Who owns goose island

This sent investors -- including Hall's -- into a frenzy. When you can confidently communicate this to them, it is really the only assurance an investor needs. Moreover, beyond just assuring investors, Hall feels that this belief in oneself is a necessity for all business leaders, because having the perseverance to "figure things out" comes more from confidence than experience.

One of the unspoken bonds among craft breweries is that they fight against the big production companies of "big beer," like AB-InBev Anheuser-Busch and Miller-Coors, which according to the Brewers Association fetched 86 percent of the beer market by volume in In doing so, local breweries have a culture and style that is meant to be unique and independent, often offering a selection of beers vastly different than "big beer" brands and unavailable anywhere else.

Fans of craft beer are very passionate about this mission as well, and rarely if ever will you find any selection from production breweries at a craft beer establishment or even the refrigerator of a craft beer diehard. This zeal for the industry is often reflected in the backlash craft breweries face when selling out all or even a stake of the business to one of the "big beer" giants.

Even the recent acquisition of Dogfish Head brewery by Boston Beer Company Sam Adams , two craft beer legacy companies, was met with some fan disappointment. Many saw this transaction as putting profits ahead of experience. When I asked Hall about this, I cautiously danced around the term "sell out. Throughout the past two decades, the craft beer industry has grown at a remarkable pace, with new breweries opening every day on average.

With more breweries came more competition, and while Goose Island had differentiated itself with a strong brand that delivered high-quality unique beers, it was still suffering the woes of a rapidly expanding company -- lack of capital for growth. More important, investors and valuable distribution partners, through whom beer is legally required to be delivered to retailers as part of the US three-tier system , were starting to get antsy.

Without the growth, Goose Island was losing the valuable support system upon which it was built. Bringing on a "big beer" partner was a clear next step for Hall.

True to form, he hired an investment banker and eventually negotiating with Anheuser-Busch InBev to be acquired, while allowing the company to maintain its brand and continue its growth strategy. In Part Two, Noel pulls back the curtain on Anheuser-Busch, focusing on how the Saint Louis conglomerate became one of the largest companies in the world.

The lot of them signed up, sold out, and endured varying degrees of retribution from the craft community. Little Goose Island endures a nightmare along the way. As A-B chews through new and bigger craft acquisitions, the newly corporate Goose Island makes mistake after mistake, getting pilloried for each misstep Google "Goose Island sellout" and you'll get 70, results. A-B'S big-beer tactics fail miserably in the craft beer market. The company rolls out Urban Wheat nationally behind Hall's back; uninspired spinoffs like Urban Pale Ale tank; top-down recipe rollout leads to boring brews, like the quickly discarded Ten Hills IPA.

In the lowest point, a bad batch of Bourbon County Stout costs the company more than a half a million dollars. The tale even has a tragic figure: Greg Hall, son of founder John, a world-changing brewer and pioneer of barrel-aging beer.

Noel tells Goose Island's story through the receipts, the sales numbers, the emails, and the time-stamped text messages, delivering what is, in retrospect, a clear look at big beer's bungled first attempt to take over craft brewing.

Most beer writing today extends to rehashing press releases and gushing over the latest beer fest; that an objective, warts-and-all retelling of a beer-business tale exists at all warms my heart. Anecdotes as simple as an employee pitching a Goose-branded cell phone case into the trash on the day of the sale speak to the heart of Noel's book. He covers tons of ground, but keeps enough of an eye on the humanity of Goose's story that his book is more than a novel-length business study.

Goose Island helped turn Anheuser-Busch from a Bud Light fire hose into one of the largest sellers of craft beer in the world. Remember, in , we were still struggling a little bit. In , the Fulton brewery was only five years old, and we were doing probably about 38, barrels Do you feel that this allowed you to make the cider you wanted to rather than the cider a brewery would have to? Greg Hall: Absolutely. I think what we would have done is one cider and done it OK.

And we would have done it at the brewery. Now, I look at it and I see all these cideries popping up, and the ones that I think are the ones that are leading things — if not on the sales side, on respect in the market — are the guys on the farms.

The timing allowed me to do it that way, which, for me, is the right way to do it: Make cider on a farm, and really focus on cider above all. Greg Hall: That certainly gave me the big advantage of knowing the inner workings of A-B and how they operate and getting to know the people there and trust those people.

Back in , we were made a lot of promises, and they pretty much all came true. It may be the same for Ballast Point and Lagunitas. It was just a matter of time.

The same thing happens in really any business. John Hall: Even more so with capital-intensive businesses, because you need more capital to grow, to keep up with the demand and scale up. Plus, they also have a hell of a support system. John Hall: My prior experience before Goose Island was with a big company, so I knew how they operated and I knew there would be some advantages.

I think what was most apparent was that we were going with the world leader who we had some affiliation with through CBA. We knew them a little bit and their system and how we could take advantage of it. Also, after the support through the wholesalers and things like that, I thought it would go very well. John Hall: I think the biggest thing, that A-B understood, is that craft is a little different and has to be operated differently from a sales standpoint.

Also, I think the biggest portion was the PR thing. Lastly, the other stakeholder is Chicago. Chicago has benefited, and that was one of the big things I was concerned about. How does Goose Island balance its back story and continued presence in Chicago with its present iteration as a brewer that also produces beer in at Anheuser-Busch InBev facilities in Baldwinsville, N.

Goose Island continues to sponsor stuff like the Pitchfork Music Festival and all kinds of cultural events in Chicago. I think there was a lot of doubt from some of the people in the cheap seats about whether that would continue, but that was the plan from the beginning. You can get it right in your seat — someone will bring it to you. As the sales grow, the resources grow, and those sales have gone back into making Chicago a better place to enjoy a pint of beer.

That was before U. We just celebrated the first Day outside of Chicago in London, and it was unbelievable. We had a big turnout. We had everything. And [the beer], believe it or not, has a lot of fans in London. I never would have even remotely imagined that. The deal has also resulted in the expanded availability of the barrel-aged Bourbon County Brand Stout beers that still draw lines of buyers in Chicagoland and elsewhere. How has that worked out thus far and what are your plans for the expansion of both that line and the Goose Island barrel program?

To make Bourbon County Stout, it takes about six times as much capacity as it does to make or Green Line, so it really will improve the throughput of the brewery by having more liquid to go into the barrels. That resulted in full refunds to dissatisfied drinkers.

Is that just a fact of life in barrel-aged brewing, or is that a quality assurance issue that Goose Island will be addressing in the future? Brewing is all about control.

In a batch of beer, you control the ingredients coming in. You have this glorious beer at the end, but then you put it into a barrel where you control nothing.