A New Beer World Order? Lagunitas Completes Its Sale To Heineken

Lagunitas’ Tony Magee announced today, via a Tumblr post interestingly entitled “Fermenting Ideas of Order,” that he’d completed what he’d initiated in 2015, when Heineken purchased a 50% stake in his company and had sold his remaining holdings to the international company.

Choosing to explain his actions as one of “buying in” rather than “selling out,” Magee understandably seemed 100% on board with his decision and the direction going forward of the company he founded.

He further explained that along with CEO Maria Stipp, who joined Lagunitas in 2015, that he would continue to helm things (in varying degrees) as the company’s Executive Chairman.

Yet there was something about his truly reflective Tumblr post, although largely bullish about craft beer’s global direction (and can we still even call it craft beer at this point?), that struck us as more than a little bittersweet.

Maybe it’s just that, as he acknowledges in his post, he’s 57 and “entering the third act,” that we took it that way…

Maybe his piece felt bittersweet to us because his actions in selling Lagunitas to Heineken today signaled an undeniable passage of time for the craft beer industry as a whole.

Or maybe it was just that his post forced us to confront the fact that, like it or not, the craft beer biz is in the process of profoundly changing…

First Wicked Weed to AB In-Bev, and now this.

What a week…