Check your Craft Beer Acquisition bingo cards. If you have Southern Tier and Victory teaming up, you might be a winner.
The first big business transaction of 2016 is thankfully straightforward and shouldn’t cause too much waves amongst the craft beer fans. Basically Artisanal Brewing Ventures (ABV) is now the parent company to the two East Coast breweries both with extensive brewing behind them. Southern Tier with 14+ and Victory with 20+.
The brewing operations will remain independent but where the combined strength will come is “in collaborative sales and marketing efforts to strengthen, support and expand its distributor and retail partnerships. Victory and Southern Tier brands will become increasingly available to loyal and new consumers across their combined markets as a direct result of this union.”
Both companies have pretty large distribution footprints but we in SoCal may be the beneficiaries because we get only Victory now but some Southern Tier may end up hitching rides to our favorite beer shoppes. The other benefit is that these two are off the table for the big sword swallowers and ABV is now an option for those who have been approached.