Talking “Craft Beer Sellouts” with the Guy Who Wrote the Book on Them

Interesting interview with Josh Nash, the Chicago Tribune reporter who wrote Barrel-Aged Stout And Selling Out: Goose Island, Anheuser-Busch, And How Craft Beer Became Big Business.  Among other things, he thinks “from the outside it looks like A-B bought their first craft brewery in 2011 and went on to buy nine more, but it’s not that simple. And I didn’t realize until I dug in that there was a really profound evolution within that company since they bought Goose Island.

“They didn’t know what they were doing at the beginning. And I think they’ve figured it out. To their credit, these guys are some of the most brilliant business people in the world. I think they figured it out certainly more than they haven’t.”

Nash thinks it’s important people know where their beer comes from, that A-B is betting on a strategy of a multiplicity of brands, not of breweries.  Read the interview here, from The Takeout.