Bottoms Up

Ahh..the InBev Anheuser-Busch takeover, Hmm. It’s truth-telling time.  I’ve always found Bud a beer of little brawn. Given a choice, I prefer Diet Coke or (gasp) a glass of wine.

Some great people work for A-B, ditto at the many A-B distributors. I feel for them; hope they’ll weather the storm. But the beer? No thanks.

Most likely, the driving force behind this deal is the so-called “emerging markets” places like China, where people drink a lot of beer and A-B has a strong foothold. But there’s a worrying aspect to this merger.

Melissa Cole, the English blogger, has an interesting perspective:

“…my major fear, which has just been realised, is that there is going to be a big beer behemoth owning a very large percentage of the American beer market and – even more terrifyingly – big corporate brewers will own 80% of the beer volume.

This will undoubtedly not only have an enormous impact on the US market but is guaranteed to have an impact on our shores soon too.

I do hope that the Parliamentary PubCo inquiry takes a long-term view on this as a potential future issue for tied pubs.

Why? Well, if any of the big companies decide to get into bed with Anheuser-Busch InBev then choice will be so drastically reduced for so many licensees – not to mention consumers – that it could set back the progress of local, regional and speciality beers in a big (and in some cases possibly fatal) way.

Worrying, it really is… READ MORE….

Ms. Cole is right about the relentless advance of “corporate beer.” We see it all the time. Go into nearly anybar/anywhere: There’s your Guinness, your Stella, a couple of InBev Belgian Ales, maybe Bass, a couple of German corporates: Beck’s and Spaten. And Bud/Coors/Miller and their light/lite clones.

They have one problem. They’re boring. There’s no adventure, no intrigue, no drama, no creativity. It’s a formula, like one giant theme pub. So what’s really new this morning? Not much, and if the new giant tries to choke off the craft beer movement, we’ll fight ‘em…to the barricades…