How SABMiller can be so sure that their complaint with Mexico’s competition watchdog will be successful this time, is beyond us. Through their – legal –exclusivity contracts with retailers, Grupo Modelo and Heineken have held the Mexican market in a tight grip, thus preventing SABMiller from gaining significant market share. After 20 years of trying, SABMiller has only managed to gain just 0.7 percent of market share.

This beggars belief. Only hours after it was announced that Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez had died of cancer on 5 March 2013, the Forbes business magazine, on its website, ran an article entitled, yes, "What does the death of the ‘Comandante’ mean to Venezuelan billionaires? Will they get richer now that the ‘21st century socialist’ is gone?"

Seeing that their own brands are not really going anywhere in the highly lucrative Canadian market, Miller Brewing Company, the U.S. subsidiary of SABMiller, has terminated its Canadian licence agreement with Molson Coors Canada as of 22 July 2013. Although Molson Coors Canada has filed a lawsuit in Ontario seeking to prevent the termination of the license agreement, Miller is vigorously defending that action and maintains its right to terminate, Canadian media report.

The Siebel Institute of Technology, America’s oldest brewing school, announced that in the summer of 2013 it will be moving its campus to the facilities of Kendall College in Chicago.

The SensoTech GmbH extends its market presence in North America with a new U.S. subsidiary and thereby reinforces significantly its globally networked team of sales and service staff. As a subsidiary of the German SensoTech GmbH, the SensoTech Incorporation (Inc.) which is located in Wayne, New Jersey, closely works together with already existing sales representatives of the U.S. market.

So this is AB-InBev’s Plan B. On 14 February 2013, AB-InBev announced that they will sell all of Grupo Modelo’s U.S. business to wine company Constellation. As part of the deal, AB-InBev have agreed to divest themselves of Modelo’s newest brewery in Mexico in Piedras Negras and grant perpetual licenses of Modelo’s brands to Constellation for USD 2.9 billion (EUR 2.2 billion).

When the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) sued to stop the deal between AB-InBev and wine company Constellation in January 2013, it argued that combining the nation’s number one and number three beer sellers would drive up prices for consumers.

In the din of brewers’ corporate Newspeak, one voice has always stood out: Graham Mackay’s. While his colleagues preferred to drone on in a language that could have been some obscure Mongolian dialect for all we knew, the outgoing Executive Chairman and former CEO of SABMiller could be trusted to talk about issues that really mattered in plain English that even a dumb blonde understood – had she been interested in the consolidation of the brewing industry.

Media support is rallying behind the U.S. government to prevent AB-InBev’s pending transaction to acquire the remaining shares in Mexico's brewer Modelo that it does not already own.

The future of beer importer Crown Imports, which ranks third in U.S. beer sales volume behind Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors, looks decidedly uncertain after the U.S. government announced it will sue to block the attempted merger of AB-InBev and Mexico’s Grupo Modelo on 31 January 2013.