The booze industry's exposure to that Ted Cruz donor leak

Plus: Why brut IPA never hit it big!

Last night, congressional reporter

Pablo Manríquez

of

Capitol Press

took to the site formerly known as Twitter with photos of a trove of documents he claimed to have obtained from a dining area in the US Senate. His posts quickly went viral and were almost-as-quickly removed for unspecified content violations.¹ Luckily, platform owner Elon Musk isn’t the arbiter of free speech no matter how much he falsely pretends to be and that’s not how the internet works, so many other users were able to spread the photos to other social-media sites before they were deleted.

The photographed documents appear to be a dossier prepared for Texas Senator Ted Cruz about a series of scheduled fundraising meetings in Washington, DC and New York City with individual donors to his unexpectedly tight reelection campaign. As another political reporter put it, it’s a “fantastic peek behind the swamp curtain.” And wouldn’t you know it: among the former ambassadors, media moguls, and healthcare heavyweights listed in those pages was a powerful trade organization with some beverage-alcohol adjacencies, as well as the founder of several influential drinks publications.