Whose figures do you trust more? Carlsberg reported that the Russian beer market grew 2 percent in the first six months of 2012 while Russian media said that beer consumption was down 0.3 percent to 51.8 million hl year-on-year. Be that is it may, there is worse to come. Beer consumption is expected to drop sharply in the first quarter of 2013, when beer sales by kiosks will be banned, while excise duties will go up 33 percent.

The working conditions of "beer girls", euphemistically called "beer promoters", are a disgrace. Although NGOs have long criticised how beer girls are being exploited, especially in Asia but also in Africa, it has taken Carlsberg and the Danish trade unions until this August to come to some sort of agreement on how to better work together to materially improve the conditions of beer promoters in Cambodia.

In Europe, the expected amount of spring barley will most likely exceed last year’s amount. Beside the expansion of acreage, first results of yield and quality in some countries are good at the end of July, although the crop in regions with heavy rain are not nearly as far developed. In East Europe, the barley was affected by drought.

The competition, widely dubbed the ‘brewing Oscars’, returned to Burton-upon-Trent last year, attracting over 800 entries. As a firmly established ‘must enter’ for many brewers around the world, we are determined to make 2013s event an even greater success.

Unlike last year, the cultivation of spring barley in Europe has been expanded considerably in 2012. Besides in the most European countries good qualities were harvested. The supply with spring barley is much bigger than the demand of the processing plants.

AB-InBev intends to close its Kursk brewery, located about 500 km south of Moscow, in an effort to reduce costs, SUN InBev, the brewer’s Russian unit said in early August 2012.

Why would anybody want to build a new brewery in Kazakhstan? It’s not a terribly fair question because the question is loaded. It implies that Kazakhstan, a huge country south of Russia, is a somewhat peculiar market. Well, it is. Larger than Western Europe, it’s home to only 15 million people. Think Berlin – Paris and hardly anybody in between. Not good for shunting beer around. If you pardon the comparison, Kazakhstan is a bit like an island market in terms of brewers’ profits. Alright if you’ve got a monopoly. So-so if it’s a duopoly. And truly, shockingly bad if there are several players in the same field. Already, beer consumption stands somewhere between 30 and 40 litres per capita. Sorry, market researchers are a bit vague here. Whatever the exact figure, it would still be ok for an emerging market. It would be even better, nay spectacularly high, for a predominantly Muslim one, which is what Kazakhstan is.

The UK loses its taste for InBev lager, British media concluded with some ill-concealed glee in early August 2012, after AB-InBev released second quarter results on 31 July 2012 which showed that it suffered a double-digit slide in UK lager volumes because of heavy promotions by rivals.

Like its rival AB-InBev, SABMiller’s western European sales volumes in the quarter ended June 2012 suffered from a combination of poor weather and weak economic conditions. However, on an organic basis (excluding the impact of acquisitions and disposals), lager volumes for the group were 5 percent ahead of the prior year for the quarter, the brewer reported on 26 July 2012.

The scale of the Corona empties scandal can be measured in its ever-widening ripples. After the German environmental pressure group Deutsche Umwelthilfe revealed in early July that brewer Radeberger had deceived consumers for years about what happened to the Corona bottles once they had been returned to Mexico as empties (where they were not refilled and shipped back to Germany as required by German law), the matter has now been taken up by the Association of Private Breweries.