Boston Beer Company, Inc.

greetings and welcome to the boston beer company's first quarter 2022 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 today's 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 mike andrews Associate General Counsel and Corporate Secretary. Thank you, sir. 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 our 2022 first quarter earnings call. Joining the call from Boston Beer are Jim Cook, founder and chairman, Dave Berwick, our CEO, and Frank Smala, our CFO. Before we discuss our business, I'll start with our disclaimer. As we stated in our earnings release, Some of the information we discussed and that may come up on this call reflects 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 the 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 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. I'll begin my remarks this afternoon with a few introductory comments, and then I'll hand it 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 first quarter results. as well as our outlook for the remainder of 2022. Immediately following Frank's comments, we'll open the line for questions. As you may recall, our first quarter 2021 depletions growth was 48% and shipments growth was 60%. So as we anticipated during our last earnings call, our first quarter 2022 volume performance faced a heavy comparative challenge. our first quarter depletions decline was 7%. This was the first quarter in the last 16 quarters that we did not grow our volume double digits over the corresponding prior year quarter. This reflects both our own slow 2022 start and the decline in the overall beer market. More particularly, the decline reflects our internal supply chain issues that continued into 2022 but also the continuing broad scale supply chain issues and inflation that are affecting consumer purchases and the weakness of hard seltzer demand as the category lapped 62% growth from the first quarter in 2021. We continue to work through challenges with our supply chain and the impacts of the slowdown in hard seltzer as we invest broadly across our portfolio while adding new innovation. The out-of-stock issues that negatively affected our first quarter performance, and which we discussed at our last earnings call, have improved during the quarter, and wholesaler service and inventory levels are gradually returning to more normal levels. Despite our depletions decline, we gained dollar share in measured off-premise channels from 4.9 to 5.1%. in the first quarter, the second largest share gain among the larger brewers. We are thankful to our outstanding coworkers, our distributors, and our retailers who continue to support our business. We have a strong ability to innovate in a broad portfolio of healthy brands, and we continue to expect that our business will recover and grow volume between 4 and 10% for the full year in 2022. I will now pass it over to Dave for a more detailed overview of our business.