Japanese beverage conglomerate Asahi Group Holdings had to halt production at its domestic plants following a cyber-attack that crippled its systems on 29 September. A company spokesperson confirmed on 30 September that production has not resumed and that there is no foreseeable timeline for operations to restart. The incident has brought production of iconic products, such as Asahi Super Dry beer, Nikka Whisky, and Mitsuya Cider, to a standstill. Asahi operates 30 beer, beverage, and food production plants in Japan.
The Japanese brewer is the latest victim of a cyber-attack: Previous targets included Australia’s brewer Lion (2020), Molson Coors and Spanish Damm (2021), Belgium’s Duvel Moortgat (2024) and Germany’s Oettinger (in May this year). These attacks became publicly known. It is highly likely that there have been more ransomware attacks on breweries. However, more often than not the victims decide to settle extortion demands quietly.
It is too early to say who is behind the attack. State-backed criminals from Russia, North Korea to China increasingly target manufacturers to cause strategic disruption. But the gang of four, which calls itself Scattered Spider and is believed to have been behind the high-profile attacks on UK retailers M&S and the Co-op earlier this year, is hardly out of school and has no such connections. Its members include a 20-year-old woman and three male teenagers, all from the UK.
Michelob Ultra unseated Modelo as best-selling beer in the US in retail channels in the 52 weeks ended 14 September, parent company AB-InBev announced on 22 September, citing data from Circana. The light lager is also the top seller in bars and restaurants, according to Nielsen IQ data for the 52 weeks ended 12 July. For AB-InBev, Michelob Ultra’s triumph reverses the company’s malaise from two years ago, when Modelo Especial dethroned Bud Light following a conservative backlash over the flagship beer’s partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Bud Light had previously held the title as the top-selling beer in the US for more than two decades. Modelo’s declining sales come as Constellation faces major challenges to its business, including President Donald Trump’s tariffs on aluminium and weaker demand from Hispanic consumers.
Heineken will acquire FIFCO’s beverage and retail business in a deal valued at about USD 3.2 billion in cash, the firms announced on 23 September. FIFCO, which makes beers, wines, non-alcoholic beverages and food, manages five production plants and 13 distribution centres across Central America, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and the United States. It exports to more than ten countries. Heineken will gain ownership of Costa Rica’s century-old beer brand Imperial, as well as a soft drink business with its own brands and a PepsiCo bottling license. This transaction builds on a long-standing partnership that began in 1986 and was deepened in 2002 when Heineken acquired a 25 percent stake in FIFCO’s beverages business in Costa Rica. Heineken said the deal will strengthen its position across attractive Central American growth markets which have large and expanding profit pools. The Costa Rican business alone has an operating profit margin of 24 percent, compared with the Heineken Group’s 15 percent.
What will become of Genesee Brewing after FIFCO’s sale to Heineken? The deal explicitly excludes FIFCO USA, based in Rochester, New York. Established as North American Breweries by the New York City investment firm KPS Capital Partners to manage its brewery acquisitions, including Genesee Brewing Company, as well as craft brewers Pyramid and Magic Hat, the company has been owned by FIFCO since December 2012. In 2018, the company changed to its present name.
Heineken’s CEO Dolf van den Brink did not mince words about his lack of interest in FIFCO USA. That is “not the part we’re interested in,” he told investors, as reported by the trade publication Beer Marketer’s Insights. “Our strategy in the US is focused on premium, and we have no interest in getting exposure to the mainstream segment in the US,” he said.
Moosehead Breweries will no longer sell beer in bottles. Its entire product line will move to cans and kegs, with the final run of bottles taking place in December. “When I started in the beer business 32 years ago, 90 percent of the beer that was sold in Canada was sold in bottles,” said Andrew Oland, Moosehead Breweries’ President and CEO. “Now it’s seven percent of beer sold in bottles, and 85 percent is sold in cans.”
Observers wonder if this pivot is triggered by Canadian beer drinkers – or if it is because breweries are favouring cans, which are a more cost-efficient way of packaging beer? Cans are also easier for retailers to move, stack and shelve, and they do not break, so there is less mess for stores to clean up. Besides, cans provide more opportunity for creative packaging and look better on the shelf.
But there is a looming dent in the can business: tariffs. In June, US President Donald Trump doubled tariffs on steel and aluminium to 50 percent, which increased the cost of cans by 200 percent for Canadian brewers. If that 200 percent cost increase sustains itself for an extended period, observers expect bottled beer will not disappear completely from Canadian shelves.
Royal Swinkels buys into Kenya’s Sierra Brewery. While its plans for a new brewery in Zimbabwe have been put on hold, the privately-owned Dutch brewer Royal Swinkels has bought a stake in Kenya’s first craft brewery, Sierra Premium, as part of a joint venture with South Africa’s Signal Hill Products, people with knowledge of the matter said. Sierra, also known as Sierra Brewery and Restaurant, was founded in 2006 by Alan Murungi, a Kenyan entrepreneur. Since October 2024, Swinkels has its malt-based canned carbonated soft drink Bavaria Smalt locally produced in a partnership with Sierra.
Although there has been no official announcement, posts on Linkedin say that Sierra has become a subsidiary of Signal Hill Products (Signal Hill), a South African holding firm, which entered the South African beer industry in 2012 with the craft beer brand Devil’s Peak, initially brewed near Cape Town. It recently opened a USD 58 million production facility near Johannesburg with a capacity to produce 2 million hl of beer and beverages annually. While the plant manufactures several of Signal Hill’s core products, a major focus will be on Strongbow cider.
Once a beer, now a whisky. Darling Brew, an award-winning, carbon-neutral South African brewery, has broken new ground: This time, not with a beer, but with a boutique whisky. In a move that blends sustainability and ingenuity, it has launched Reminisce, a limited-edition five-year-old malt whisky, distilled entirely from beer, and the first of its kind in South Africa. The idea to distil beer into whisky was born out of necessity. When the South African government banned alcohol during the covid lockdown and beer sales were halted, Darling Brew faced a dilemma: what to do with pallets of beer that could no longer reach consumers? Instead of dumping it, they collaborated with a local master distiller, George Dalla Cia, best known for his work in grappa, brandy and eau-de-vie. Though this marked his first foray into whisky, he was immediately intrigued by the challenge.
Just 600 hand-bottled, hand-labelled, and hand-numbered bottles have been released. They are available from Darling Brew’s website, costing ZAR 3000 (USD 175) per 750 ml bottle, and select specialist outlets, as well as through premium whisky clubs.
SAB must not call its girlie drink Brutal Fruit “demi-sec”. They have been around for decades, but only now are brewers’ fizzy girlie drinks seriously taking off – so much so that Heineken and AB-InBev have been locking horns over the descriptive term “demi-sec”. Heineken had argued that the use of “demi-sec” – a term formally recognised in South African liquor regulations as denoting a semi-sweet sparkling wine – misrepresented Brutal Fruit as a wine-based product, whereas in fact it is a RTD, reportedly brewed from fermented grain. The Advertising Regulatory Board (ARB) upheld Heineken’s complaint and ordered AB-InBev’s local unit South African Breweries (SAB) to withdraw the descriptor from its advertising immediately.
Brutal Fruit uncannily looks like Heineken’s Bernini Blush, a rosé-coloured wine-based spritzer. The Bernini brand fell into Heineken’s hands following its acquisition of drinks firm Distell. Distell launched Bernini in the 1990s already. These drinks do not come cheap. A 6-pack (275 ml each) retails at about USD 5.50.
SAB’s lipstick-pink Brutal Fruit Spritzer is one of the most popular alcohol brands in the country with women. Developed by the former SABMiller in 2002, it has since become a cultural phenomenon, known for its feminine persona and focus on empowering women.
There seems to be no end to the “Mediterranean lagers UK controversy” – a veritable hullabaloo, whipped up by the British media, over the marketing of lagers like Madrí Excepcional (Molson Coors) and Birra Moretti (Heineken), which heavily evoke a foreign heritage despite being brewed in the UK. Critics grumble that these beers are overpriced “fakes”, given their often bogus heritage and local production. Many of the so-called international lager brands are actually locally produced. But Molson Coors’ Madrí is “the biggest lulu”, says the beer writer Roger Protz. Although it claims to capture “el alma” (the soul) of Madrid, it did not exist until five years ago and has never been brewed in Spain, let alone Madrid. Yet it shares the same sanguine-red label of the real Spanish lagers, which allows it to blend in with them on pub bars and supermarket shelves. It has proven a smash hit.
No doubt, Molson Coors will be fanning the flames with its latest offering, a Monte Carlo lager (who knew that the tax haven even had a brewery?). The 4.8 percent ABV lager was created specifically for the UK and is produced at Molson Coors’ macrobreweries in Burton and Tadcaster. It has been available in draught format in select venues since August. The launch of a 330 ml bottled version is set for October.
Having conquered the UK with its Madrí, Molson Coors seems to have set its eyes on France and found a partner in the Monaco start-up Monte Carlo Beer. Established in 2019 by local entrepreneurs William Scheffer and Anthony Orengo, their beers – a blonde ale, an amber ale, and an IPA (but no lager) – are available in Monaco and along the French Riviera. They are produced near Nice in France, reports say.
The rise of Mediterranean-style beers is an advertising success story; a victory of image over reality. As to whether their upward sales trajectory is sustainable – or another beer trend will eventually come along to supplant it – is an open question. However, the fact that these brands are able to charge premium prices, at a time when consumers are facing a cost-of-living crisis, suggests Brits will be lifting pints of mainly domestically-brewed “Mediterranean” lagers and dreaming of the Med (even if they can’t afford to go there) for some time yet.
The UK pub operator and brewer Greene King broke ground on a new, state-of-the-art brewery outside of Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, marking the start of a GBP 40 million (USD 54 million) construction project. The move from its historic Westgate brewery in the scenic centre of Bury St Edmunds aims to modernise its operations and reduce its environmental impact. Locals, particularly those who live in the rather posh town centre, which has an 18th century grid system of narrow streets, will probably toast the old brewery’s eventual closure with champagne.
The new brewery is expected to come on-stream in 2027. Whether Greene King will completely vacate its Westgate Brewery, where it has been brewing cask ales for over 200 years and also operates a small microbrewery, is not clear. Media reports differ on that issue. The company also owns the Belhaven Brewery, Scotland’s oldest working brewery, which was established in 1719.
What is clear is that its old brewery (with a capacity between 500,000 hl and nearly 1 million hl beer per year) has become too large for its current needs and probably too costly to run. Insiders estimate that the publicised investment would buy Greene King installations with a capacity of 150,000 hl beer per year. This reflects the fact that in the past 40 years the production of beer in the UK has halved.
CAMRA, the real ale enthusiasts’ group, cancelled Britain’s biggest beer festival amid an existential crisis. The decision came after this year’s events failed to attract enough visitors to cover the rising cost of running CAMRA, accommodating the volunteers who run the event, and hiring venues. Instead, CAMRA made a “substantial loss”. The group, which was founded in 1971 and has 145,000 members, said it would launch a three-year strategy and review its internal budgets to ensure its financial viability.
Carlsberg is exploring an IPO for its Indian unit. The time seems to be right as Carlsberg India had a robust financial year 2024 with revenues of approximately INR 80 billion (USD 910 million). Results for its financial year 2025, ending March 2025, are not available yet. Media say that the brewer has begun talks with potential advisers about an initial public offering (IPO) of its Indian unit, which contributes about 4 percent to group profits (EBIT). Based on peer comparisons, analysts value the subsidiary between USD 3.3 billion and USD 4.2 billion, assuming a 45x EV/EBIT multiple in line with Heineken-controlled United Breweries.
Indian beverage companies command premium valuations. United Spirits (controlled by Diageo) trades at 40x EV/EBIT versus Diageo’s 13x, United Breweries at 38x against Heineken’s 11x. In contrast, Carlsberg Group currently trades on 13x EV/EBIT, it was reported.
The company holds a 21 percent share of the Indian beer market behind United Breweries. In the second quarter of 2024, Carlsberg bought out its joint-venture partner, removing investment constraints, particularly around brewing capacity and marketing.
Brau Union at court: “We are dominated by Heineken”. Faced with a potential fine of billions of euros if found guilty of market power abuses, Dutch Heineken is trying to distance itself from its fully-owned Austrian subsidiary Brau Union. Representatives from both Heineken and Brau Union insisted at the Vienna cartel court on 8 September that the Austrian market leader can act autonomously and freely. Austrian media wonder: Is this plausible?
In this widely-covered case, BWB accuses Brau Union of putting pressure on its distributors to exclusively purchase its beers and beverages and not carry competitors’ products. Otherwise, they are threatened with “consequences”. The competition watchdog’s accusations were confirmed by a now bankrupt wholesaler in his six-hour-long, emotional and teary testimony in June. Brau Union denies the allegations.
The first witness in September was Bart van den Huijsen, Managing Director of Heineken’s European region. His message: the parent company is not responsible, as Heineken is committed to decentralisation. The next witness was one of Brau Union’s Managing Directors, Viktor Gillhofer, who had already been working for the brewing group before the Heineken takeover in 2003. He reiterated that Brau Union takes its own decisions and is “customer-oriented”. In court, BWB presented him with an internal email, sent to him by Brau Union’s legal counsel and obtained during the search of Brau Union’s premises in 2022. The counsel had written: “We are controlled by Heineken.” The Managing Director replied that he cannot remember seeing the correspondence.
Belgian nobles cut their stake in AB-InBev’s anchor holding. A significant number of shares in AB-InBev’s Belgian anchor holding Eugénie Patri Sébastien (EPS) was withdrawn in 2024. A generation gap between the Belgian shareholders is part of the reason for their departure. “The younger generations no longer drink alcohol. They have issues with a brewery,” explains the journalist Wolfgang Riepl in an article for the Belgian business magazine Trends (4 September). Add to their moral concerns about alcohol the brewer’s lacklustre share price and its dependence on organic growth after decades of spectacular takeovers and you can probably find more explanations for their departure.
Official documents show that in 2024, the number of shares in EPS (which corresponds to the number of shares in AB-InBev) fell to 399 million, from 465 million in 2023 – a decrease of 13 percent or 66.5 million shares. The value of EPS’ balance sheet dropped by almost EUR 4 billion (USD 4.7 billion) to EUR 22.9 billion. Mr Riepl believes that the shares have not been sold yet. But since they are no longer consolidated in EPS, the Belgians’ combined stake in AB-InBev fell from 23.6 percent (2023) to 19.7 percent (2024). Worries about the Belgian aristocrats’ losing control of AB-InBev are premature. Together with the other anchor holding, BRC, by the Brazilian families, they still control 38.5 percent of the brewer’s shares.
Diageo closes Crown Royal bottling plant in Amherstburg, Ontario. Operations will cease in February next year, as Diageo will shift some bottling volume to the US and bottling for Canadian consumers to its plant in Valleyfield, Quebec. The decision is part of its USD 625 million cost-saving programme, Accelerate, over the next three years. Local union and government representatives said they will plead with Diageo to keep the bottling plant in Amherstburg open and save some 200 jobs. Canadian whisky Crown Royal remains one of Diageo’s strongest brands, but most of that demand is in the US, where Crown Royal is among the top-selling whiskeys/whiskies.