The puritans on the board of the Advertising Standards Authority lack any sense of irony, or on 10 April 2012 they would not have banned a radio commercial for Budweiser beer, after a complaint that it suggested that men who drink beer on a night on the town would be more likely to "pull" (ie attract the opposite sex) than .. than ... sadly the commercial would not say.

Why does Danish brewer Carlsberg plan to spend up to USD 1.2 billion to buy the 15 percent of Russia's Baltika brewery that it does not already own? Anybody in a rush? And why did it promise to pay so much (the maximum 1,550 rubles/USD 52 per share represent a 25 percent premium on the current stock price), although everyone and his dog know that the Russian beer market spells trouble?

Visiting Vienna will make Munich beer lovers eat out their hearts. How come Munich sports only three brewpubs whereas Austria's capital, which at 1.7 million inhabitants is hardly bigger than Munich, has so many brewpubs? By Conrad Seidl's count "about ten" – depending on who's actively brewing or just using the brewing kit for decor. Conrad is the man to know because the Viennese beer writer and man-about-town publishes an annual beer guide of Austria's best pubs and bars.

Heidi and Peter do it

Think Swiss, think high mountains, chocolate, cheese and watches, spick and span villages with cuckoo clock houses where ZZ Top lookalikes play the Alphorn while the little gnomes of Zürich shunt their gold to and fro in the vaults under Bahnhofstrasse. Don’t we all love these tired and trite clichés about Switzerland, which give us a healthy dose of patronising amusement at the twee-ness of it all? Swiss stereotypes capture much of what Switzerland was and still is – but miss out what it has become: a nation of garagiste brewers. In a country of 7.8 million people there’s over 340 of them already – and rising. When it comes to putting the romance back into the beer, these newly converted show great stubbornness and perseverance. But isn’t that another typecast?

It’s the wrong sort of emerging market and it’s the wrong sort of price. Molson Coors’ multi-billion foray into central Europe with the acquisition of Czech Republic-based StarBev, the brewer of Staropramen beer, which was announced on 3 April 2012, left investors more than underwhelmed. On the day the deal became public, the U.S.-Canadian beer group’s stock dropped 5 percent.

Take up of Beer Academy courses has risen by over a third during the first three months of 2012 compared with bookings over the same period last year.

So all the pundits got it wrong. Neither Asahi nor another private equity firm were the forerunners in acquiring StarBev. AB-InBev’s former central European unit went to Molson Coors. The brewer said on 3 April 2012 that it will buy StarBev from private equity fund CVC Capital Partners for EUR 2.65 billion (USD 3.52 billion) to expand in central and eastern Europe.

With the ruling centre-right party ODS lurching from scandal to scandal, the Czech Prime Minister Petr Nečas apparently did not want to open another battlefield with brewer Budweiser Budvar. In mid-March 2012 he finally had enough of his Minister for Agriculture’s macho posturing and told him, probably in not so many words, to leave Budweiser Budvar alone.

As could be expected, many on the bloggosphere screamed "à la lanterne" when an article appeared in the Belgian magazine Trends on 9 March 2012 which said that AB-InBev’s CEO Carlos Brito was entitled to a super bonus of EUR 133 million. What had Mr Brito done to earn this? Bring down debt two years ahead of target that had been piled up following the acquisition of Anheuser-Busch.

In an effort to clamp down on binge drinking, the Prime Minister has radical plans. Taking his lead from Scotland, whose parliament voted on 14 March 2012 to introduce a minimum price per unit of alcohol as of next year, David Cameron, on 23 March 2012, proposed the same for England and Wales.