INNOVATION
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Alcohol and cannabis Is there an opportunity for THC-Infused Beer?
New marijuana users By crunching numbers from multiple sources, we developed estimates on the size of a couple of key consumer segments for the US market, shown in Figure 1 (8) . As portrayed in the upper graph there are currently 60 million beer drinkers and 23 million marijuana users (legal and illegal) in the US, with about 12 million people using both. This means that about 20% of beer drinkers also use marijuana (THC’s most popular form) regularly. But what happens once cannabis is legalised in all 50 states, as it almost inevitably will be? Surveys indicate that at least 27% of cannabis non-users would enter the market if legal barriers were removed (9) . Some surveys nd even higher percentages. This would result in 39 million new marijuana users, for a total of 62 million. (See the lower graph in Figure 1.) That’s right; it’s more than likely there would be more THC users than beer drink- ers in the US. And the percent of beer drinkers also using marijuana jumps
byMike Kallenberger, First Key Consulting
Beer and weed don’t mix. Or do they? Most adults who use both alcohol and cannabis report seldom using them on the same occasion (1) , so in that sense the opening statement is more or less true. But in a marketing portfolio sense a lot of brewers are betting they’ll mix very well, and so the race is on to introduce THC-infused beers (2) .
S ome prominent names have already ventured into this space, most notably Keith Villa, the former MillerCoors brewer renowned for his creation of Blue Moon in the 1990s. Now retired from MillerCoors, Villa and his wife Jodi have founded Ceria, Inc., to brew a line of THC-infused non-al- coholic beers (3) . It is not currently legal (in the US) for the same beverage to contain both alcohol and THC. And it’s probably not surprising that Heineken-owned Lagunitas, whose brand was associated through its
founder Tony Magee with weed-friendly attitudes long before it was legal (4) , has introduced Hi-Fi Hops, a THC-infused, ‘IPA-inspired’ sparkling water with hoppy avour (5) . Molson Coors (6) and Anheuser- Busch InBev (7) are in the game as well, having announced joint ventures to brew and/or research cannabis-infused beers with Canadian cannabis companies Hexo and Tilray, respectively. It seems that few doubt there’s a big opportunity here. Let’s break that opportunity down just a little.
38 ● BREWER AND DISTILLER INTERNATIONAL I november 2019
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