I'll say this much for Koch...
During a recent "brew tour" at a local brewery, the Brewmaster had nothing but good things to say about him. Recently, there was some shortage of something, I can't remember what (hops? grain?), and it was hitting the small guys hard, real hard.
Although Boston is now pretty much a "big guy", they were the only big company -- which the suppliers had at the front of the line -- that decided to not hoard the ingredient and actually resold it to many of the little guys at their cost, to avoid shutting them out. It would have been really easy to basically shut 80% of the microbrews down for a few months because of this.
Koch literally came to the rescue.
I know nothing else, just what this brewmaster said. This company competes with Boston on the local shelves. Didn't matter. Koch did the right thing.
Yes, that was about a hop shortage. It's kind of complicated, but the big guys (Miller, Bud, Coors, etc) apparently use mostly a hop oil concentrate that is shelf stable for years. They had contracted with hop growers, and ran into overproduction for several years, and the big guys had an excess of hop concentrate on the shelf, so cut future contracts way down. Hop farmers ended up pulling out hops and growing other things to stay afloat.
Now the microbrewers are getting mostly the marginal excess hops from these big growers, and basically, the margins dried up very quickly. And it takes years for hops to start producing in quantity. It was tough for home brewers and micro-brewers.
And it was widely reported that Koch helped out the other guys, as he had his own contracts with some to spare (or something like that). Yes, he's very well thought of among home brewers and the micro-brewer community.
I think the sum of the micros and home brewers have created a hop market separate from the big boys, so barring weather or disease issues, probably not a future problem.
Interestingly, I decided to try to find this crisis the brewmaster mentioned. Instead I found an article that says Koch may be veering away from this altruistic past:
The Competition for Craft Beer Drinkers Takes a Bitter Turn - TIME
Don't know. It is "he said, he said" right now.
As far as the second post there - yes, 'he said - she said', and the guy from Laguntitas got in a big row recently, he really acted like a jerk and was widely scorned for it. Basically, he was suing another company (Sierra Nevada I think) for trademark infringement - claiming their "IPA" label ripped off Lagunitas IPA label. Hmmm, three block-style letters, just how different can you make them? The court of popular opinion spoke, and Lagunitas tweeted an apology. But he still came off as a jerk.
In a he-said-she-said, I'd go with Koch.
-ERD50