WALMART BEER

WHEN IS CRAFT BEER not craft beer? When it’s produced by Walmart. With cool packaging and names like After Party Pale Ale and Cat’s Away IPA, Trouble Brewing may have the look and sound of a craft line, but the beer is a Walmart product created after the mega store teamed up with a company called Trouble Brewing to create its own line of beer which it started selling early last year. However, nowhere on the packaging is there any indication that Walmart is behind the label. The company asserts that its name doesn’t appear on any of its private brands. But there is no American brewery called Trouble Brewing: the applicant listed on filings with the Treasury Department’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) is “Winery Exchange, Inc.” which has since become WX Brands, a company that “develops exclusive brands of wine, beer and spirits for retailers around the world,” according to its website. Then, under “brewery address” the TTB filings list the address of Genesee Brewing’s business office in Rochester, New York. And Genesee is most assuredly not a craft brew. It is owned by a company called Florida Ice and Farm, which brews a Costa Rican lager and other industrial brands. According to the Brewers Association, a craft brewery is defined as small (annual production of 6 million barrels of beer or less); independent (less than 25% of the brewery is owned or controlled by an alcoholic beverage industry member that is not itself a craft brewer); and traditional (“a brewer that has a majority of its total beverage alcohol volume in beers whose flavor derives from traditional or innovative brewing ingredients and their fermentation”).