I had no idea Veza Sur was an AB company until my buddy who bartends told me that the salesman was the same guy who sold them Bud products. Same thing with Kona Brewing. It’s one thing for a mega corp to buy a brand like Constellation did with Funky Buddha. The owners at FB made a killing and retained control over day to day operations. It’s something else to create a fake independent brewery to try to kill competition with your favorable distribution networks.
AB/InBev and Miller/Coors were dead to me when they started sponsoring bills in Florida to make tap rooms illegal. They wanted all beer sales anywhere to have to run through a distributor first. Meaning breweries would have to sell to a distributor and buy their own beer back from a distributor before they could sell it in house. The kicker is that all the distributors are owned by the two major brewing conglomerates. The tap rooms got around the law by, ironically, by using a rule that allowed Anheiser Busch to sell beers at Busch Gardens. As long as a brewery offers occasional free tours of their brewing facility, it’s considered a tourist locale and thus doesn’t have to buy their beers through a distributor.