For years, we endured the plight of the Casamigos bro. You know the type. Follows CNBC on Instagram, owns enough Yeti to be a shareholder, sense of personal style contained entirely within the Vuori catalog. He would show up at bars and parties — who invited this guy? — and order a tequila and soda, and loudly call for Casamigos. Which would have been fine. There are better-tasting tequilas, more affordable tequilas, and better-tasting more affordable tequilas, but taste is a matter of taste. But then he would start talking about why he drinks Casamigos. And it would become very clear, very quickly, that it was because he’d read about George Clooney and his business partners selling the brand to Diageo for a billion dollars in 2017.
“That’s baller,” the Casamigos bro might say. “Truly epic. Want to see my Tesla?” Harrowing stuff.
Earlier this month, a new non-alcoholic beer brand called Crazy Mountain began a publicity push. “Crazy Mountain is a premium non-alc lager-style brew for those who want to live healthier without giving up the taste, ritual, camaraderie, and satisfaction of drinking a cold one,” announced a press release on March 9. It’s a very anodyne statement that nevertheless helped to garner an enormous amount of press. Just kidding: The mainstream media is not suddenly interested in the vagaries of one of the beer industry’s fastest-growing (albeit small) segments. Publications like Gear Patrol, USAToday, and People aggregated the brand launch because of how its headline was framed — or more specifically, who it was framed around.
“GEORGE CLOONEY, RANDE GERBER, AND MIKE MELDMAN INTRODUCE CRAZY MOUNTAIN,” it read. (Block caps theirs.) That’s right, bay-bee: The Casamigos amigos are back for one last non-alcoholic ride. Call it the Gang That Wouldn’t Drink Straight. Alert your local bro.
For months, trade insiders have chewed on rumors that this day would come. It was “among the beer business’ worst-kept secrets,” wrote Brewbound’s Justin Kendall last week. “Former New Belgium CEO and Beam Suntory executive Steve Fechheimer cryptically posted about the ‘Project Zero’ NA beer brand to LinkedIn several times over the last year, including announcing himself as CEO. He also made filings for the Crazy Mountain name with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in June.” In October 2025, the New York Post’s Page Six did a little beat-sweetening for itself, publishing a gauzy preview full of thought-terminating bromides like:
Rande, George and Mike didn’t disappear into retirement — they leaned into the life they’ve always lived. Between bike trips and late-night laughs, they have been quietly crafting something new: A non-alcoholic beer made for real friends, by real friends and the freedom to wake up ready for whatever comes next.
This is more or less the value proposition for every non-alcoholic beer on the market, minus “George.” And while the segment is just 1.63 percent of overall beer by dollars and 1.42 percent by volume, per off-premise scan data through Feb. 22 from market research firm Circana, there are a lot of them! Macrobrewers Anheuser-Busch InBev and Heineken have made huge strides to the top of the charts, where Michelob Ultra Zero and Heineken 0.0 are in a dogfight for the best-selling individual brand. (The latter leads in Circana-tracked off-premise dollar scans, the former in volume.) Constellation Brands’ Non-Alcoholic is a comer, and Molson Coors’ Peroni 0.0 is making a push, too.
Then there are the craft volume players. The venerable Athletic Brewing Company — the NA beer of choice for the Alo-and-Allbirds bro, a totally different strain — has the largest share of the segment of any brand family, boasting nearly a quarter of the market in Bump Williams Consulting’s analysis of the NIQ-scanned off-premise after Dry January 2026. On the strength of that performance, Athletic bought the old Ballast Point plant, and it’s now the eighth-largest craft brewer by volume in the country, according to the most recent volume data published by the Brewers Association. The third largest, Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, grew its Trail Pass NA brand by 10.6 percent NIQ-tracked dollars in Dry January, picking up 0.1 share of the segment in the process. No. 4 Tilray Brands is pushing an Athletic knock-off called Runner’s High (+345.9 percent dollars and +0.1 percent share in the same period); No. 11 Deschutes’ NA line is cooking (+38.6 percent, +0.5 percent); and No. 16 Rhinegeist’s NA Ghost duo was able to score 0.1 percent share in its first Dry January.
Lest we forget, there are also a bunch of startups that have jumped into the segment over the past few years. You’ve got Bero (2024), Best Day (2022), Go Brewing (2022), Wild AF (2025), Years (2024), and a bunch of others I’m probably forgetting. It’s not that the space is too crowded; some of these brands do decent business on small denominators. (Others, not so much.) The segment is still growing: +23.2 percent dollars and +25.7 percent volume in the 52 weeks through Feb. 22 in Circana scans. Not bad! But the viable long tail on distributed NA brands is shaping up to be considerably shorter than even, say, craft beer’s, which is currently shrinking. Grabbing ahold now, as the segment has already begun to consolidate around major players, is no sure bet. And if, as Clooney claimed in the press release, the Casamigos trio launched Crazy Mountain because “We love beer, we just don’t always want the effects that come with it,” well… there were already plenty of solutions to that problem.
(There was also already a Crazy Mountain Brewery, in Denver. It did not respond to a request for comment.)
But of course this is about the money. Be serious. If you sold a tequila brand to the world’s largest spirits conglomerate for 10 figures — or, in tequila parlance, Tres Comas — why wouldn’t you try your luck at another growing segment? (One reason: Diageo’s deal for Casamigos was hardly an unalloyed success, and compared to premium tequila, there’s a vanishingly small market for high-dollar NA M&A.) The Crazy Mountain team will benefit from an old hand in Fechheimer, whose career stops at NBB and Suntory Global Spirits have helped this upstart brand recruit top-tier talent from around the industry in advance of its rollout to around half the states in 2026. In addition to already-on direct-to-consumer sales, Crazy Mountain has signed Reyes Beverage Group, Keg 1, Columbia Distributing, Crescent Crown, Andrews Distributing, and Southern, per Brewbound’s Kendall; it is contracting production from NBB and Boulevard Brewing Co.
In response to detailed questions about the brand, a publicist for Crazy Mountain referred Hop Take to the press release and a fact sheet about the beers, Original and Original with Lime. What makes these beers — style unknown — different, according to the latter document, is that they are “Naturally Low Alcohol,” “Full Flavor Without Compromise,” “Crafted by Experts,” and “Lifestyle Driven.”
Can we be adults for a minute? What makes Crazy Mountain different is none of the above. It’s that Clooney is behind it. (Sure, Fechheimer, too, but with respect to his manifest experience, he can only do so much here.) Even then, it’s not a singular pitch! Several NA beer brands have hired endorsers or brought on “founders” plucked from the A-, B-, and C-lists of American white-guy celebrity. Bero is fronted by Tom Holland, of Spider-manning and Zendaya-husbanding fame; Wild AF was launched by notably sober jagoff Charlie Sheen; Years has a co-owner in bankable comedian John Mulaney; and so forth.
You could make the case that these stars pale in comparison to Danny Ocean, and I would stipulate. But this gets at a bigger challenge Crazy Mountain will face. Part of the reason Casamigos worked — and whatever you think of the liquid, it did work as a brand to no small extent — is because super-premium tequila was totally complementary to Clooney’s indelible idealization of sophisticated American masculinity. The spirit is coded wealthy, worldly, and understatedly macho; these are traits the actor has cultivated, on screen and off, for an entire generation. It can only be produced in Jalisco, a 3.5-hour flight from Los Angeles. (Hence, the Hollywood-oriented celebrity-tequila boom that followed Clooney and company’s cashout.) The frame-up was extremely comprehensible to Casamigos bros looking for their post-Jose Cuervo call.
Is the same true of Crazy Mountain? To my eye, no. The brand bears a very obvious resemblance to the Marlboro Man aesthetic, an overlap made all the more conspicuous by the fact that for years, Philip Morris operated the Marlboro Ranch in the foothills of Montana’s Crazy Mountains. It’s a funny inversion of the “alcohol is the new tobacco” caterwaul that industry boosters liked to harp on about when they were still worried that the federal public-health establishment might actually meaningfully regulate the sector. But does Clooney read “cowboy” to you? For that matter, does non-alcoholic beer read “cowboy” to you? Come on.
The actor does not appear in the brand’s consumer-facing marketing campaign, photos from which double as an awkward wraparound label for its cans. I doubt it would have worked to simply duplicate the so-iconic-it’s-cliché Casamigos imagery of Clooney and Gerber riding motorcycles through a Mexican agave field. But when a load-bearing portion of the value proposition is the brand’s red-carpet co-founder, his absence from the high-mountain collateral is conspicuous — especially given he now permanently resides in France. As a public-relations consultant told Fox News, “It opens him up to the charge that he’s strip-mining Americana for cash.” That’s red meat for the network’s right-wing base, sure, but it also elucidates the tension here.
Crazy Mountain may find a loyal audience, but it probably won’t be Clooney’s audience. And “Yellowstone’s” audience hates him. (Plus, now they’ve got Ultra Zero.) So who is going to drink this stuff? I guess we’ll find out.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
As leading illegal gambling platform prediction market Polymarket declared in announcing a bizarre new partnership with leading Nazi monetization platform email newsletter publisher Substack last month, “Journalism is better when it’s backed by live markets.” This is, of course, depravity-economy gobbledegook. But in early March, when Brewbound reported that Constellation Brands was planning to launch a “spiked apple refresher” called Good Peels, and Anheuser-Busch InBev announced the imminent release of Vicious Nectar, “a bold fruit-forward beer [with a] smooth, juicy, and balanced fruit profile” from Wicked Weed, I found myself wondering whether I might have left money on the table. After all, it was in this very column that I predicted that macrobrewers would take runs at both hard juice and apple-flavored alcopops just last year. Ethics, schmethics — I could’ve been rich!
📈 Ups…
Congratulations to journalist Brandon Hernández, the first-ever Yakima Valley Residency winner from North American Guild of Beer Writers x Yakima Tourism Board… Bigtime bev-alc wholesaler Breakthru Beverage Group is getting into hemp-derived THC distribution in Minnesota… Tilray Brands completed its acquisition of key BrewDog USA assets, including the firm’s Ohio brewery and hotel… The Michael James Jackson Foundation for Brewing & Distilling has issued over $600,000 in scholarship funding in its first five years of operation, per the org’s latest impact report…
📉 …and downs
Since Trump took office, the global aluminum price is up 30 percent, and the Midwest Premium price is up 365 percent, noted Brewers Association head honcho Bart Watson… BrewDog USA closed its swanky BeltLine pub in Atlanta last week, not quite four years since opening it… It also sent a memo to American “equity punks” letting them know their shares apply to BrewDog USA, Inc., which Tilray did not buy… The Beer Institute’s analysis of January 2026 tax-paids puts shipments down nearly 10 percent year-over-year…
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