & Convicts Brewing Co. (Highwood, Illinois) would buy Ballast Point from Constellation Brands is, on the face of it, the year’s most bizarre piece of industry news. On closer inspection, once the situation is better understood, the news is … still pretty weird. Let’s take a look.
Kings & Convicts is so small that most beer geeks in Chicago hadn’t heard of it until now. Last year it made 550 barrels of beer, according to data from the Brewer Association. Ballast Point, meanwhile, is on pace to sell a bit more than 200,000 barrels—down from its peak of about 430,000 barrels in 2016. It looks like a minnow swallowing a whale.