@subterraneanne

Right on!

And, besides the ignorant 20-something posters... it goes to Mr. Leonard too!

America is losing a(nother) very large company, which means that (even more) Americans will lose their jobs.

Shallow and stupid and inconsiderate -> Mr. Leonard.

P.s. Sierra Nevada!? Punk!

@ Ringomon - I find that a good guide to whether or not I'm drinking Budweiser, blind or not, is whether my head starts to hurt somewhere in the middle of the first beer - apparently I'm a sensitive wilting blossom when it comes to beers with rice used as an adjunct. During my mis-spent youth I was able to tell Murphy's from Guinness blind, but I can't claim the same facility with mass market lagers.

@ subterraneanne Oh settle down. Where were you when Miller was sold to a South African firm?

For anyone who doesn't have a personal or local connection to Anheuser-Busch, the question of "do I care about Budweiser's manufacturer being sold" amounts to "what do I think of their products?" Since I've always assumed that they bottled whatever came out of the Clydesdales (isn't that why they keep them around?), then my sympathy goes to the people who stand to lose their jobs, and that's about it.

And, just to answer your snark, I do have a good idea of what it means for local companies to disappear. My family is from Glasgow, which was decimated by the combination of poor management in the shipyard and relentless foreign competition - a lot of which was from the US.

subterraneanne, if you're old enough to remember US growth rates in the 60s and early 70s, then you're old enough to have been the beneficiary of economic trends that tore out the heart of one of the cradles of the industrial revolution. I'm not complaining that this was unfair, I'm telling you what happened. (The recovery issues were all the fault of the locals, but that's another story...)

Now the US is on the receiving end, but whether or not there's management failure in the firms, there's been plenty of failure on monetary policy, and there's a cadre of people who are only too willing to hasten the process by selling out their shares to whoever pays.

Do you think that monetary policy is controlled by twenty-somethings? Do you think that the profit first, everything else later speculators are just a bunch of twenty-somethings? I doubt it.

HTWW misses the real story.

Consolidation in the big brewers has been underway for years as firms grasp the global nature of this business. This happened to Miller several years back (acquired by SAB -South African Brewery)and now Coors and SABMiller are merging. What's left is a two tiered structure - the global behemouths with hundreds of brands and local microbrews.

Bud-lite is bad beer. No question. But its not bad because it is made badly. Budweiser is without doubt a world class producer of _very_ high _quality_, but inferior products. The trouble is that people mistake the product specification for low-quality.

The brewers involved have every right to proclaim pride in workmanship, they just unfortunately are stuck producing an inferior product in a superior fashion.

You like capitalism, then you have nothing to complain about if a bunch of corporate bastards with swill in their clammy hands try to buy your grandmother. Or Budweiser. They don't give a shit about jobs or history or national origins. They just want to make more lucre. And if that means closing Bud down, or moving it to Poland, or shipping out half the jobs, they'll do it.

They have been doing it for years. They emptied Milwaukee. They'll try to empty St. Louis too. Who has the gold makes the rules. Love it or ... leave it.

A merger, or outright purchase sounds pretty much like you think is does. It doesn't mean they take the brand name and suddenly churn out product far away then pay to have it shipped to their own major market in the US.

In talking about Budweiser summarizing all that is wrong with business in the U.S. today -- particularly public shareholders selling out to the highest bidder instead of balancing the interests of the communities, workers, and the business itself with the pursuit of money -- you missed a big one. The reliance on fakey nostalgic branding instead of working on real quality and craftsmanship.

We don't use Clydesdales to transport beer and milk any more. We may in the future. The Budweiser stables may turn out to be an important pool of stock as we start breeding more. But the last story I heard about horse-delivered been happened during prohibition to one of my ex's great uncles. It's not something we hold in common.

What we hold in common is watching Superbowl commercials and reaching into the cooler for a 6-, 12-, or 24-pack. It's likely that'll be around for awhile.

Obviously, I don't think that 20-somethings are behind predatory mergers and acquisitions, I simply think that their comments along the lines of "Since I don't like that beer, why should I care if the company gets sold?" are shallow, short-sighted and snobbish. I presume they are 20-somethings because their perspective is sorely lacking, but I may be mistaken.

And I'm from a steel town across the river from St. Louis...you wanna see an industry that's had its heart torn out, look at steel.

Amen brother.

See economic freedom is overrated. Perhaps we need to nationalize every American company a-la the Soviets, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Venezulela, Mao's China. What could possibly go wrong with that?

But you are going to lose the Hispanic vote if you take on Budweiser.

. . . for what it does. It brews a light, thin lager in multiple breweries on something like five continents with such consistency that most human beings simply could not detect any difference in the finished product. Consistency is the hallmark of good brewing, and A-B has it in spades.

That said, I'm not a fan of any of their products. Light lagers in general barely deserve to be called beer, and Bud Light is the worst of the bunch. And there's nothing wrong with Budweiser - its not terrible, its not great, its just boring. I drink about a six pack of Bud a year, right at the hottest point of the summer, when I'm more concerned with refreshment than taste. (A-B does own a stake in a couple of microbreweries, such as Redhook and Goose Island - but those beers weren't developed by A-B and so really aren't their products.)

I probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference between Bud, Miller and Coors in a blind taste test. But that isn't surprising at all, given that all three beers belong to the same style - American Standard Lager - and they're all brewed to be bland and inoffensive. More to the point, I'm damn sure that I could tell the difference between any A-B product and some of my favorite microbrews (Summit, Surly and August Schell come to mind).

I don't look down my nose at Bud drinkers, but I do feel sorry for those Bud drinkers who think Bud is all there is to beer. There's so much more out there, and anyone who says they can't taste the difference between Bud and an IPA or an ESB or a porter is kidding themselves.

As for the InBev deal, I say: why not? That's the way capitalism works, and A-B has done very well in the past by playing the same game.