Is AB-InBev Throttling Your Access To Craft Beer?

On Monday, Anheuser-Busch InBev, the globe’s largest brewer and maker of Budweiser, agreed to purchase SABMiller, the globe’s second largest brewer, for a tidy $104 billion. This, of course, is the biggest news in the world of suds right now—a truly massive merger that, if approved, “reshuffles the global beer industry and sets the stage for higher beer prices worldwide,” as the Wall Street Journal puts it. 

Momentous as it might be, however, the deal probably won’t mean a whole lot to American beer drinkers. That’s because regulators are unlikely to greenlight the merger unless SABMiller gives up the rights to brew its biggest domestic brands, Miller and Miller Lite, in the United States. (As of now, the company produces the beers through MillerCoors, a joint venture with Molson Coors). It would be similar to the agreement AB InBev struck in 2013, when it bought Mexican megabrewer Grupo Modelo and was required to spin off the U.S. brewing operations of beers like Corona and Modelo Especial into a separate company. So while the bigger, badder AB InBev company is expected to control more than a quarter of the planet’s beer sales, Miller and Bud will almost certainly remain stateside rivals—the Yankees and Red Sox of pale macrobrews… CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY AT SLATE