科罗拉多经销商 Coors Distributing 遭三大供应商终止合作，啤酒“中间层”未来再引担忧

In the Mile High City, the fight is on for the future of the middle tier.

A brewer threw the first punch — or at least, the first one in the public eye. In early September, Constellation Brands, the country’s third-largest macrobrewer, told its wholesaler in Denver, Coors Distributing Company (CDC), that it was terminating its arrangement within 30 days. Mark Anthony Group, which ranks fourth behind the Modelo maker in off-premise sales, followed suit less than two weeks later. Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, the country’s second-largest craft brewer by Brewers Association-defined production volume, made its own move for the exit earlier this month.

The dominoes fell so fast, and from a westward territory, that your humble Hop Take columnist heard echoes of Republic National Distributing Company’s collapse in California, which started with rapid-fire departures by major liquor suppliers at the top of 2025, and ended with the mega-distributor’s de facto demise earlier this year. Was it a social contagion? Blood in the water? Something else?

It’s in vogue for beverage-alcohol industry c-suiters to blame abstractions like “headwinds,” and “Zoomers” whenever trouble arises. But my reporting on RNDC’s California cataclysm indicated bad business decisions, institutional arrogance, and infrastructural rot had pushed the firm to the brink right as the hangover in post-Covid booze sales began to bite. There are always causes, and some are always more proximate than others.

So what’s the casus belli for Colorado’s middle-tier trench war? The militants aren’t saying much.

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“We’re exploring all legal and commercial options,” CDC tells Hop Take via email. “None of the parties provided any reason for their termination and doing so without cause is a direct violation of the Colorado beer franchise law.” The firm, a wholly owned distributorship of Molson Coors Brewing Beverage Co., has already asked Denver’s district court to enjoin Constellation and Mark Anthony from exiting; it is “evaluat[ing] next steps with Sierra Nevada.”

“We have concluded our partnership with Coors Distributing Company and remain grateful for their partnership over the years,” says Ellie Preslar, Sierra Nevada’s chief growth officer, in an emailed statement. “Though this was a difficult decision, it is necessary for both the long-term and short-term needs of our business.”

A spokesperson for Constellation declined to comment, citing the litigation. Mark Anthony did not respond.

What gives? I doubt it’s frustration over facilities. After all, in a bit of incredibly unfortunate timing, CDC just cut the ribbon on a new state-of-the-art, 70,000 square-foot warehouse at the end of August, less than two weeks before Constellation’s pink slip. If you work at or with CDC, and know more, please get in touch by emailing [email protected] or texting dinfontay.11 on Signal. (You can remain anonymous in my coverage.) But in the meantime, tune your ear to another echo of RNDC’s retreat from the Golden State, because suppliers aren’t just leaving CDC — they’re heading to Reyes Beverage Group. Or at least, trying to.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but often rhymes, and it’s rhyming in the Rockies right now. “How much RNDC blood is on Reyes’s hands in California?” I asked in a column the week I broke the news that the now-defunct distributor was exiting the market last year. “Maybe more than you think.” I was never able to verify whether RBG was in talks to acquire RNDC CA before its exit, as some sources had claimed. But there’s no doubt the mighty beer-turned-”total beverage” distributor’s fierce, many-fronted competition in California hastened RNDC’s failure there. Most of the suppliers who fled pre-collapse, fled to RBG.

A few states east and 18 months later, Mark Anthony and Sierra Nevada have signaled their aims to move their CDC volume to RBG. Constellation has been playing coy, but it’s almost unfathomable that it would move to another house. In a remarkable turn of industry fate, RBG acquired its Colorado operation just this year from, you guessed it: RNDC. Its entry into the state, along with Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits’ acquisition of Eagle Rock Distributing Co. earlier this year, has shifted the middle-tier calculus there. Now, CDC is facing subtraction.

(Laurel Slick, RBG’s vice-president of corporate affairs, provided statements to Hop Take welcoming Mark Anthony and Sierra Nevada to the fold.)

But. But! While CDC execs may be uttering f-words privately, they’re uttering another f-word publicly: franchise. The history of franchise law is long, winding, and deathly boring, but the upshot is that beer distributors are nearly unique in the protections afforded to them by most states’ laws. The most crucial of these is the so-called “just cause” provision, which requires brewers to cite a legally defensible breach of their agreement with the house they’re trying to terminate. This provision is written into most states’ codes because wholesalers marched on statehouses to make it so in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. Critics argue it harms competition by making it difficult for good brewers to bail on bad distributors; boosters insist it protects competition by making it difficult for bad brewers to strong-arm good distributors. But it’s there.

The protective power of this provision was tested most famously in Florida roughly a quarter-century ago, and distributors came away with the whip hand. In Maris Distributing v. Anheuser-Busch, Inc., a wholesaler fought the brewer tooth and nail for a decade over a termination it believed unjust. The family — the kin of baseball great Roger Maris, who’d been bestowed an A-B house by Gussie Busch after finishing out his Hall of Fame career with the St. Louis Cardinals — won a $120 million settlement in 2005.

As the mantra goes: there are 50 different states, and 50 different three-tier systems. A version of the just-cause clause is on the books in Colorado. But it’s a weird version. It dictates a brewer hoping to terminate a distributor has to cite “alleged noncompliance” and allow the offending firm 60 days to “cure” the infraction. If the distributor doesn’t shape up in that time, then the brewer can ship out. That’s all right at the top of C.R.S. § 44-3-408. But in subsection three, the code appears to contradict itself, noting “the supplier shall have the right to terminate an agreement with a wholesaler at any time by giving the wholesaler at least ninety days’ written notice by certified mail.” To me, a not-lawyer, , the Colorado code appears to say that a brewer must have just cause to terminate a distributor after 60 days, but can terminate for any reason after 90 days.

You will not be shocked to learn that this is not how CDC’s actual lawyers read the text. “Under Constellation’s novel interpretation of Colorado law, its termination will become final after 90 days,” the firm’s legal team wrote in a September 25 filing. “In the interim, there is a likelihood that CDC will face cascading terminations from its other suppliers.”

For a trade that has long grasped the power of a united political bloc, CDC’s existential fight is cause for alarm. At the National Beer Wholesalers Association’s (NBWA) annual conference in Orlando in mid-October, president and chief executive Craig Purser sounded the klaxons. “The efforts to weaken the three-tier system are going to keep coming, and that’s why we need you to double down on your support and participation in NBWA and your state’s association,” he said, per a dispatch from Brewbound.

Whether the suppliers’ assessments of Colorado’s code are innovative, or illegal, is a matter for the judicial system. But in the meantime, if you’re wondering who the hell would write a statute like that, well, the independent beverage-alcohol bar (ahem) is too. Colorado’s franchise law is “really badly written,” Drew Jaglom of Tannenbaum Helpern Syracuse & Hirschtritt LLP told a presumably sympathetic crowd at the NBWA confab, Brewbound reported.

“What good is a statutory right to cure a breach if a supplier can bypass it simply by waiting another thirty days?” asks Ashley Brandt, the Tucker Ellis LLP attorney behind the prolific trade blotter Libation Law Blog, in a post about the CDC brew-haha. “A supplier that cannot establish a breach—or knows the distributor will fix it—could simply choose the ninety-day route. What happens during those additional thirty days that makes a performing distributor’s continued contractual compliance irrelevant?”

It’s a good question. For CDC, it may wind up being the question. And with the pendulum of power lately swinging back towards big suppliers, you can bet the rest of the middle tier will be hanging on the answer.

🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now

Well, Halloween is right around the corner, so it’s a good thing your costume is already covered. What’s that? You’re not wearing the Adult Wedgehead Jumpsuit Costume ($69.99)? The totally epic apparel that corresponds to Shock Top’s Candy Corn Wheat Ale, a new and not-at-all-depressing collaboration between Tilray Brands and retail Grim Reaper Spirit Halloween? Huh. I mean… why not?

📈 Ups…

Stone Brewing co-founders Greg Koch and Steve Wagner are taking over the firm’s recently closed World Bistro & Gardens in Escondido… First-wave craft-brewing pioneer Deschutes will take a crack at the booming “hard sports drink” space with a malt-based offering, Firelyte… Sapporo USA says it has a path to double last year’s volume by the end of 2027… The absolute rubes who bought Ultra Right 100% Woke-Free American Beer back in 2023 still haven’t received it, and Georgia’s attorney general is now investigating, lol… Twin Cities icon Summit Brewing found a new lender to take over its about-to-be-foreclosed-upon loans…

📉 …and downs

Pioneering craft-brewing supplier Admiral Malting announced plans to shutter… Mega-brewers Constellation Brands and Mark Anthony Group are jumping into the “hard sports drink” segment, too — with vodka-based offerings… Centi-billionaire and known freak (but I repeat myself) Mark Zuckerberg finally figured out how to make Guinness look uncool…

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