Too clever for their own good
Interbrew’s top brass must have known that there was a snag to their purchase of Munich’s Spaten brewery or they would have told the press in 2003 that the small print of the sales contract read: “Brewery real estate not included”.
Everybody, even yours truly, had been led to believe otherwise. I mean, splashing out almost EUR 500 million for a regional brewer selling about 3.5 million hl beer annually should get you a brewery thrown in for good measure, shouldn’t it?
But Spaten’s owners drove a hard bargain. They knew that Interbrew was desperate to become number one brewer in Germany and sell beer at the Oktoberfest. By buying Spaten, Interbrew achieved both – at a price.
The nitty gritty of the deal would have remained a well-kept secret had not Dr. Jobst Kayser-Eichberg, one of the previous owners of Spaten, bragged to the media a few years ago that he himself was looking for a suitable piece of land on which InBev could build a new brewery.
“What? InBev needs to build a new brewery?” Munich’s hacks were intrigued.
Usually, such a detail would warrant just a short article. Not this time.
Because if you want to call yourself a Munich brewer and sell your beer at the Oktoberfest you must brew your beer within Munich’s city limits. That’s gospel.
Unfortunately, in Munich land is scarce and industrial land even scarcer.
Interbrew’s strategists should have been alarmed by the prospect of being evicted from the Spaten brewery eventually. But you can just imagine how the Germans pulled them aside and told them with a nudge and a wink that they would take care of this matter having the local je-ne-sais-quoi it takes to pull off this near-impossible feat.
Lo and behold, six years later Spaten’s erstwhile owners had managed to buy up 14 hectare of real estate to the west of Munich, convincing various private and public land owners, the city of Munich among them, to sell their land to them.
Planning for the 5-million-hl brewery began in January 2009. Whether it will be AB-InBev that will build the brewery – err, ah, … that’s highly unlikely.
AB-InBev have not left anybody in doubt that they would like to get out of Germany rather sooner than later.
This is what has made Spaten’s old guard nervous.
If AB-InBev find a buyer before the end of the year and do not take up the option to purchase the land for the new brewery, Spaten’s big shots might end up sitting on dead wood. And for a long, long while.
