Paste magazine recently ran a fantastic article titled The BS Arguments of Craft Beer Sell-Outs: How Brewery Buyouts Hurt Craft Beer.  This article debunks the most common rationalizations for selling out to Big Beer that are often given by formerly craft brewers (and their fans).  This article is a great read, packed with many detailed examples and points, and I strongly recommend you read it in its entirety.  Just in case, though, here’s the TLDR:

This buyout will allow our beer to be more widely distributed!  You’ll be able to get it everywhere!

That’s great for your one brewery, but not so great for competition in the rest of the industry.  You now compete with other craft breweries on a playing field that is far from level, making it more much difficult for other craft breweries to get adequate distribution.

This is just business, and we’re just making money!  How are we any different from other brands that have been sold?

There are plenty of ways to sell a brewery that don’t involve selling it to Big Beer.  New Belgium sold itself to its employees.  Victory and Southern formed Artisanal Brewing Ventures.  Stone’s True Craft invests in small breweries, to “allow brewers to continue to operate independently without having to borrow from banks, sell to traditional venture capitalists, or sell to multinational conglomerates.”  In other words, it is one thing to sell your brewery, but quite another to sell it to a corporation that is acting on all fronts (supply chain, distribution, legal) to undermine the entire craft brewing industry.

If the beer still tastes good, what’s the difference?

Except your brewery’s profits are now being used to support Big Beer, with all of its shady, sometimes illegal, craft-crushing business practices.

The same people are running the brewery and making the beer as before.  

Apply all of the above objections.  Supporting this brewery, regardless of how good its beer is and how virtuous its management behaves, is bad for the wider craft beer industry.  Not to mention that part of the reason that I supported you before was because I believed in what you were doing as an independent craft brewer.  As you are no longer an independent craft brewer, I can no longer support you.

In short, the brewers who sell out to AB InBev and the like aren’t stupid.  At this point, any post-sale blowback they get has to have been expected.  So any shock at how they are treated after they sell out is 100% fake.  These rationalizations are just advertising, being recited by the shiny new employees of international conglomerates that are far better at making advertising than they are at making beer.