Sam Adams and Dogfish Head Merge

My twitter timeline is flooded with tweets and retweets on the $300 million Sam Adams Dogfish Head merger.  Beer twitter is confused.  It is so quick to condemn any merger - usually because it is big beer buying an independent craft brewery - and its habit of classifying every beer issue in stark black and white terms, with clear right and wrong opinions, and heroes and villains does not work with this merger.  A $300 million merger is obscene, so it must be bad on its price alone.  But it is craft buying craft, so that is good.  And, craft breweries can't fight big beer giants if they don't get bigger, and a merger of craft brewers is one way to get big and stay independent.  But, isn't a combined Sam Adams Dogfish Head too big to be craft, which makes it part of big beer?   Oh, God! The agony, the nuance, the contradictions!  AND FOR CHRISSAKE, WHERE DOES SAM ADAMS' CIDER OPERATION FIT IN THIS MERGER?!  Why didn't the Sams make it easy for beer twitter and just sell to AB InBev so we could all know the bad guys?

This transaction is good for craft beer.  Two independent breweries are combining and the behemoths AB InBev, Molson Coors, and Constellation are not involved.  Even if Sam Adams Dogfish Head now exceed the definition of a craft brewery, to me they are still considered craft.  The combined company is big craft for sure, but craft all the same.  Deals like Sam Adams Dogfish Head are needed to counter the continued, on purpose blurring of fake craft by the giant beer companies.  A walk down the beer aisle in most any supermarket shows how successful giant beer companies have been at cracking independent breweries market share.  Good for Sam Adams and Dogfish Head.

The Brewhound article, linked to above, notes that as part of the merger Dogfish Head is repaying/retiring the 15% ownership stake of private equity firm LNK Partners.  I am not sure how or if LNK played into Dogfish Head's decision to merge, but LNK invested in Dogfish Head five years ago and a five-year hold likely fits with LNK's investment time horizon and its requirement to return money to its investors.  Other craft brewers that took private equity money rather than sell outright are going to have to deal with similar time constraints imposed by the private equity managers and their funds' need to liquidate.  Private equity investors are not passive long-term investors.  If nothing else, getting private equity out of the two companies is positive.

I have a many years old bottle of 120 Minute IPA in the back of my beer fridge.  I am thinking of cracking it open in honor of this merger.