This is no country for old breweries. Beer sales are down, contract capacity is plentiful, and urban real estate is valuable. Enormous, inefficient, and ill-positioned to serve the cities and markets they helped build, the legacies of America’s agéd brewhouses are in jeopardy all over the country. A resilient few still churn out beer; the rest have been converted to condos or bulldozed entirely, their once-proud brands sold off to become contract-brewed zombies or unceremoniously scrapped. So it goes — and so it’s going at Leinenkugel’s.
Last week, the Jacob Leinenkugel Brewing Company in Chippewa Falls, Wis. closed after 157 years in operation. This was not a sudden shutdown: Molson Coors (MC), which has, via the since-merged Miller Brewing Company, owned the firm since 1988, announced its plans to idle the plant and move production of its beers to its larger, more modern facility in Milwaukee, four hours southeast. The Chicago-based conglomerate has said that it plans to hang onto Leinie’s big red brewhouse (which today stands on the same spring-fed site that Jacob himself selected for his eponymous brewery back in 1867) and operate it as a pilot facility.
“We’re incredibly proud of Leinie’s, the many people in Chippewa Falls who built this brand into what it is today, and what it will continue to be for years to come, a true Wisconsin beer beloved by people across the country,” MC spokesperson Adam Collins told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel last week. The company did not respond to Hop Take’s request for comment.
Members of the Leinenkugel family aren’t feeling the love. Last week, fifth-generation shandyman Dick Leinenkugel posted an open letter to social media lamenting the parent company’s decision and beseeching it to reconsider a proposal from him and his brother, Jake, to sell the Chippewa Falls property and potentially the Leinie brand back to the family, rather than turn it into just another undifferentiated asset in its global portfolio. The Leinenkugels suggested a non-disclosure agreement with MC to put chief executive Gavin Hattersley at ease to speak freely about potential outcomes; they say that offer was rebuffed, and a follow-up remained unanswered a week later.
“We remain optimistic that Molson Coors’ leadership will reconsider our proposal and engage in meaningful discussions about safeguarding this important part of our heritage,” reads the Leinenkugels’ open letter. (Dick did not respond to a request for comment.)
That optimism isn’t totally unwarranted. By now, a major macrobrewer cutting bait on a struggling craft-brewing acquisition is de rigueur, and MC’s fellow macrobrewers have assuaged some of their buyer’s remorse by flipping brewhouse keys back to their original owners. Anheuser-Busch InBev did that with Appalachian Mountain Brewery in 2023; Constellation Brands did likewise with both Funky Buddha and Four Corners that same year. None of MC’s craft acquisitions wound up back in their founders’ hands; four joined ABI’s also-rans on Tilray Brands’ island of misfit microbreweries in 2024. The fifth, Leinenkugel’s, was not included in the deal.
“Just to be clear: This doesn’t change anything related to Blue Moon or Leinenkugel’s,” MC chief commercial officer Michelle St. Jacques wrote in an August 2024 memo to wholesalers obtained by Brewbound. “These brands continue to play an important role in our premiumization plans and there are no changes to our commitment to them.”
Given that the firm would announce its plans to end Leinenkugel’s century-and-a-half long streak of brewing in Chippewa Falls (interrupted only by Prohibition, which it survived by making soda water and near-beer) just three months later, St. Jacques could have been a little more clear. Sure, the Leinie brand will technically live on, even though the brewhouse from whence it came, Chippewa Falls’ longest continuously operated business, has been relieved of its production duties. But MC’s move to shutter what was the seventh-oldest still-operating brewery in America is clearly a change in its commitment to Leinenkugel — and not for the better.
There are two obvious rejoinders here. First: Leinenkugel’s is MC’s property, and it is entitled to do with it what it sees fit. Miller Brewing Company bought the firm from the Wisconsin brewing family for which it’s named fair and square nearly 40 years ago, long before the North-American brewing beverage mash-up was even a twinkle in Eric Molson’s eye. It’s the corporation’s prerogative to shut down Leinie’s Chippewa Falls plant, lay off the 56 Teamsters that worked there, and use its scaled Milwaukee facility to milk whatever’s left of the iconic shandy brand’s legacy. The Leinenkugels conceded as much. “It’s really in their court to indicate to us that they’d like to have a conversation with us,” Dick told Brewbound last week, noting that the firm “hold[s] all the cards.”
It’s also true that Leinie’s portfolio has not sold particularly well in recent years. The brand family was down a little over nine percent in dollars year-over-year for the 52 weeks through September 2024, per NIQ off-premise retail scans analyzed by 3Tier Beverages for Brewbound. Off-premise sales at multi-outlet grocery, mass retail, and convenience stores tracked by market research firm Circana through the end of last year show the firm’s flagship summer shandy (which MC announced as a year-round offering last April) down 13.5 percent in volume. Like fellow 19th-century icon Anchor, Leinenkugel’s stature as an august American brewing institution has not translated into robust sales.
The points above offer a straightforward logic for MC’s decision to shift production of the ~25 percent of Leinenkugel still being brewed in Chippewa Falls to the Milwaukee plant that already handled the other three quarters of it. I can grasp that explanation, even though I don’t find it compelling. I’m more baffled, and less sympathetic, to MC’s apparent refusal to explore an alternative to idling one of the country’s oldest breweries just because it can.
You’re telling me one mothballed microbrewery in western Wisconsin is a vital asset that this multinational corporation (market capitalization: more than $10 billion) can’t even ponder parting with? That there’s no other facility across the vast network of the country’s second-largest brewing conglomerate that could possibly be used for research and development besides the Leinie Lodge? That severing Leinie’s most meaningful tie to its roots and snubbing its eponymous family demonstrates how MC is “fully committed to the Leinenkugel’s brand”?
Come on. Be serious.
From where I’m sitting, if MC has enough money to launch soulless, MBA-brained pander-brands like Happy Thursday, it has enough to secure a piece of the American brewing industry’s soul by continuing to run shandy through the tanks in Chippewa Falls — even if just to preserve its centuries-spanning streak. The firm already crossed that Rubicon by closing the historic brewhouse, but it still has a chance to save some face here by at least entertaining a sale of the place back to the brewing dynasty that made it famous. It’s MC’s right not to bother, but that doesn’t make it right.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
As the country’s preeminent archivist of beverage-alcohol industry buzzwords, it takes a truly vacuous snatch of corporatespeak from the macrobrewer managerial class and its dutiful phalanx of flacks to impress me. But hot damn, did Anheuser-Busch InBev’s copywriterswrongers come to the firm’s all-important annual wholesaler meeting (“SAMCOM”) with a powerfully anodyne comeback-trail slogan: “Build Tomorrow Today.” On one hand, it’s just a vague description of incremental progress and the linear progression of time, but on the other hand, isn’t it really much more than that, when you think about it? Just kidding, it’s “We Here For You”-grade PowerPoint palaver of the foulest vintage. Ain’t nobody doing it like ABI.
📈 Ups…
Congrats to Steve Fechheimer, late of New Belgium Brewery, on his new gig as Rhinegeist Brewery’s advisor… Look at all these smart breweries using Dry January-induced downtime to tackle needed taproom renovations, take time off, and so forth… New research out of Cornell University suggests that supermarket customers buying beer spend as much as 17 percent more on groceries per month… Arkansas lawmakers are considering a bill to raise the legal ABV for beer from five to 14 percent…
📉 …and downs
The Brewers Association expressed concerns about the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau’s new draft rules on booze labeling for “alcohol facts” and allergens… The Teamsters authorized a strike against Costco with a week to go on their existing contract… The Colorado Beverage Coalition tracked 41 brewery closures last year in the first-wave craft-beer hotbed… Sapporo-Stone Brewing laid off two percent of its workforce… Monster warned its investors that another impairment charge is coming on its troubled brewing division…
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