Beer & Me

No doubt you’ve heard the news by now – Anhueser-Busch finally acquiesced to being taken over by Inbev. After the Belgian beer giant upped their bid by four or five billion – but what’s a few billion among friends? – the board at A-B decided that was their price.

It’s been a remarkable few months. Back in the beginning of 2008 three companies dominated US beer sales – Anheuser-Busch, Miller and Coors. At the end of 2008 none of these companies will exist! Miller and Coors’s respective foreign masters decided to join their American interests into a single company called MillerCoors and now Anheuser-Busch Inbev, or as some are already calling it A-B Inbev, will replace the once mighty brewer of Budweiser.

By the way, if you want to get an in-depth look at the brewer that was Anheuser-Busch, CNBC is airing a show that should be pretty interesting this Friday.

If you’re one of the many Budweiser fans concerned about the fate of Anheuser-Busch then you’ll be glad to know that at least one brewer in St. Louis is prepared to take a proactive stance against Inbev.

Schlafly Beer, a craft brewer in St. Louis, has started a fundraising campaign with a goal of buying Inbev. So even if the beer giant does eventually buy out A-B at least, ultimately, Budweiser will remain an American beer! Go, contribute now!

By the way, Schlafly makes some really excellent beer, too. If you ever have the chance you should try some.  They make a nice oatmeal state and a beautifully hoppy American pale ale.

In a letter to Inbev this week Anheuser-Busch told the Belgian beer giant thanks but no thanks to their unsolicited bid. The letter points out many reasons that the bid was rejected but they all boiled down to “We are SO worth more than that!”

Is it a real rejection or a negotiating tactic? Conventional wisdom is that this will now enter the hostile takeover phase. I don’t pretend to know what the next step will be but I fully expect that this time next year Inbev will own the American brewer.

I also fully expect that most beer drinkers in America and Europe will notice very little difference.

In case I haven’t mentioned it I live 90 miles south of St. Louis, the home of Anheuser-Busch.

Busch country.

So as you might imagine things are reaching a fevered pitch around here. You’d think that a foreign government is threatening to take over the country; not the run of the mill big beer business deal that this really is. I can usually calm the hysteria a bit when I point out that Coors is owned by a Canadian company and Miller a South African company.

Even so, people are still freaking out. And this headline, Inbev tone turns more hostile in bid for A-B, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch didn’t help any.

But we all need to calm down. First, it’s just beer, ok? We all love it but life will go on if something about beer changes. Second, Budweiser and the other big brands brewed by Anhueser-Busch aren’t going anywhere. And odds are they’re going to be brewed in exactly the same breweries in exactly the same way as before.

Interesting side note: It occurred to me today that if this deal does wind up going through the Boston Beer Company, Sam Adams’s brewer, will be the biggest American owned beer producer.

So by now everyone has heard the rumor…well, I suppose it is more than a rumor at this point. I’m talking about Inbev considering taking over Anheuser-Busch. My initial reaction was mild interest. One mega brewer taking over another; ho-hum.

But there has been another reaction that frankly surprised me. It borders on jingoism. It may be finding its voice in a new website – SaveBudweiser.com. The idea isn’t so much a fear that the A-B brands might be compromised which was my only concern, if concern is the right word. No, it has more to do with the taking over of an American company by an overseas competitor.

This is really fascinating given that A-B and the other long-time brewers were until recently considered to be foreign invaders themselves. But sometime during the last two or three generations they’ve gone from unwelcome German beer mongers to the equivalent of apple pie.

Rumors of the Inbev takeover of Anheuser-Busch have left at least one fan of Budweiser worried that his favorite brew will go the way of the dodo. I think that that’s pretty unlikely.

As much as I would prefer that Anheuser-Busch not become a subsidiary of a European corporation I believe that Bud would remain safe even if it does. Inbev does not have a history of completely dismembering the companies that they buy. In fact the brands that come with their take-overs tend to become even better known.

Now, as to the quality of Bud, I’m the wrong guy to ask as Bud is already pretty low quality, in my opinion. But I believe that it will be maintained. A-B has long been a streamlined American corporation and its flagship brand is designed for the lowest production cost possible with the highest profit. Given those truths, Inbev would likely change very little about it.

Do you follow the business of big beer? Yeah, I probably wouldn’t either except that it’s my job to know about these things. Most of the time the news is pretty drab and boring stuff – Molson Coors sales were up a quarter of a point last quarter, Carslberg bought a brewery in Poland…yawn!

But this bit of news made me sit up and pay attention. Seems that Inbev – the beer conglomerate based in Belgium and responsible for such brands as Beck’s, Stella Artois, and Hoegaarden – is making noises that they might buy Anheuser-Busch! As startling as this new is it shouldn’t come as a total surprise. The two have been dating for a while with A-B exclusively distributing most of Inbev’s big brands here in the US. If the deal goes through one company would control a quarter of all of the beer sold in the world!