MillerCoors’ Miller Lite brand is keeping its head in the game with two renewed multi-year sponsorships for both Major League Baseball’s Milwaukee Brewers and the NFL’s Chicago Bears.

Through a partnership with K2 Sports, MillerCoors’ Coors Light and Coors Banquet brands are giving fans of legal drinking age the chance to win a variety of prizes that will make their skiing or snowboarding experiences even more memorable.

In conjunction with the launch of the Star bottle for its Heineken and Heineken Light brands, Heineken USA also introduced new secondary packaging for the brands’ six-, 12-, 18- and 24-packs

If you were to ask Bret Williams a year ago whether he would ever sell Vermont Hard Cider Co., the answer would have been, “No.” When the president and chief executive officer of the Middlebury, Vt.-based company originally purchased the Woodchuck hard cider brand and facility in 2003, it was not about developing a big company or brand; it was about saving jobs.

St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch, a subsidiary of Anheuser-Busch InBev, is adding some berry taste to its flavored malt beverage (FMB) lineup with the release of Bud Light Lime Straw-Ber-Rita. A follow up to the successful Lime-A-Rita, which launched last April and has sold more than 500,000 barrels, the Straw-Ber-Rita is an 8 percent alcohol by volume FMB that blends Bud Light Lime with the taste of a strawberry Margarita, the company says.

In 2012, the total U.S. beer market grew by 1 percent; however, craft beer grew 15 percent in volume and 17 percent in dollar sales, representing a total barrel increase of nearly 1.8 million, according to preliminary data from the Brewers Association, Boulder, Colo.

At the end of January, Budweiser asked its Facebook fans and Twitter followers to send along naming suggestions for the new baby Clydesdale that starred in its Super Bowl XLVII commercial.

Among the pumping bass, neon lighting and professional dancers at this year’s nightclub-themed National Distributors Conference for HEINEKEN USA, White Plains, N.Y., a subsidiary of Amsterdam-based Heineken International B.V., the company announced that, for the first time in five years, Heineken Lager is back in the black.

The old saying goes, “There’s no ‘I’ in team.” It’s not too hard to apply that saying to the U.S. beer market as analysts recognize the role different tiers and segments play in the category’s efforts to bring its case and dollar sales positioning back to pre-recession levels.

 This month, Longmont, Colo.-based Oskar Blues Brewery integrated its brewing and restaurant roots to open its fast-craft-casual restaurant, ChuBurger.