Dogfish Head Brewery Is the Latest Craft Brew to Go Corporate

Dogfish Head Brewery announced today that they have sold a 15% stake to LNK Partners. The latter is a private equity company based out of New York who owns similar investments in companies like Au Bon Pain and Beachbody, and they will gain a seat on the board of directors at Dogfish as a result. Dogfish’s reported current goal is to be able to use LNK’s investment for enough growth to buy back that 15%, especially after their huge, recent expansion that ran them about $50 million.
 

The brewery itself, of course, will continue to be run by the Calagione family and Nick Benz, the current CEO, and LNK’s investment appears to be a simple financial assist to help a family-owned craft brewery expand as much as possible.

This is the sixth recent craft brewery acquisition by a larger company, and it’s clearly becoming a trend - if these small companies want to expand as effectively as possible, they’ll need some serious capital without having to sacrifice any of their quality. Luckily, it looks like not much will change at Dogfish, aside from hopefully wider distribution throughout the country.