When the entire beer industry is tripping over itself to get to a hot corner of the market, it’s odd to see one of the biggest players standing pat.

Two years ago, Nielsen noted that Mexican beers had a growth rate on par with U.S. craft beer. But while craft sales have flagged since then, Mexican beer-sale growth is still in the double digits — up 13.7% last year. The sales numbers of each market are now almost the same.

Unfortunately for MillerCoors, it didn’t have a Mexican beer in its lineup until recently.

“ ‘You can’t create an authentic Mexican brand out of thin air.’ ” — MillerCoors CEO Gavin Hattersley

Eight of Nielsen’s 25 fastest-growing beer brands are Mexican, which makes Constellation Brands STZ, -0.02% ecstatic. The beer, wine and spirits company paid $4.75 billion for the U.S. rights to Corona, Modelo, Pacifico, Victoria, Bohemia and other brands after the Department of Justice ruled that Anheuser-Busch InBev SA’s BUD, -0.11% 2013 purchase of Grupo Modelo for $20.1 billion violated U.S. antitrust laws. ABI, meanwhile, used the growing U.S. market for Mexican imports as an excuse to comb through its Grupo Modelo portfolio for more obscure brands and release Estrella Jalisco and Montejo here in the U.S.

Then there’s Heineken NV HEINY, -0.71% , which used the Most Interesting Man on Earth to turn Dos Equis into a top-15 beer brand in the U.S., according to market research firm IRI Worldwide. That leaves one very big brewer out of the mix: MillerCoors and its parent company, Molson Coors Brewing Co. TAP, -1.21% . Though it secured the global rights to the Miller-branded beers for $12 billion last year after a U.S. antitrust decision against ABI and its purchase of global beer conglomerate SABMiller, MillerCoors somehow ended up with a portfolio devoid of Mexican beers.

Want Peruvian beers? MillerCoors has Cusqueña and Cristal for you. Polish beer? Try Lech or Tyskie. Colombian beer? Aguila fits the bill. Czech? None better than Pilsner Urquell.

But Mexican beer? MillerCoors itself described it as a “gap in our portfolio.” MillerCoors CEO Gavin Hattersley said on his company’s blog that its management team had been watching the growth of Mexican beers with interest, but didn’t really have a way to get in on it.

“For some time now, we’ve heard from many quarters — including inside MillerCoors — that one of the things holding us back was the lack of a Mexican import,” he says. “MillerCoors explored ways to get into that part of the business over the years, including looking at buying a Mexican craft brand, but there was no clear or scalable way to do it. You can’t, after all, create an authentic Mexican brand out of thin air.”

The best you can hope for is that someone else has one kicking around. As it turned out, Heineken USA had its hands full with both Dos Equis and Baja-brewed economy beer Tecate, and was willing to give up import rights to another Mexican beer in its portfolio, Sol. First brewed by Cervecería Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma in 1899, Sol was picked up by Heineken USA for import only in 2004 and got a somewhat bigger push after Heineken bought that brewery outright in 2010.

However, Heineken gave U.S. drinkers the pale lager version of it in a green bottle and called it a day. Drinkers here never got to taste Sol Brava dark beer, Sol with salt and lime, or Sol with Clamato. The fact that Hattersley is vowing that MillerCoors will “bring more investment and focus to Sol than it’s seen in a very long time” suggests a bit of neglect here in the States, but a 10-year import deal with a new U.S. partner just might turn that around.

Or so everybody hopes. From MillerCoors’ perspective, there’s a bit of debt and restructuring that came after the end of its joint venture with SAB, and the company’s committed to volume growth across all lines by 2019. In the first quarter of 2017, volume to wholesalers and retailers was down as much as 4%.

Even after MillerCoors brings Sol into the fold, there are going to be issues. For one, about 20% of Sol’s distributors aren’t within the MillerCoors network, so they’re going to need to be convinced to let that beer go. Second, a whole lot of MillerCoors trucks already carry Heineken and Constellation Brands’ Mexican beers, which are working out pretty well for those distributors.

MillerCoors got the Mexican beer it wanted, but it may have to reintroduce or reinvent Sol for U.S. audiences if it wants to keep both drinkers and distributors happy.

“If we can combine the equity in the Sol brand with our sales and marketing teams’ expertise and our distributors’ know-how, there’s no question in my mind we can change Sol’s trajectory,” Hattersley says. “We expect the volume to come from a number of sources, but our intention is to differentiate Sol so that it drives incremental growth for our portfolio and our distributors’ portfolios.”

Jason Notte is a freelance writer based in Portland, Ore. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post and Esquire. Follow him on Twitter @Notteham.