Welcome in, today is Monday, August twenty-fourth, and we begin with Bloomberg's reporting on a family rebuke inside Brown-Forman. Bloomberg reports that two members of the family that controls Brown-Forman wrote to the board on July tenth, taking it to task for deteriorating results, pay practices and the collapsed Pernod Ricard talks. Per that account, W. L. Lyons Brown the Third, a descendant of the founding family, and his brother Stuart Brown, a retired director, wrote that chief executive Lawson Whiting carries what they called a three-year track record of poor operating performance, failed transactions and significant increases in personal compensation. Three days later, the company announced Whiting had decided to retire, the same reporting says. That reporting also says the brothers questioned roughly six million dollars in bonuses to executives involved in the talks, including two point seven million to Whiting, and asked what the plan is now. The Wall Street Journal had the letter first. A Brown-Forman spokesperson said the company takes feedback from all stakeholders seriously and regularly engages in constructive dialogue. With a fifteen-billion-dollar Sazerac approach rejected in July, the pressure now sits on control, not price. Industry reaction leans toward reading this as a family-governance test rather than a valuation dispute. Also today, Diageo has put a number on how the slowdown is reaching its own cost base. The Fresno Bee reports that average full-time-equivalent headcount fell by one thousand nine hundred and twenty-two in fiscal twenty twenty-six, to twenty-seven thousand nine hundred and thirty-eight, down about six point four percent. That same account notes the drop is not layoffs alone, with business disposals and a site closure also in the figure. Net sales came in at nineteen point six billion dollars, down three percent, reported operating profit fell twenty-seven percent, and severance costs rose to five hundred and fourteen million from seventy-three million a year earlier. The company is spending about one point two billion on a two-year restructuring targeting roughly a billion in savings, ninety percent implemented by September first. Industry reaction leans skeptical that cost cutting can substitute for demand, particularly in North America. Separately, new NIQ research puts ready-to-drink at thirty-eight percent of beverage alcohol innovation dollars, off a smaller item count than that share implies. Brewbound reports the finding, and the same research has brands that invest in innovation roughly twice as likely to grow their overall business, which is a direct read for anyone setting new-product budgets this cycle. Some in the trade set that figure against a shrinking base and read the format's outperformance as substitution within the category rather than net new growth. A recurring thread points to on-premise trial as the underrated discovery channel for new RTDs among younger legal-drinking-age drinkers. Staying with the data, Gallup's annual drinking survey landed Thursday with the share of US adults who drink unchanged from last year, while adult trial of non-alcoholic options picked up. Just Drinks frames that share as a record low. Per Brewbound, the underlying trend depends on which angle you cut the data from, which is how both the moderation case and the stable-volume case end up citing the same survey. Industry reaction leans skeptical of the coverage rather than the data, with some practitioners questioning how much weight a roughly thousand-person annual survey should carry, and arguing composition matters more than volume. Now, a few more headlines moving the trade today. Following our earlier report on India's food-safety action, Mint reports United Spirits has agreed to reformulate affected whisky and rum brands, with about ninety days to liquidate existing stock in Maharashtra as its court challenge continues. Sazerac says it has completed its twenty-million-dollar purchase of the idled Garrard County distillery in Lancaster, Kentucky, per its announcement carried by CNHI, adding capacity while much of bourbon cuts output. Carlsberg's chief executive told the group's first-half call that India delivered mid-teens percentage volume growth, the Economic Times reports, with a draft prospectus now pre-filed for the planned India listing. And finally, Just Drinks reports Strategic Beverage Services has acquired BevZero's US operations, in what it says will create the country's largest dealcoholisation service provider.