Boston Beer Company, Inc.

Greetings and welcome to the Boston Beer Company third quarter 2021 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in the 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 will now turn the conference over to our host, Mike Andrews,

associate general counsel and corporate secretary thank you you may begin thank you good afternoon and welcome this is mike andrews associate general counsel and corporate secretary of the boston beer company i'm pleased to kick off the 2021 third quarter earnings call for the boston beer company joining the call from boston beer are jim cook founder and chairman dave berwick our ceo and frank small our cfo before we discuss our business i'll start with our disclaimer As we state in our earnings release, some of the information we discuss, and that may come up on this call, reflect the company's or management's expectations or predictions of the future. Such predictions are forward-looking statements. It's important to note that the company's actual results could differ materially from those projected in these forward-looking statements. Additional information concerning factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements is contained in the company's most recent 10Q and 10K. The company does not undertake to publicly update the forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. I will now pass it over to Jim for some introductory comments.

Thanks, Mike. Our intent today is to provide some additional context around our third quarter earnings, discuss our views on trends we see driving results at Boston Beer and in our industry, and talk about how we see performance going forward. After I discuss a few highlights from the third quarter, I'll hand it over to Dave, who will provide an overview of our business. Frank will then provide details of the third quarter financial results and how these results have been impacted by slower than anticipated hard seltzer growth, as well as our outlook for the remainder of 2021 and 2022. Then I will share with you our longer-term view of the business. Finally, we'll open the lineup for questions. I'll begin with some context. In measured off-premise channels year to date through October 10th, where our brand portfolio represents only 4.4 of the total industry volume, we've delivered more than 41% of the total industry volume growth, the highest by far of all brewers. Four of our five major brands are growing depletions and gaining share in off-premise measured channels over the last 13 weeks. We have a broad portfolio of healthy brands, which we will further build in 2022 to continue driving our growth. Our success has been recognized by our most important customers, our distributors, who recently voted us the top beer supplier in 2021 in the latest Tamron survey. This is the 10th time in the last 12 years that our most important customers have recognized us as the top supplier in our industry. We are thankful to our outstanding coworkers, distributors, and retailers whose continued support is helping grow our business to achieve our 14th consecutive quarter of double digit growth. But despite these ongoing strengths, we experienced very large unanticipated costs as a result of the sudden unexpected slowing of growth in Hart-Seltzer. Based on our growth projections, we moved aggressively to build inventory to try to avoid the out of stocks that we experienced in 2019 and in 2020. and to secure capacity both short-term and long-term to be ready for growth through 2023. Dave will share our perspective on the decisions that led to these unanticipated costs, and Frank will share a fuller accounting of them. I'll now pass it over to Dave for a more detailed overview of our business.