There Are Two Konas. Only One of Them Is in Hawaiʻi.

Kona Brewing was founded in Kailua-Kona in 1994 and grew into Hawaiʻi's most famous beer name — Longboard, Big Wave, a wave on every label. Fame like that gets bought. By the late 2010s Kona belonged to Craft Brew Alliance, and in 2020 Anheuser-Busch moved to buy Craft Brew Alliance whole.

Then the Department of Justice did something unusual: it drew a line down the middle of a beer brand, and the line was the Pacific Ocean. As a condition of the acquisition, the DOJ required the divestiture of the entire Kona Hawaiʻi business. The paperwork is public: an SEC-filed agreement in which PV Brewing Partners, LLC purchased one hundred percent of Kona Brewery LLC's membership interests. Anheuser-Busch got the Kona brand for the continental United States. Hawaiʻi kept its brewery.

Which means the wave on the label now marks a border. Order a Longboard in Kailua-Kona and it comes from Kona Brewing Hawaiʻi — a company the Brewers Association formally recognized as an independent craft brewerin August 2026, while noting in the same breath that the mainland Kona operation is separately owned inside Anheuser-Busch's portfolio. Order the same beer in Ohio and you are drinking Big Beer. Neither bottle is lying. They are just two different answers wearing one name.

This archive keeps eight distinctions that must never collapse, and Kona is the living proof of half of them at once: a brand is not a brewery; a brewery is not the companythat owns it; and "who owns Kona?" is not one question. It is at least two, with an ocean between the answers.

That's Tally's Take.

What the archive holds

Kona Brewing is recorded as the Hawaiʻi operation — founded 1994, active, its parent recorded as PV Brewing Partners, LLC with the SEC purchase agreement as the source, and its record noting explicitly that mainland production is separate under AB InBev. The archive answers "who owns Kona?" the only honest way: by asking which Kona you mean.