I love beer, and I love covering the beer industry, and those are two different things. I am constantly explaining to people — angry readers, new sources, confused strangers — that while I personally enjoy “the liquid,” I’m professionally focused on everything besides it. Instead, for the past decade and a half, your humble Hop Take columnist has been lucky enough to make a living reporting on the business, culture, and politics of the trade. In that time, the American brewing business, with its era-defining marketing, byzantine structures, and outsized personalities, has been my prism through which to scrutinize America as such.
It’s good work if you can get it. In a way, I got it from my father.
Not in the nepotistic sense, mind you. My dad, Nick Infante, never got me a job in the beer business. How could he? I don’t even work in the beer business, and by the time I joined the media workforce in 2010, it had been almost two decades since he had, either. Despite subbing in for a week on Harry Schuhmacher’s then-nascent Beer Business Daily in the early aughts, and launching a subscription newsletter about the business of college athletics way back in 2004, (eons ahead of its time!), and landing an op-ed in The New York Times in 2006, he never really worked in the media business, either. The closest our careers have ever come to proper overlap was probably a stretch of years in the early 2010s when he did some consulting and wrote an internal corporate newsletter for Manhattan Beer Distributors. Again: two different things.
But even as I take pains to make it clear I’m not of the industry, the reality is that I kinda-sorta am. In the early ‘80s, my father drove cross-country and finagled a job selling St. Pauli Girl in San Francisco, where he met two people of particular note. The first was Fritz Maytag, the scion of the appliance dynasty of the same name, who had saved an erstwhile little steam brewery called Anchor Brewing Company from financial ruin in the mid-’60s. The father of American craft beer made a big impression on my actual father, taking time out of his day to tour this random beardo from a Connecticut mill town around the gleaming copper kettles of the soon-to-be-iconic Potrero Hill plant. That’s powerful stuff for a son trying to grasp his father’s place in the world, and I held it close. Did I follow up on the tip I’d received in the summer of 2023 that Sapporo-Stone Brewing (née Sapporo USA) was preparing to liquidate Anchor because I had grown up surrounded by Steam Beer paraphernalia and paeans to Fritz’s character? Or because it was my job? “Sad days in San Francisco,” Dad texted our family group chat a couple years ago, right under the link I’d sent to my scoop.
It was in San Francisco, too, that Dad met Mom, who was then stocking dog food at a Bay Area grocery store. As he recalled in an interview I forced him to give me back in 2014 for Thrillist’s Father’s Day editorial package that year:
I was a beer salesman, and she worked for General Foods. We met in a supermarket at 8:30 a.m. in the morning, and we just hit it off. I wanted to ask her out but I was too shy, so I called the supermarket later and asked for her number, and the receptionist was like ‘no way’ because she thought I was some nutjob. So I called again the next morning and some other receptionist — a temp! — gave it to me.
The beer business had delivered in the biggest way possible for Nick Infante, and he would stay in it for another dozen years, working on brands you’ve heard of (Labatt’s, Guinness, Rolling Rock), and ones you almost certainly haven’t. “Nordik Wolf Light was a great product from the Pripps brewery in Sweden,” he told me in another interview I did with him, also in 2014. (I have also interviewed people besides my father about the beer industry, I swear.) “It was a great beer, just the wrong time with little-to-no backing financially. Amstel had the market and we couldn’t crack it, but Nordik Wolf Light was a great beer.” One of my first really big stories on this beat made the glass-half-empty case on the craft-beer boom, less because my dad thought India Pale Ale was an abomination (ahem) than because I’d already absorbed, from musings like that one, the critical logic of the beer business. Namely: In a commodity business, marketing, distribution, and scale are all more important than “the liquid” as such.
Apropos of Amstel: Long before I set foot on the beat, Dad had already drilled into me the factors animating parent company Heineken’s powerhouse run as America’s top importer. The green bottle! The foil label! The sophisticated lifestyle marketing! Every other import in the market was chasing the Dutch juggernaut during my father’s stint in the business, so naturally our garage in suburban New Jersey was chock-a-block with swag produced in that war effort. Framed St. Pauli Girl posters, inflatable Pilsner Urquell bottles, Beck’s coasters stapled to the rafters — and on, and on. There’s bringing your work home with you, and then there’s whatever that was.
You have to understand, this wasn’t the norm. Not for most people, obviously, but not for him, either. Over the course of his career, my dad marketed ADT alarm systems, Coppertone sunscreen, Dentyne Ice chewing gum, and probably half a dozen other products along the way. I’m forgetting them now because our house wasn’t decorated with lifesize cardboard cutouts of the Coppertone Girl, or whatever. (To my mom’s great relief, I’m sure.) That’s because those products were forgettable in a way that beer just isn’t. Whether consciously or not — I never asked — my dad treated the beer industry as its own special thing, much more akin to the cultural-commercial institution of college sports than the grubby, one-dimensional rabble of the broader consumer-packaged-goods sector. Much of my best reporting on the beer industry focuses on the tension inherent in this exceptionalism. I knew to look for it because of Dad.
Dominick Infante passed away last week, just weeks into his 75th year. He had been sick for a long time. It had been over a year since I’d last seen him get annoyed about a restaurant menu full of IPAs but void of imported pilsners. He had mostly stopped railing about the manifest indignity of Anheuser-Busch InBev moving production of the Stella Artois and Beck’s sold stateside to their domestic megaplants. Before he stopped drinking entirely, a function as much of his waning thirst as his doctors’ orders, his taste had wandered far afield, going on kicks of Natural Light and Modelo Especial. (He never drank wine; his only liquor order was an occasional Beefeater and tonic with a lemon — not a lime.)
But even in twilight, he loved the beer business. He guffawed one day as I reminded him of the disastrous fallout of Schlitz’s infamous “Drink Schlitz or I’ll kill you” campaign. He passed along an unfalsifiable rumor about Gussie Busch in the St. Louis titan’s own final years that I can’t reprint here, or really anywhere. He paid improbably close attention to the strike earlier this year on Manhattan Beer Distributors, his one-time client, texting me about the “high drama” of a labor dispute threatening the flow of beer from one of the country’s biggest wholesalers to its biggest city. He was fascinated, nearly to the end, by the industry’s indelible mix of public theater, industrial coordination, and human ego.
Not too long ago, some guy filed an op-ed of his own in The New York Times with some ideas for how to “save” beer. They all sucked, which is a shame, because the American brewing industry really could use some help these days. I wouldn’t say my dad knew how to restore the trade to its former glory (if that’s even possible). But reproducing his passion for it — its histories, its rivalries, its infuriating idiosyncrasies — strikes me as crucial to any serious restoration project for the category. Beer is unique among CPG products and even among its beverage-alcohol frenemies, wine and spirits. It’s more affordable, it turns faster, it hits a broader swath of the national palate. It’s served on draft, for chrissakes! It’s special! My dad understood that, and he taught it to me. You could argue that it was once his job, as a one-time beer marketer, to teach it to the American drinking public writ large. But those days are long gone, and the headwinds are stiffer than ever.
Who will tell beer’s singular stories in this “total beverage” market? Who will make the case for the industry’s romance, its “high drama”? Who will inspire the next generation to love not just the liquid but the legacy, warts and all? Such boosterism is not my business. But if the Beer Institute, the Brewers Association, and the National Beer Wholesalers Association wanted to make it theirs, producing oral histories with the industry’s veterans might be a good place to start. My dad’s stories about the beer business, and his passion for it, will only live on because his son happens to publish things about it for a living. Imagine the thousands of others whose stories will be forgotten, or were never told in the first place. These memories are the soul of the trade. They may not be its path forward, but they can help light the way. They are what separates the beer business from the broader CPG sector. Nobody really sings songs of the sunscreen industry’s splendor.
One of the last good days I had with my father before he passed came in October, shortly after “House of Guinness” came out on Netflix. As luck would have it, he was fairly lucid, and still had energy after an early dinner, so he and I watched the pilot together. The show is only nominally about the titular stout, and plays it so fast and loose with the actual history of Ireland’s proudest brewery that its paper of record saw fit to correct the record at length. It’s certainly not about the contemporary American beer industry. But none of that seemed to matter to my dad. It was close enough to once more stir his passion for the brand he’d worked on more than three decades ago, and the business he loved.
“Wow,” he said as we finished the episode. “I could definitely watch more of that.”
Here’s to you, Dad.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
Many people are confused by the ongoing closure of Anchor Brewing Co., which was acquired out of Sapporo USA Sapporo-Stone Brewing-induced liquidation in 2024 by consumer-packaged-goods mogul Hamdi Ulukaya, only to sit idled ever since. Doing nothing to clarify matters is AmericanCraftBeer.com’s editor-in-chief Tom Bobak, who last week turned heads with an item falsely reporting that the storied San Francisco brewery had “no intention of reopening the original brewery or reestablishing a physical taproom in the city,” and was preparing to have its style-defining steam beer “brewed by a contract partner” elsewhere. The actual journalists of the San Francisco Standard debunked Bobak’s claim, and got him to cop to feeding their own six-month-old report into ChatGPT and publishing the baseless claims it returned to him. A sloppy job by a slopper? You don’t say!
📈 Ups…
Congrats to all 26 of the new breweries named VinePair’s best of 2025… Congrats to the new president of Heineken Americas… After rumors last month, Anheuser-Busch InBev did indeed acquire BeatBox — or at least 85 percent of it, for $490 million… Oregon’s two U.S. Senators introduced a new bill that would create a federal framework for regulating hemp-derived THC beverages…
📉 …and downs
Pabst Brewing Co. conducted another sweeping round of layoffs last week, cutting senior employees and consolidating sales markets in the face of compounding declines… The co-owner of Sycamore Brewing in North Carolina was accused of statutory rape and placed on a $10 million bond… Anheuser-Busch InBev announced the closure of its plants in New Hampshire and Northern California and the sale of the one in Newark…
The article The Beer Industry Is Special. My Dad Taught Me That appeared first on VinePair.