Boston Beer Company, Inc.

Greetings and welcome to the Boston Beer Company second quarter 2021 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn this conference over to your host, Mr. Jim Cook, founder and chairman. Thank you, sir. You may begin.

Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome to everyone. This is Jim Cook, founder and chairman, and I'm pleased to be here to kick off the 2021 second quarter earnings call for the Boston Beer Company. Joining the call from Boston Beer are Dave Berwick, our CEO, and Frank Smala, our CFO. I'll begin my remarks this afternoon with a few introductory comments, including some highlights of our results, and then hand over to Dave who will provide an overview of our business.

Dave will then turn the call over to Frank, who will focus on the financial details of our second quarter and showcasing Trulie's superior variety of flavors and the colorful and adventurous nature of Trulie drinkers. Based on the brand's innovation leadership, strong brand building, and growing cultural relevance, we believe Trulie is well-positioned to continue to grow share. We overestimated the growth of the hard seltzer category in the second quarter and the demand for Trulie, which negatively impacted our volume and earnings for the quarter and our estimates for the remainder of the year. We increased our production of Thule to meet our summer peak and have had lower than anticipated demand for certain Thule brand styles, which has resulted in higher than planned inventory levels at our breweries and increased supply chain costs and complexity. At the same time, we've been experiencing out of stocks on certain of our canned products, most significantly on our Twisted Tea brand family. We expect wholesaler inventories of Twisted Tea to remain tight for the rest of the summer. Our outlook for the hard seltzer category in the second half of 2021 is uncertain, and we planned our capacity and spending based upon several volume scenarios. We'll continue to manage our capacity requirements through a combination of internal capacity increases and higher usage of third-party breweries. We continue to work hard on our comprehensive program to transform our supply chain with the goal of making our integrated supply chain more efficient, reduce costs, increase our flexibility to better react to mixed changes, and allow us to scale up more efficiently. While we're in a very competitive business, we're confident in the continued growth of our current brand portfolio and innovations, and we remain prepared to forsake short-term earnings as we invest to sustain long-term profitable growth. Based on information in hand, year-to-date depletions reported to the company through the 28 weeks and to July 10, 2021, Our estimate would increase to approximately 32% for the comparable weeks in 2020. Now, Frank will provide the financial details. Thank you.