There’s a lot of noise in the modern beer industry, but if you listen past it, you can hear a story being told.

Earlier this week, Petaluma, Calif.-based Lagunitas Brewing Co. sold a 50% stake to Heineken for an estimated $500 million. Lagunitas founder Tony Magee will tell you, in detail, that it’s simply an acceptance of where craft beer is headed. Magee’s critics will tell you it’s hypocrisy of the highest order from a craft-beer zealot who, just this year, threw down with Sierra Nevada over IPA and kerning. Craft beer’s last remaining hard-liners will say it’s Lagunitas losing its craft credibility under a definition it helped write.

All of the above misses the point.

Within the same week, MillerCoors’ Tenth and Blake division, home to its Blue Moon and Leinenkugel brands, bought two-year-old San Diego brewer Saint Archer, making it the first brewery in a city of more than 100 to be bought out by a major brewer. Some uncharitably called them a brewery built to sell out. Others, especially San Diego Padres fans, questioned their commitment to their hometown.

Again, all part of a fairly indiscernible din obscuring a very strong statement.

We’ve been writing this column for a little less than a year. In that time, we’ve seen Anheuser-Busch InBev BUD, -0.22% purchase Bend, Ore.-based 10 Barrel Brewing, Seattle-based Elysian Brewing and, just this week, Fennville, Mich.-based Virtue Cider (which was owned by the former brewmaster of Goose Island, which A-B bought in 2011). We’ve seen Grand Rapids, Mich.-based Founders Brewing sell to Spain’s Mahou San Miguel, Colorado-based Oskar Blues buy Michigan’s Perrin Brewing and saw Hood River, Ore.-based Full Sail and its employee-shareholders sell to a private-equity firm.

Yet the biggest story in beer this year may be Heineken and MillerCoors buying up craft breweries in one week. According to Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Euromonitor International, MillerCoors’ parent companies — MolsonCoors TAP, +0.41% and SABMiller US:SBMRY — produce 15% of the world’s beer, second only to A-B InBev’s 20%. Heinken, meanwhile, produces 9%.

Companies that, combined, make nearly a quarter of the world’s beer just got up off the bench and started buying craft breweries. Heineken just bought its first U.S. property, while MillerCoors — which hasn’t made a purchase since buying Crispin Cider in 2012 — has acquired its first craft brewer since picking up Leinenkugel in 1988. That’s a lot of buying power going into a quickly consolidating market, and it may be just the beginning.

Diageo DEO, +0.20% , which owns the Guinness and Red Stripe brands and attended the Craft Brewers Conference amid a tweak of the Guinness brand in the U.S., can’t be counted out as a potential buyer. Constellation Brands STZ, +1.85% , which was granted the right to Grupo Modelo’s U.S. sales by the Justice Department after an antitrust suit against Modelo owner A-B InBev, is seeing its brands grow on a pace that rivals craft beer, but also can’t be excluded as a potential buyer. Even Pabst, which doesn’t even have a brewery of its own but is building a research brewery in Milwaukee, may want some brands to add to its stable of legacy beers. This is on top of the private-equity firms, holding companies and other craft brewers (think San Diego brewery Green Flash’s purchase of neighboring Alpine) that are also getting into the hunt.

When we began covering beer last October, there were still questions about why a business publication would dedicate a column to the drink. By the time we hit the Craft Brewers Conference in Portland, Ore., in April, nobody was asking that question anymore. Craft beer was just downgraded to “sell,” and any pretense of independence or idealism its adherents may have held — with few exceptions — has been put on the block for anyone with cash in hand.

Jason Notte is a freelance writer based in Portland, Ore. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post and Esquire. Notte received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University in 1998. Follow him on Twitter @Notteham.