A Shuttered MAGA Brewery Wants $50 Million from Its Haters in a Lawsuit over Hurt Feelings

It’s somehow fitting that in the same week where the President of the United States successfully strongarmed the IRS and his Department of Justice into creating a $1.8 billion slush fund to fling cash at any MAGA ally who claims they were hurt by left-wing “lawfare,” a prominent (and failed) right-wing brewery in Virginia would announce its own, absurd $50 million nuisance lawsuit against a collection of people who dared to criticize said brewery in public. Armed Forces Brewing Company, formerly of Norfolk, Virginia, is alleging in the civil lawsuit that it endured “a coordinated campaign of tortious interference, defamation, intimidation, harassment, and statutory business conspiracy designed to destroy the company commercially,” wrought against it by a conspiratorial hive of evil woke activists and “social-media operators” who undermined the business with calculated lies, “fabricated media narratives” and “anonymous online amplification attacks.”

Somehow lost in the story is whether local customers, I dunno, liked their beer or wanted to purchase said beer with American currency. Spoiler: Generally speaking, they did not, or the brewery would still be here. Armed Forces Brewing Company closed its doors in March of 2025, after barely 15 months of being physically open in Norfolk, and has been on a grand grievance tour ever since. The lawsuit is its attempt to take formal revenge against the people it sees as its tormenters, who are mostly Norfolk-area residents who just didn’t like the business and said so online, or spoke out against it at city council meetings.

This is a sprawling story of politically infused business and extremely fragile feelings, with the full scope of the Armed Forces Brewing Co. story perhaps best told by alcohol business writer and Virginia resident Dave Infante and his newsletter Fingers, which has been covering the story in many installments since the beginning.

For the uninitiated, however: Armed Forces Brewing Co. is essentially a classic right-wing pander brand, the kind of thing tossed together by hucksters to capitalize on customers who are more swayed by grievance and ideology than by products. It has some things in common with brands like “Tears of the Left” Bourbon or Conservative Dad’s Ultra Right Beer, although its pandering wasn’t quite so garish or directly embracing of the culture war. Instead, AFBC merely positioned itself as a generic champion of “The Troops,” etc., a perfectly viable strategy for a business opening in a city like Norfolk, home to the world’s largest navy base and a huge accompanying military population. The problem wasn’t somehow that AFBC was military-themed, as there are several other military-themed breweries in the same region that never ended up as targets of local ire. The problem was how AFBC carried itself, and its extreme aggression toward anything its operators perceived as a threat. And wouldn’t you know it, they saw threats everywhere, envisioning an endlessly wicked, community-wide conspiracy to persecute their business, rather than local consumers and beer industry peers simply being grossed out by the company’s behavior. Or as a well-crafted Simpsons meme I saw posted online put it:

This persecution complex was on hand from the very beginning, when AFBC arrived in Norfolk with nothing less than the backing of Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who went far out of his way to lure the brand into opening in the state with hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax incentives. Alan Beal, the CEO of the enterprise, set the tone immediately, with personal Instagram posting that included stereotypical Trump worship and crude posting mocking President Joe Biden. Despite that, the company’s overall aesthetic and attitude might have passed largely unremarked upon if not for the company hiring former SEAL Team 6 member Robert O’Neill, the man who claims to have fired the bullet that killed Osama bin Laden, as its official brand ambassador. O’Neill subsequently drew local ire for social media posts that castigated the Navy for having a drag queen in a recruitment ad. O’Neill quickly became a lightning rod and embarrassment for the company as he mocked transgender people and drew headlines for claiming that he had been kicked off a Delta flight for refusing to wear a mask during the COVID-19 pandemic. Further social media marketing with O’Neill, some of it also starring Alan Beal, would depict the company going to war on “pretentious foreign breweries” and other aspects of the craft beer industry, despite AFBC’s status as ostensibly another craft brewery. O’Neill was eventually arrested in a Dallas suburb for public intoxication and misdemeanor assault in 2023, with a local security guard alleging that O’Neill had screamed racial slurs at him.

Suffice to say, incidents like these–not to mention Armed Forces Brewing Company raising $7.5 million in “shares” from 9,300 investors in a crowdfunding campaign, only for those “shares” to likely become worthless, much like the Feb. collapse of BrewDog–poisoned many in the local Norfolk community against AFBC. This created what really feels like a vicious feedback loop, where an aggrieved Alan Beals absolutely refuses to believe that anyone could hate his company, his beer or his politics on their own, and instead imagines that the whole world has allied against him in an unnatural fashion, causing him to lash out and further solidify the local community against him and AFBC. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course: Anyone who didn’t already hate AFBC would inevitably do so eventually after all of its ceaseless whining and victimhood.

As one poster put it online, as noted by the local Virginia Mercury: “I cannot believe they are putting that BS in Norfolk,” saying the company was “this sexist, gun culture glorifying, hipster hating, racist magnet.”

The hate and accusations subsequently continued to build on any topic related to AFBC in its local community, with local service members accusing Alan Beal of trading on stolen valor, thanks to incidents such as his Fox News appearance with Maria Bartiromo, where the host thanked him “for his service,” and he didn’t bother to correct her that he never served in the military, later saying that “I didn’t hear her even say that.” In messages to the company’s fans and financial supporters–many of whom were not actually local to Norfolk–Beal would frequently lash out, saying that the brewery was fighting against “evil, evil forces.” As he put it in one of those messages: “These people are, I’m gonna be frank with you. These people are truly evil.”

If anyone in the media is looking for a quote in response to the $50 million lawsuit that was just filed against me and others. Here is my only statement until I speak to my lawyers:

“lol.”

— Zach D Roberts (@zdroberts.bsky.social) 6:53 PM · May 19, 2026

Now, via the lawsuit, Beals is back for revenge against the people who dared to criticize his business, speak out against it locally, or engaged in activism against it. As covered in an intensely credulous right-wing media, with headlines like “How A Patriotic Brewery Fought Back With a $50 Million Lawsuit,” he explained the goals of the lawsuit: “This lawsuit is about coordinated and intentional economic destruction — not free speech. The defendants didn’t merely criticize our company, they admittedly conspired and worked together to pressure our customers, vendors, sponsors, charitable partners, event operators, and business associates to sever ties with our company. They continuously spread false and defamatory narratives designed to damage our reputation and destroy our business.”

Which is, of course … free speech. This becomes clear when you look at some of the material in the lawsuit text the company posted in full on its Facebook page of all places, which purports to enumerate the many instances in which the locals conspired against the company. These include such incidents as the admin of a local beer education company and its associated Facebook page commenting on Facebook “I don’t know how I feel about it” on a post about AFBC’s opening, which the brewery said implied “AFBC fosters a culture of hate and hostility towards the LGBTQ community, thereby undermining AFBC’s community goodwill.” Other instances include the most basic forms of activism imaginable, such as the company claiming it is malicious and illegal for a local resident to place a call or send an email to the Hampton Roads Food Truck Association to urge those people not to do business with Armed Forces brewing Company. As a result, Beals and the company claim that “As a proximate cause thereof, many food trucks withdrew from selling food at AFBC’s taproom, and participation disruptions recurred; he knowingly and intentionally targeted food‑truck/vendor relationships he knew were critical to AFBC’s taproom operations.”

What it always seems to come back to, ultimately, is Beals’ utter disbelief that the community might not want his attitude or his brewery there, and his belief that anyone expressing that sentiment is engaged in something illegal in doing so. Somehow, I expect his opinions about the validity of activism against a business you don’t like would be very, very different if the business in question was something other than the MAGA-pandering brewery he owns.

In the now year-plus since the closure of Armed Forces Brewing Company in Norfolk, the brand has continually proclaimed that it will reopen somewhere else with a “more pro-small business social and economic climate,” blaming the “woke mob” for shuttering the brewery doors in Virginia. To quote Beals directly: “Our ability to profitably operate in Norfolk was severely affected by the local woke mob – a few individuals in the area who have no love for the traditional American values we hold as a company.” It will no doubt shock you to learn that there have been zero updates as to where the company is supposedly reopening, or whether it will be continuing to brew its brands through contract brewers.

As a Virginia resident myself, I couldn’t help but notice one thing in particular over the course of the last year: The final batches of Armed Forces Brewing Co. Special Hops IPA sitting immovably in the cooler of my local Publix, refusing to go away or be purchased by anyone. In March of 2026, a full year after these six-packs of IPA were brewed, the grocery chain finally took notice of the fact that they were never moving and stuck a clearance sticker on them, causing me to snap a photo for posterity. Shortly afterward, the store liquidated the remaining stock, robbing the world of potentially its last chance to taste the most Troop-Respecting beer around. Now excuse me while I dust off my bugle to play Taps.