Welcome back, today is Wednesday, July twenty-second, and we begin with a fresh escalation in the US-Canada trade war landing squarely on beverage alcohol. This builds on our earlier reporting on the cross-border drinks fight. On Monday, President Trump signed three proclamations invoking Section three thirty-eight of the Tariff Act of nineteen thirty, a Depression-era authority that, per Dentons, has been effectively dormant since the nineteen forties. Together they impose an additional fifty percent tariff on more than five hundred fifty categories of Canadian goods, and one order targets alcohol directly: beer, wine, cider, whisky, vodka, and cocktail ingredients such as bitters, according to The Globe and Mail. The White House ties the move to provincial liquor-board boycotts that it says cut Canadian purchases of American alcohol by eighty-one percent. The duties take effect one minute past midnight Eastern on August nineteenth, and reporting notes no exemption for goods trading under USMCA, which widens the hit. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer put the scope at nearly twenty billion dollars, roughly five percent of Canada's exports to the US. For anyone sourcing Canadian-made product, that reads straight through to landed cost, and it reopens the retaliation risk we flagged earlier. Prime Minister Mark Carney said Tuesday the two sides agreed to intensify trade talks. Now to the scan data, and a development on the post-holiday picture we have been tracking. Circana's latest weekly report puts off-premise beverage-alcohol dollars down twenty-one point four percent week-over-week for the week ending July twelfth, a drop the firm calls expected after the Fourth. Look past the seasonal noise and the read is steadier. Year-over-year, dollars slipped just three-tenths of a percent, to one point four five billion, with case volume off one point seven percent. The Spirits Business notes spirits held up better than the total, and prepared cocktails kept growing. The signal operators are watching beneath that is the durability of year-over-year growth brands. On that, industry reaction offers a caution: some practitioners note that early-stage brand scaling leans on sustained founder capital and direct market work, not just distributor pickup. Staying with beer, Morgan Stanley has trimmed what it expects the FIFA World Cup to add to global volumes, to seventeen basis points for the full year, down from twenty-four, after early exits by major brewing markets including Brazil, Germany and Colombia, according to The Drinks Business. The bank's read is that the tournament's winner, in relative terms, is Carlsberg. It was the clearest positive surprise, helped by deep runs from the UK, France, Switzerland and Norway, where the Danish brewer is well represented. AB InBev sees a smaller Latin American lift after Brazil's exit, though it keeps its official-sponsor exposure. The catch sits in the third quarter. Morgan Stanley warns brewers may need to correct shipments to match real demand, with the biggest inventory risk flagged in Brazil, Germany, Portugal and the Netherlands. And a governance story at Diageo. The Financial Times reports, per Shanken News Daily, that chairman John Manzoni is looking to reshape the company's board and bring in industry heavyweights, part of the turnaround now running under new chief executive Dave Lewis. The report is unconfirmed by the company, and no specific appointments or departures have been named. Still, board composition is the kind of change investors read as intent, a marker of how seriously the top of the house is treating the reset at a group whose recent results have run soft. Now, a few more headlines moving the trade today. In San Diego, court filings put Ballast Point in the middle of an ownership fight, with one faction alleging three million dollars in unauthorized loans have left the brewery in what the complaint calls imminent threat of operational collapse, per Brewbound. Those claims are untested. Hemp THC drinks reached more than one point six million case-equivalents in twenty twenty-five, up one hundred thirty-three percent, according to the Hemp Beverage Alliance and Vermont Information Processing. Separately, Swiss investor Spirit Capital has completed its purchase of the Killarney Brewing and Distilling site at Fossa in Ireland, per Just Drinks, with plans for the facility not yet detailed. Edrington has extended its alignment with Breakthru Beverage Group into Illinois, a sixth state, consolidating its full US portfolio with a single distributor, according to Shanken News Daily. In Germany, and following our earlier report on a possible duty rise, The Spirits Business says a national trade body is challenging the plan, arguing it unfairly singles out spirits. Nothing is enacted yet. And finally, Radico Khaitan reports its Magic Moments vodka rose forty-three percent, to three point two five million cases in the first quarter, with the producer claiming significant headroom left in India's vodka category.