Death to chains: "MillerCoors Buys Out Oregon Brewery With History of Sexism Scandal."

It probably comes as no surprise that a multinational brewer accustomed to unprincipled pillage would be utterly titillated at the prospect of such a beer.

From January, 2014:

"Mouth Raper," a Horrible Idea for a Beer Name, by Shannon Finnell (Eugene Weekly)

And you thought "Double D Blond" was eyeroll-worthy. Hop Valley got some bad press when Rebecca Rose of Jezebel wrote about a post from Beervana's Jeff Alworth that claimed the real name of Hop Valley's "Mr. IPA" is "Mouth Raper." Alworth cited an alias page from ratebeer.com as proof, and a commenter added that she'd looked up the brew on Untapped after seeing it on Twitter as "Mouth Raper," and all the reviews there listed that as its name.

This makes Indiana's legendary Leg Spreader sound positively quaint -- but has MillerCoors made an offer for Route 2 Brews?

MillerCoors Buys Out Oregon Brewery With History of Sexism Scandal, by Martin Cizmar (Willamette Week)

They Now Own a Majority Stake In The Maker of "Mouth Raper"

There have been two very hot topics in the world of craft beer over the past few years.

First, there are the buy-outs.

Today, Oregon had another one. The Brewbound blog reports that a majority stake in Hop Valley has been acquired by MillerCoors for an undisclosed sum. The purchase follows on the heels of 10 Barrel, Ballast Point, Elysian and Lagunitas being bought for massive sums of money. In the case of Ballast Point, a billion dollars.

But unlike those other breweries, there will be no mourning period for Hop Valley. They make very, very average beer with shiny packaging. It's the IPA your mom brings over for dinner because she knows you like hoppy beers and it says "hop" right there on the label.

Nikos Ridge, co-owner of Ninkasi, another Eugene Brewery, did throw a little shade, which will likely be the last you hear of it.

"We are always disappointed when a member of the craft industry becomes part of one of the big two macrobreweries," Ridge told the Register-Guard. "The craft industry was built on being the antithesis of big beer, and has been competing successfully with the global conglomerates for the last 30 years."

But there is a second big issue in play over the past few years: the increasing awareness of sexism in craft beer ...

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Trojan Cigar?

At first it seemed like a nice, conventional public courtship among capitalists.

Anheuser-Busch interested in buying Tampa’s Cigar City Brewing, by James L. Rosica (Tampa Tribune)

TAMPA — If you can’t beat ’em, buy’ em.

Despite its snarky Budweiser ad during the Super Bowl poking fun at craft beer, Anheuser-Busch has been steadily buying craft breweries around the country.

Could Tampa’s own Cigar City Brewing be next?

Founder and owner Joey Redner on Friday confirmed that the beer company’s representatives have reached out to him about buying his Tampa-based business.

Of course, every article in America must include those accursed words. Damn it, Rosica, STOP "REACHING OUT" BEFORE I TEAR OFF YOUR ARM."

Meanwhile, Cigar City's owner says it's much ado about nothing, and all he wanted was a chance to drink some nice Scotch on the monolith's tab.

Cigar City selling to Anheuser-Busch? Not likely, owner says, by Laura Reiley (Tampa Bay Times)

TAMPA — It's a tempest in a beer can. At the end of 2014, Anheuser-Busch InBev purchased 10 Barrel Brewing Co. of Bend, Ore. In January, it announced it was purchasing Seattle-based Elysian Brewing Co. And now Anheuser-Busch, the world's largest brewer with 25 percent global market share, is sniffing around Tampa's Cigar City Brewing.

Joey Redner, the founder and owner of Cigar City, says yes, he took a meeting. But he says local beer drinkers shouldn't be worried.

Perhaps Redner saw the Pour Fool's open letter.

Cigar City vs. AB: An Open Letter to Joey Redner, by Steve Foolbody (Pour Fool)

 ... Sooner or later, some brewery owner is going to stare down the barrel of one of those prohibitive buy-out offers from Anheuser Busch or AB/InBev or whatever that pack o’ vermin is calling itself this week and they’re going to think beyond the planetary-scale impact such dollars will have on their own bank accounts and realize that pulling the trigger on this deal, while making that villa in the Bahamas a lot more feasible, is also going to sentence them personally and their staffs to forever being considered sell-outs and greedheads and douche-nozzles by many, many of the same people they saw come into their taprooms and growler stations when they were just starting out. It will permanently remove them from serious consideration when American craft beer fans speak of the country’s great breweries. Because the instant the last curlicue at the end of their signature trails out on that sales agreement, that brewery is no longer a part of that booming American phenomenon called “Craft Beer”. It cannot be. Because it is now nothing more than a regional outpost for corporate greed, bean-counting, arrogance, and Money Is Everything thinking.

Beautiful: "Pack o’ vermin."

So true ... so true.

Diary: On the Gooseislandization of 10 Barrel Brewing by the aesthetic assassins at AB-InBev.

Who gives a flying fuck?

10 Barrel's dead as Monty Python's parrot. Find a cheap preacher, pay your respects and bring flowers. Then move on.

10 Barrel's just Zombie "Craft" now.

It's Trojan Ten Barrel.

Don't confuse me with someone who gives a fuck.

You see, back before the beer narcissists were born, we had a revolution to take beer back from the grimy corporatist likes of AB-InBev, which has been, and always will be, the foremost enemy of better beer in this world, as we know it.

Obviously, AB-InBev has the ample resources to buy its way to alleged respectability. Just as obviously, this is the fundamental problem, because money cannot buy authenticity. Even more obviously, drinkers of better beer have hundreds -- nay, thousands -- of legitimate small breweries to choose from, ones that have not been irrevocably bastardized by association (and ownership) with a company that's the closest thing to a Great Beer Satan as we're likely to see in this world ... as we know it.

If you doubt it, do some cursory research on AB-InBev's repellant company history as a symbol of everything wrong with beer and capitalism. It ain't pretty, and I'm sorry if it steps all over your sense of entitlement. Appeasing it does not change the paradigm.

You see, selling one's soul isn't about gray areas. When you sell your soul, you sell your soul. That's what this is about, and whenever possible, in a probably doomed effort to hold onto what tiny bits of soul I may as yet possess, I try not to hand my money over to those who've sold theirs. It's as simple as that. Better beer owes its existence to pride, ideas and principles .. to its very soul.

Sacrifice the soul and you're handing over the revolution to the very same soulless vampires it was fought against in the first place.

It's as simple as that.

10 Barrel's unfortunate demise signals yet again AB-InBev's dull intent to buy what it cannot create. Fortunately, 3,000 other breweries remain that are small, local and real. Pick a few, enjoy their beers, and give your soul some nourishment. Be local. Case closed.

Rest in peace, 10 Barrel Brewing. I'm sure your beers were great, but you're dead now. Who gives a fuck? 

Let's have a better beer, shall we?

Big Red Liquors pursues its monopoly in Indianapolis. Someone fetch me my musket.

Talk to NABC that way, and the Curmudgeon will write about it - now, tomorrow, and forever more, until an apology is forthcoming.

Here's to you, Glum John. Another year has almost passed, so make it ten.

Nine years later, and absolute power still corrupts Big Red Liquors absolutely.

Just last year, the cold war came close to flaring. Seems Glum John forgot his place.

Big Red's intent to stock NABC is an intolerable provocation.

But hostilities were averted.

Truce in our time.

Now the fascistic monopolists are at it again, this time seeking a stranglehold on the Indianapolis market. Time for another Lincoln Brigade.

Big Red acquires United Package Liquors, by Scott Olson (Indianapolis Business Journal)

Bloomington-based Big Red Liquors is expanding into Indianapolis by acquiring the assets of United Package Liquors Inc. and taking over operations of the chain’s 24 local stores.

Terms of the transaction, announced Monday afternoon, were not disclosed.

Under the agreement, the United Package stores will operate under the banner of Big Red. Big Red will sign long-term leases for all locations with Indianapolis-based LOR Corp, a local real estate development firm that owns the United Package chain.

Big Red, founded in 1972, already owns and operates 25 stores in south-central Indiana, including 13 in Bloomington, and plans to open three additional locations this year in the Indianapolis area, the company said.

Old news item: Goose Island completely annexed, entirely absorbed by AB-Inbev.

Is the craft beer world coming to an end?

No, it isn’t. Actually, it’s starting to make a bit more sense. Like theories of tectonic plates and continental drift, the beer categories are slowly separating by money, just as the capitalist system insists they should.

Most of us will concede that we’re for sale. We may be more or less interested in negotiating a price, but we’re still for sale. It is neither a moral nor ethical discussion. It’s just reality. Having acknowledged it, you may breathe a sigh of relief, because few of us are sufficiently valuable to attract the big bucks.

Value is a very funny thing, indeed. As the stories began circulating about the $38 million Goose Island deal, our local newspapers were reporting about a proposed real estate development on New Albany’s riverfront totaling investments of $43 million.

While most of Craft Beer Nation rushed to the ramparts to defend Goose Island’s honor before even knowing the dimensions of the story, I was thinking: Wow, even factoring in the previous investment shares in distribution … $38 million for 127,000 barrels, compared to $43 million for a parking garage, plaza, condos and commercial space … geez; what does it all mean, anyway?

Should I have gone into real estate instead?

Look, this isn’t Einstein. Goose Island’s owners sold out – note I’m not saying they’re “sell-outs”, which means something else in popular culture terms, but isn’t appropriate here. They sold business interests in a somewhat open market, and in doing so, they became transformed from an entity that interests me to one that no longer does. It is nothing personal. It is nothing at all. It just is what it is, which is true.

What does it mean to craft beer? Very little in the larger sense, because there are several hundred of us prepared to fill the gap and keep the flag in the sir.

However, it must be conceded that AB-Inbev surely intends to use this erstwhile craft toy to aggressively combat the interests of craft beer in the venues where its money buys space on the top shelf, whether by hoarding shelf space in supermarkets or engaging in the usual concessionaire’s extortion in closed settings like airports and stadiums.

This means that we’ll have a better beer choice, somewhere, in the form of ex-craft, its placement achieved by business as usual, which we generally loathe – and rightly so.

Will you still drink Goose Island, now that the money flies to a board room somewhere overseas? That’s your decision.

If it’s the only choice before the jet way rolls back, will I swallow hard and fork over ten bucks for 16 ounces of Honkers?

Honestly, I don’t know.

Has something died?

Yes. Then again, death is a necessary part of life.