Not so. Macrobrews are extremely consisten, a quality which makes availability a viable reason to drink it. Customers know exactly what they're getting every time they open a Bud Light.
Your points focus on how craft beers are flourishing now, without looking at the implications of the recent developments: mergers that take over distribution, conglomerates that have the power to lobby for laws that are in their favor.
Beer snobs just can't comprehend why anyone would prefer, say, Miller over Bud, or that it's even possible to differentiate between the two.
From our side of the fence, all craft beer enthusiasts seem to care about is disgustingly ever-higher levels of hops.
Hey, store operator. It's clear that staple beers like Coors and Bud Lite are 50+% of your beer sales and a significant portion of your whole store's margin. So, we declaring that we won't ship you any Bud Lite unless you also stock 3 of our new, wacky, nobody-thinks-its-gonna-sell variants like "Bud Lite n Salsa". The only purpose of even making BLnS is to make it harder for you to have shelf space left over for upstart smaller brews. Have a nice day.
[1] 8% in 2013 to 11% in 2014 http://www.bizjournals.com/albany/news/2015/03/18/craft-beer...
If their plan to buy up the distributors succeeds, you should assume the breweries will wind up ruined.
Specifically: if a company doesn't have to compete because it has monopoly power, it stops making much sense for them to spend extra money on competent employees and expensive raw materials for no economic gain.
Once they stop having to compete, expect quality to drop. That's obviously not limited to beer. But it happens time and time again.
And yet, AB-InBev and SABMiller lobby against laws which make it easier for craft beer to be sold. They fight against self-distribution and for small distributors and for the dissolution of the 3-tier system, so that they can run the One Tied House to Rule Them All. They're happy to buy craft breweries with established names and products, but loathe to compete with them on fair terms.
> Finally: I call BS on the idea that Big Beer somehow ruins acquired craft breweries. Goose Island is if anything doing a more consistent and competent job now than they were prior to the acquisition.
1) Any time a brewery gets further from the drinkers its hop-forward beers suffer. Goose IPA being made in New York adds like a week to the time it takes to hit shelves, and for most hop-forward beers, that's a notable amount of time. (Goose, pre-buyout had very few hop-forward beers, and has more now. The focus of the brewery has changed. Many breweries will not scale, because they can't ship fresh enough beer to compete with the local breweries. Even Three Floyds, distributing across state lines can't compete with Revolution, Half Acre, Pipeworks, or Spiteful on freshness)
2) Look at this year's bourbon county release where consumers will be paying drastically more money for less beer, with their money paying for increased marketing and advertising.
3) Goose's other world-class beers are all but forgotten. While Bourbon County has risen to become a status symbol, written about in "What to buy for the man who has everything" articles, the Sisters, Juliet, Lolita, etc., are essentially gone. When they do show up, it's at much higher price points.
Goose Island has lowered the quality of its top-line while increasing the availability of its less interesting flagship fare.
Your assessment of AB-InBev customers doesn't hold going forward. AB-InBev wants as many customers as they can get, hence their purchase of Goose and so many more. They'd be happy to sell beer to anyone, and they're also happy to sell beer to people who don't realize they're buying from AB-InBev, hence the proliferation of brands.
First, it's not possible: it's too easy to start new breweries, and too easy to get local distribution to bars and the kinds of stores that already do a good job of stocking craft beer. The capital costs to start a new craft brewery are small. There are tens of new brewery starts in major metros every year (we're flooded with them in Chicago). So AB InBev takes out Goose Island. Who cares? For every Goose Island, there's a dozen Half Acres.
Second, it doesn't make economic sense. Macrobrews and tiny local craft brews are not substitutable products. Macrobrews are defined not by quality but by availability: they're produced in enough quantity and their logistics are managed competently enough to be reliably available in the places where people who buy macrobrews shop. The same is absolutely not the case for craft beer; even the best-run largest-scale craft breweries are often on allocation systems with retailers.
By the way, AB InBev's customers generally aren't trying to maximize IBUs, don't give a shit which hop varietals got used, and would probably assume a brett beer had somehow gone bad. Again: not substitutable products.
Meanwhile: on the off chance that a Three Floyds or Bruery "graduates" to real nationwide distribution, in 6-pack/case format, Big Beer will simply buy them. They can, in effect, use craft breweries as laboratory for product development: the products that succeed in the market get acquired, and AB InBev supplies its logistics and distribution to milk profits from the acquisition. It's a very old, very effective business model (see, for instance, Cisco).
Finally: I call BS on the idea that Big Beer somehow ruins acquired craft breweries. Goose Island is if anything doing a more consistent and competent job now than they were prior to the acquisition.