While AB-InBev’s takeover of SABMiller is still underway, media pundits have started wondering what lies in store for the world’s medium-sized brewers like Heineken, Molson Coors and Carlsberg? Resorting to common sense quips, their strategic position boils down to: being in the middle either sucks or can be fun. At the moment, the first interpretation seems to prevail.

Shareholders in Molson Coors certainly think so. The brewer’s stock has risen since news of a possible tie-up between AB-InBev and SABMiller broke in mid-September 2015.

Regulators are having a busy time looking into allegations that brewer AB-InBev is limiting competition from craft brewers by buying distributors, media reported on 12 October 2015.

So they are after craft brewers across the border too. The Toronto-based Mill Street Brewery, one of Canada’s largest craft brewers, was bought by AB-InBev’s local unit Labatt, media reported on 9 October 2015.

Bell’s from Kalamazoo, Michigan – the eighth largest U.S. craft brewer – has released its first beer fermented in wooden tanks, which were once used by the long-defunct Stroh brewery in Detroit, media reported on 6 October 2015.

For the cognoscenti, it’s just a metric by the name “negative cash conversion cycle” but it basically measures the time gap for a company between taking in cash from customers and paying its suppliers. Delaying payments to suppliers has apparently become fashionable. As Stephanie Strom reported in the New York Times in April this year: “In the past, extended payment terms often were a signal that a company was experiencing worrisome cash flow problems, but these days big, robust companies are imposing new schedules on suppliers as a business strategy.”

Dogfish Head, the popular Delaware craft brewer with a cult following, has succumbed to the lure of Wall Street money by giving the New York private equity firm LNK a 15 percent stake in the company. On 28 September 2015, Dogfish’s founder Sam Calagione, 46, who only a few days previously had been feted by Vanity Fair magazine as one of the U.S. “celebrity brewers”, shared the news with his employees.

And we thought that “flipping it” – selling a house on quickly and make a profit – was a strategy confined to real estate. But no. Brewers are doing it too. Merely weeks after MillerCoors bought the two-year-old craft brewer Saint Archer, AB-InBev on 23 September 2015 snapped up a Californian up-start brewery too, acquiring Golden Road, which is Los Angeles’ largest craft brewer.

If you’re looking for a good beer, you might want to go to Maine, the most north-eastern U.S. state. Breweries from that state had a remarkably strong showing at the Great American Beer Festival Awards, winning medals in 21 percent of the categories local brewers entered – the most of any state, the Brewers’ Association announced on 27 September 2015.

Does Greg Koch, the co-founder and CEO of California’s craft brewer Stone, really only want to take Tuesday afternoons off? On 11 September 2015 Mr Koch, 51, announced he will become Chairman of Stone, while rejecting all speculation that a sale was in the offing.