It’s all over but the tears (and for stockholders, the cheers)….From the Associated Press…

• BC-EU–Belgium-Anheuser-Busch InBev,2nd Ld-Writethru/791
• InBev says Anheuser Busch takeover is finalized
• By AOIFE WHITE, AP Business Writer
  

  BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) _ InBev SA formed the world’s largest brewer Tuesday when it finalized its $52 billion (€41 billion) takeover of Anheuser-Busch Cos. Inc.

  The new company, named Anheuser-Busch InBev, will be headed by InBev CEO Carlos Brito and will be headquartered at Leuven, Belgium.

  InBev promises to keep Anheuser-Busch’s St. Louis base as the company’s North American headquarters but the takeover ends 150 years of family rule at Anheuser-Busch. Anheuser-Busch President and CEO August A. Busch IV joins the new company’s board as a non-executive director.

  Anheuser-Busch shares stopped trading Monday and will now be swapped for $70 each in cash.

  The Belgian-Brazilian takeover of Anheuser-Busch comes after a bitter takeover battle..BUT YOU KNOW ALL THAT...

  Onward..Have your tried Dogfish Head’s Palo Santo Marron? I highly recommend you try. It’s a stony, 12 percent beer with a sweet, unusual nose and the taste is woody with a strange aromatic quality from the barrel where it was fermented. The barrel’s made from palo santo, a sweet-scented tropical wood.

  I’m bringing it up because an article this week in the New Yorker is causing a stir in the world of beer geekdom: A better brew: The rise of extreme beer, by Burkhard Bilger, a guy who’s gained a deserved reputation for excellent reporting on unusual subjects.

  But it’s only peripherally about extreme beer. Really, it’s an excellent profile of Sam Calagione, whom Bilger said looks like a surfer (and whom, I might add, is – as we mere toilers in the daily journalism world call “a quote machine”  – someone whose casual comments make great quotes.)  Anyway, it’s an excellent read and he begins the movie-length article with a detailed examination of palo santo wood, ending here:

  • Calagione took me to see it in August, a pallet of leftover palo santo was stacked nearby. The staves, streaked with a greenish-brown grain, felt disproportionately heavy, as if subject to a stronger gravity—one part wood, one part white dwarf star. The barrel was built by a father-and-son firm in Buffalo, Calagione said, and cost about a hundred and forty thousand dollars—three times the price of the oak barrel beside it. “If Dogfish were a publicly traded company, I’d have been fired for building this,” he said. READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE HERE…

  The article is making waves in the blogosphere…Jack Curtin, who writes the Liquid Diet Blog notes that over at Beer Advocate, there’s a regular pissing match underway. One serious point, Brooklyn  Brewery’s erudite brewmaster Garrett Oliver says the author misquoted him and misled him. He thought it was about extreme brewing, but actually, the article turns out to be about Sam Calagione. JOIN THAT THREAD HERE…

  WHO SAYS THERE’S NO GOOD BEER IN LIVERMORE…For readers outside the San Francisco Bay Area, Livermore is 60 miles east of San Francisco on the edge of the hills that divide the Bay Area from the Central Valley. It’s mostly a bedroom community, famous because it’s the home of  the government’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It’s not famous for beer.

  That’s changing.  If you live out that way check out Perry’s Liquor, 1522 Railroad Ave., (925) 443-0550. Owner Harpreet Singh stocks a lot of great beer. For instance, it’s the one place out that way where you can find Jolly Pumpkin’s exotic beer.  Harpreet says he’s just received a number of Shelton Brothers English and Belgian beers including, among many others… Drie Fonteinen Doesjel Old Lambic, which is a classic in the sour beer category.

  CRUISING THE BLOGS… Evan Rail, the Bay Area guy who lives in the Czech Republic and writes The Prague Monitor blog reports that for its 120th anniverrsary bbers, Japan’s Kirin went retro. And they took out the rice and made all malt beers like they used to do…

• The big difference between the old styles and today’s modern Kirin? According to an English-language post at Japan Marketing News, the modern version of Kirin is made “with rice and starch,” while the earlier versions “did without starch” or were made with barley and hops only.