Dave Infante

1 month ago | vinepair.com | Dave Infante

Against all odds, another fiscal quarter is in the books. Did you pay your taxes earlier this week? Follow-up question: Why? It’s not like the people running this country do! And yet we soldier on. (Hopefully not literally.)Today, as has become Hop Take tradition, we take stock of the beer industry’s past three-ish months. Think of it like an earnings report, but more fun, and less regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Editorially speaking: Sh*t is gnarly out there, man.

1 month ago | vinepair.com | Dave Infante

There are not a lot of “dynamic” segments in the American brewing business at the moment, on account of the entire beer market — nay, the beverage-alcohol market writ large — struggling to find sales in the face of our various and sundry national sh*tshows. Of them all, though, light macro lager is about as dull as it gets.

2 months ago | vinepair.com | Dave Infante

Way back in the post-vaccine, pre-election sweet spot of October 2023, when Bidenomics were really cooking, I wrote a column about the brightest spot in craft brewing’s otherwise fairly dim outlook: the convenience store. Back then, the segment was down in virtually every other channel, but up in the nation’s gas stations and corner stores, thanks to the convergence of several trends.

2 months ago | vinepair.com | Dave Infante

Apropos of the Trump administration’s ongoing anti-constitutional purge in Washington, D.C., shoutout to the federal bureaucracy, man. For decades, it’s been trendy to shit on this tangle of acronymic entities that gathers data, delivers services, and regulates industry on behalf of the United States’ executive and legislative branches. There are valid critiques to be made of the lowercase-l liberal administrative state, ways it could be improved to function better.

2 months ago | vinepair.com | Dave Infante

“If you see this in your neighborhood, the rent is going up.” The joke has bounced around the internet for years, batted back and forth by an American precariat beleaguered by the Great Recession, the Covid pandemic, and the housing crisis. “This” is usually some culturally relevant affectation of urbane white wealth: a blonde wood-paneled Pilates studio, a deliberately low-brow haircut, a start-up’s slick electric scooters. You get it.