What’s going on at Diageo? After selling some beer assets to Heineken, Diageo continued in its attic clearance mode by offloading the majority of assets from Diageo Wine’s U.S. and UK operations to Australia’s largest winemaker Treasury Wine Estates (TWE) for USD 625 million.

To learn more about the latest technology innovations and processes in raw material handling and grinding, all major Japanese breweries and distilleries attended a seminar of Bühler in Osaka or Yokohama.

Funny that. Asahi seems to value craft beer in Australia but cannot develop the category at home, where craft beer accounted for less than 1 percent of sales in 2013. Not so in Australia, where craft beer is a growth category. No wonder, on 28 September 2015 the Japanese beer giant Asahi bought its second Australian boutique brewer in as many years, taking over the well-established Melbourne-based craft brewer Mountain Goat, founded in 1997.

Most analysts seem to believe that once AB-InBev takes over SABMiller, it will have to sell SABMiller’s 49 percent stake in Chinese brewer CR Snow to appease China’s regulators. Combined, AB-InBev and CR Snow would hold a 38 percent market share. SABMiller, through CR Snow, holds a 23 percent share, while AB-InBev has a 15 percent share.

Carlton & United Breweries (CUB) may reclaim its title as Australia’s biggest brewer in the event of a successful takeover of SABMiller by AB-InBev.

With Brazil and Russia in recession and India not yet living up to its promises, is the fall of China a timely reminder that emerging markets are, well, a risky investment? Many wonder these days: is China going to be the new Russia for global brewers? In retrospect, will 2013 be the last year before things took a turn to the worse? In 2014, China’s beer market shrank to 492 million hl. This translates into a loss of 14 million hl over 2013, says the beer economist Germain Hansmaennel.

What’s going on in China? Last year’s 1.8 percent dip in beer sales could have been a one-off as many blamed it on poor weather. In fact it was the first year-on-year decline since beer sales statistics became available in 1998.

Having found out that shipping beer to Asia and Australia is challenging, Brooklyn Brewery first tied up with the Hitachino Brewery in Japan to contract brew Brooklyn Lager for them.

Once Australia’s top-selling beer, Foster’s Lager can now be found on tap in just ten bars and pubs scattered across the country: three in the state of Queensland, two in New South Wales, three in Victoria and two in Western Australia.

It’s how you see it. The volume of beer produced in China decreased in 2014 for the first time in 24 years, falling by 2.7 percent to 490 million hl, according to the country’s National Bureau of Statistics.