Country Malt Group enters hemp beverages with Perfectly Dosed partnership

Country Malt Group has pushed past barley and hops and into hemp beverages, announcing a partnership with Perfectly Dosed that gives brewers and distillers access to THC and CBD hemp emulsions for non-alcoholic drinks. The timing is hard to miss: Country Malt Group made the announcement on April 16 and said it will be at the Craft Brewers Conference in Philadelphia from April 20-22 at Booth #937, putting the move in front of the exact crowd that is most likely to decide whether hemp belongs in the modern brewery portfolio.

The bet is not just about one more ingredient line. Country Malt Group says it serves thousands of breweries and distilleries across North America through 12 distribution centers, a scale that matters if hemp beverages are going to move beyond pilot batches and novelty cans. The company traces its roots to 1995, when it was founded in Champlain, New York, as North Country Malt, and it became part of Soufflet Malt in 2023. Soufflet Malt calls itself the world’s No. 1 maltster, which gives this partnership the feel of a mainstream supply-chain play rather than a fringe side project.

Perfectly Dosed brings the formulation side. The company says it was founded at the University of Chicago and is backed by the University of Chicago Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. The Polsky Center says Alexander Choi founded the company and that it pioneered the technology and infrastructure behind more than half a billion servings of hemp THC and CBD beverages. Perfectly Dosed says its emulsions use high-pressure homogenization technology and are flavor-neutral, stable, and rapidly absorbed, the kind of spec sheet that should catch the attention of brewers who have seen enough hazy, separated, or muddy functional drinks to know that texture can make or break the pour.

That is where the real brewery question sits: is hemp a credible diversification play, or a distraction from beer? The answer depends on whether operators see it as a taproom extension, a package-format experiment, or a compliance headache waiting to happen. The Brewers Association said in June 2025 that cannabis and intoxicating hemp products are already prevalent across U.S. markets, while regulation has lagged behind the category’s spread. USDA says the 2018 Farm Bill authorized hemp production and removed hemp and hemp seeds from the DEA’s schedule of controlled substances, but TTB has been fielding industry questions about hemp ingredients in alcohol beverages since 2019, which is exactly the kind of regulatory gray zone that makes brewers cautious.

There is also a growing trade infrastructure around the category. The Hemp Beverage Alliance says it has more than 280 members in the U.S., Canada and the United Kingdom, and its regulatory principles focus on age limits, serving-size controls, labeling and consistent rules across state lines. That is a serious signal for small breweries weighing whether to test hemp drinks as a way to diversify revenue and keep drinkers in the building. Country Malt Group’s move suggests the supply chain is getting ready for that experiment. The bigger question now is whether brewers are ready to treat hemp as a second lane, or whether it remains a shiny detour from the core beer business.