Garrett Marrero owns Maui Brewing Company.

Period, end of story.

This will be short and sweet because it’s very simple:

Garrett Marrero owns Maui Brewing Company.

Period, end of story.

Garrett Marrero

He started Maui Brewing in 2005, after buying pioneering Hawaiian brewpub, Lahaina Fish & Game Brewery and Rotisserie. With partner, Melanie Oxley, Lahaina morphed into Maui Brewing, the success of which, spurred by some truly great beers, turned a local Maui brewpub into a modern state-of-the-art brewery, whose beers are now available in several states and even overseas.

A recent graphic, in the February/March ’17 edition of The Great Lakes Brewing News, attempted to shine some light on which craft breweries are actually not independently owned but are part of much larger corporate entities. There, much to Marrero’s surprise, Maui Brewing was identified as a subsidiary of the beverage conglomerate, Constellation Brands. The mistake was later traced back to a clipping from a San Diego publication that had been used by a graphic designer and incorporated into the “family tree” poster of brewery ownership.

Marrero freaked – and with ample reason. The craft beer community – and those who are its knee-jerk detractors – often latch onto “mistakes” like this one, outright lies, misquotes, and baseless folk wisdom far more tightly than to actual, provable, facts. As Marerro put it, speaking to craftbeer.com, “It made my gut sink. Now, no matter how many retractions are printed, no matter what we do, there will always be people out there who don’t get wind of the retraction but remember that graphic, and start telling people that our brand is not independent and that we’re part of Constellation.” He is dead-on in believing that this sort of casual error can, and probably will, become instant “common knowledge” and wind up losing his brewery money. As much as I like to think that beer fans are more level-headed and inquisitive than that vast legion of wine weenies against whom I’ve beat my head for nearly three solid decades, that sad truth is that there are also legions of beer fans who believe what they want to believe and seeing cans of Maui beers on shelves, waaaay over here in the continental US, kindles the notion that they could not come from a mid-sized, independent brewery, so they must be a part of some monolith like Constellation.

Some of this confusion is caused by people seeing those omnipresent beers from Marrero’s neighbor, Kona Brewing – which is loosely allied with Anheuser-Busch – and not being able to tell one Hawaiian name from another. Kona makes some pleasant beers and they enjoy AB’s aggressive distribution network, but they are NOT Maui Brewing, either in quality or style or graphics or any other way.

Garrett Marrero is the owner of Maui Brewing. THAT is the fact of this brewery and this ownership. It is not owned, even in small part, by Constellation or Diageo or Beam Suntory or AB/InBev or Duvel Moortgat or anybody else and if you hear some pedantic twit holding forth to his five or six running mates in a bar or taproom and this effluvium issues from his frothing piehole, barge in like you own the joint and set him straight. Yeah, they’ll probably give you some grief about it because there is nothing so logic-resistent as a beer geek poseur at full-throttle. But stick to your guns. Tell ’em to prove it. When they produce a copy of The Great Lakes Brewing News, shame them with the post in craftbeer.com. You’ll at least have the comfort of knowing that you’re upholding truth and accuracy and, here in this Trump epoch, that is no small feat.

And if you think that this sort of blatant misinformation doesn’t happen and cannot have legs, quick – ask yourself this question: Is there a white Zinfandel grape?

Zinfandel grapes: RED, damnit!

Several recent polls reveal that, more than forty-three years since the first bottle of White Zin hit American grocery store shelves, over half of all people polled believe that there is a grape called white Zinfandel and that it is used to make the wine by that name…which this country has been told, far in excess of a hundred million times, is simple bullshit. Zinfandel grapes are RED, all of ’em, now and forever, amen. The blush wine known as White Zin is actually made by tanking the clear juice of the Zinfandel grape – which is absolutely red! – and then giving it minimal contact with its grape skins, to produce that lovely pink tint.

THERE IS NO WHITE ZINFANDEL GRAPE.

SULFITES ARE NOT THE MAIN CAUSE OF WINE HEADACHES.

SOUR BEERS DO NOT CONTAIN VINEGAR.

And Constellation Brands does NOT own Maui Brewing.

Garrett Marrero does…and he has NO plans to sell it, any time soon.

Spread the word. Please.