Welcome in, today is Tuesday, August twenty-fifth, and we begin with Shanken News Daily on the collapse of the Canada trade talks. The fifty percent United States tariff on Canadian wine and spirits is now in force. Shanken News Daily reports the talks collapsed without a deal, following our earlier report on the three-day pause the president announced to let negotiations finish. Drinks International reports the duty covers beer, wine, liquor, cider and other fermented beverages, and that Canadian prime minister Mark Carney has promised to match the tariffs dollar for dollar. That resets landed cost overnight for importers, distributors and on-premise buyers, and it sets the reference point for everything else moving in the trade file today. Industry reaction leans toward the view that the damage is already structural rather than new, with some arguing that after roughly eighteen months of American bottles off many provincial shelves, habits and substitutes have had time to harden. A recurring trade-side framing treats the vacated shelf space itself as the real contest. Also today, wine imports into the United States fell in both value and volume in the first half of this year. That is Just Drinks, reporting on United States customs data analysed by the OIVE. The account carries no figures beyond the direction of travel, but that direction gives operators a baseline on how far import demand had already softened before the new duties landed, which is what separates pre-existing weakness from policy effect. Reaction tends to place the decline inside a wider tariff-driven disruption of wine trade, with some pointing to stranded export inventory and the cost of relabeling stock for redirected markets. Packaging-side voices extend that concern down the supply chain, arguing tariffs on bottles and raw materials land well beyond producers themselves. Separately, Brown-Forman is facing open criticism from inside its founding family ahead of the chief executive's exit. Shanken News Daily, citing Wall Street Journal reporting, says W.L. Lyons Brown the third and Stuart Brown wrote to the board on July tenth that the stock had fallen from the mid seventy dollar range to the mid twenties over three years. Per that reporting, the brothers, who sit outside the Wolf Pen Branch block holding about sixty percent of voting rights, faulted the board for rejecting Sazerac's fifteen billion dollar offer after merger talks with Pernod Ricard broke down. Chief executive Lawson Whiting told the board three days later that he would step down once a successor is found. The New York Post reports Sazerac's offer remains open. Control of the fifth-largest global spirits player by volume is the clearest live test of consolidation pressure in American whiskey. Reaction leans toward reading the exit as symptom rather than cause. Fifty-four percent of Americans say they drink alcohol, unchanged from last year and still at a record low. That figure comes from new Gallup polling, reported by Harpers Wine and Spirit Trade News. A second flat year is what makers and retailers have been waiting on to judge whether the participation decline has levelled off or is still working through the category. Some in the trade push back on the record-low framing, noting the same survey's long history shows participation near comparable levels in earlier decades. A recurring counter-view holds that this dip is different because non-alcoholic options now supply the occasion people were buying. Now, a few more headlines moving the trade today. Sazerac has bought the Garrard County Distilling plant in Lancaster, Kentucky, Food Dive reports, for about twenty million dollars at a court-ordered auction. Beer's August losses were not as steep as first reported, per corrected Circana data carried by Brewbound, following our earlier report on the sales rut. BevNET argues traditional trading up is finished: ready-to-drink cocktails carry the highest average price per serve of any category, and are still growing fastest. Anheuser-Busch InBev sued Tennessee and its revenue commissioner on August twenty-first, The Tennessean reports, over a denied one point eight million dollar franchise tax refund. And finally, Harpers reports the government has opened a review of how business rates are calculated for pubs and hotels in England and Wales, which could lead to reforms.