On 11 June 2008 InBev made an unsolicited USD 46 billon offer for the American King of Beers. The response from St. Louis? Anheuser-Busch’s board promised they would look at it.

The Jochen Mautner GmbH has ended their regular reports about current developments in the area of malting barley as of spring 2008. Dagmar Hufnagel, correspondent of the “Ernährungsdienst”, Frankfurt/Main will take over the task in future. She has started with her first report on the current situation in malting barley cultivation in April 2008:

Radeberger, Germany’s largest privately owned brewing group with 15 breweries in Germany, is building a EUR 20 million brewery in Nuremberg/Fürth. Meanwhile the Frankfurt brewery site is threatened with closure.

In a recent interview with the English newspaper The Telegraph, SABMiller’s CEO Graham Mackay was his usual bullish self and called a spade a spade and a beer a beer.

Fearing an unhealthy duopoly, the Swiss competition authority could take up to four months to investigate the takeover of the Eichhof brewery by Heineken which would give the Dutch brewer a 29 percent share of the 4.3 million hl beer market.

At Carlsberg they are taking their own sweet time. Although they announced massive brewery closures in 2005 already, nothing drastic happened. Now Carlsberg’s top brass seems to be investigating the issue again.

An alcohol ban on London’s transport network sparked a party on the Tube that got out of hand.

Heineken plans to close one brewery and sell another one in France in order to cut costs.

… namely cease production at its St. James’ Gate brewery in Dublin. However, it will lay off more than half of its brewery workers, close two breweries and shift most production to a new, high-tech plant in the Dublin suburbs by 2013.

You would have thought that most Belarusians drive taxis in New York. But no. They are back home drinking beer brewed by Heineken.