Ballast Point Breaks The Mold Again As Small Brewery Buys It From Constellation Brands

Kings & Convicts Microbrewery Taps The Keg On Popular Craft Beer Company 

Ballast Point Brewing Company broke the craft beer mold when it was sold to Constellation Brands for a still-record $1 billion, and now it has done it again, only in reverse.

The San Diego-based brewery has been sold again, but this time not to a mega-company but to a small-time company in Chicago most people had never heard of before this transaction.

Kings  & Convicts – which sounds like the name of a craft brew – has eight employees and produces about 600 barrels of beer a year. Compare that to the 431,000 barrels Constellation brewed of Ballast Point in 2016.

The new parent company plans to make 200,000 barrels of Ballast Point. Sales of the once-rising craft brewery’s beers have been falling since its peak point, which led Constellation to offer it for sale.

This goes against the grain of big breweries buying up popular regional and local craft breweries, pissing off the people who made them successful in the first place.

Kings & Convicts, which will relocate to San Diego (maybe that’s why they bought it!), is named after its’ two founders. Chris Bradley is a Brit known as the King and Brendon Watters, an Aussie who calls himself the Convict because Australia is a former penal colony of England.