When Lagunitas Brewing Company opened its 300,000-square-foot Lawndale facility in April of 2014, it became the largest brewery in Chicago. The massive space immediately started drawing crowds and has been a welcome addition to the city's craft beer scene.
In a surprising announcement on Tuesday, the company's founder and executive chairman Tony Magee revealed that international beer behemoth Heineken is buying a 50 percent stake in Lagunitas. In a long-winded blog post, Magee said the venture would allow the company to expand into more international markets and help bring American craft beer to the world.
Magee has been critical of other breweries, including Goose Island and Elysian, of selling out to huge companies like Anheuser-Busch. “What they really want to do is disrupt this whole craft thing so they can go back to the business that they’d like to be in, which is making lighter beer with inexpensive ingredients,” he said in a Bloomberg article from last June.
He also criticized Anheuser-Busch in the blog post announcing the merger and stated that Heineken was different and is "truly global, family-owned and still brewers first." Lagunitas claimed that quality of their beer would not be affected by the Heineken investment, but other breweries (see Goose Island) claimed the same thing when announcing a buyout only to have their products drop in quality.
Aside from trying to soften the blow, Magee's blog post quoted the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus and likened himself to Friedrich Nietzsche's "madman," as if to say that a man with such a wide range of philosophy knowledge would never soil the quality of his company's beer.