The beer industry's "seven-minute abs"

Plus: Whasssssssssssuuuuuuuuuuuuuuup!

Most large brewers have learned through painful experience that there's a limit to how far a beer brand can be haphazardly extended into this or that fad before it starts confusing drinkers and cannibalizing itself.

Then, there’s Tilray Brands. As we’ve discussed before, with little painful experience to draw on, the Canadian cannabis conglomerate-cum-American craft brewer is currently playing a game of follow-the-leader with its product “innovation” strategy, by which I mean, cloning successful existing products from segment-leading brands and seeing what sticks. For example: Shock Top Liit, a sure-why-not take on Twisted Tea from Anheuser-Busch InBev’s moribund craft beer simulacrum, which Tilray bought from the megabrewer (along with seven other brands) in a firesale last summer.

I don’t really make a moral judgment on this copy-cat approach. I’m much more interested in watching Tilray, as a relative newcomer to the US beer business, feel around for the red line on over-extending its recently-acquired brands in real time. This doesn’t happen as much these days! Not at this scale at least. Tilray was the sixth-largest Brewers Association-defined craft brewer in the country by volume in 2023, with a national footprint.

The company’s line-extending tendencies (extendencies?) are especially transparent on one of the other breweries it scooped up from ABI, 10 Barrel Brewing Co. The Oregon firm has a sub-brand called Pub Beer—tagline “Cheap Fun”—and its expansion under Tilray’s ownership as been revealing.