A Ton Of Craft Beer Just Went Missing In Atlanta

There's a mysterious beer-caper on the loose in Georgia.

In what might be the weirdest heist since the great Canadian maple syrup heist in 2013, an Atlanta brewery has announced that roughly 78,500 bottles were stolen on Tuesday. According to the company, the thieves made off with two loaded refrigerated trailers in the pre-dawn darkness.

Police later found both trailers using GPS, but they had already been emptied. Further searching uncovered roughly a quarter of the stolen goods in a suburban warehouse, but even despite this recovery, the loss still stings. As Steve Farace, the man in charge of SweetWater Brewing Co.'s marketing says, "For a small company like us to lose that much beer, it really hurts."

The heist does have some precedent in this area; the catch is the precedent is fictional. The warehouse where the beer was found is close to some of the locations where the famous 1977 film Smokey and the Bandit was shot.

In the movie, the duo hauls beer across the South with sheriffs in hot pursuit. The similarities are laughable—literally. Some plant workers have already been cracking movie-themed jokes.

To top brass, however, the news is anything but funny. The stolen shipments included most of the company's supply of Goin' Coastal, a pineapple-flavored IPA that sounds so delicious it seems natural that they are sold out.

We can only hope that SweetWater Brewing Co. can solve this mystery, but in the meantime, craft-beer lovers might have to look elsewhere for their hoppy fix.