Just as well the former A-B CEO August Busch IV did not seek re-election as Director of AB-InBev. His legal woes, which have dogged him for the past six months following the death of his girl-friend at his home on 19 December 2010, aren’t going to be over any time soon. On 7 June 2011 St. Louis media reported that a judge had postponed indefinitely a USD 1.5 million wrongful-death lawsuit settlement offered by Mr Busch to the young son of his deceased girlfriend.

Funny the new owners of the Pabst Brewing Company should want to relocate headquarters to Los Angeles. Only a few years ago Pabst’s headquarters had been lured to Chicago from San Antonio, Texas with the help of a big wad of tax dollars and training funds.

They too have had to learn the hard way that you cannot seed, nurture and grow specialty and craft beer brands in an FMCG company. Like MillerCoors in the U.S., which outsourced its craft and import brand business to Denver under the name Tenth and Blake Beer Company in August 2010, Molson Coors decided to create a new stand-alone division to better promote these brands. The launch of the Six Pints Specialty Beer Company was announced at the end of May 2011.

Guess the Koreans are into golf as much as the Japanese. Titleist, one of world’s best-known golf equipment names, is getting a new owner after alcoholic drinks maker Fortune Brands clinched a deal to sell the brand to Fila Korea Ltd for USD 1.23 billion at the end of May 2011.

The new web-based World Brewing Academy Beer Production and Quality Control course (June 13 - September 10, 2011) provides training in technologies from the completion of wort cooling & aeration through fermentation & microbiological control to the evaluation of finished beer. This course offers in-depth instruction in all aspects of the theory of yeast handling and performance, giving students a substantial grounding in this important area of brewing science. This course also includes instruction in the process of quality control & assurance, ensuring that students understand the critical role that QA/QC plays in retaining the consistency and longevity of beer and other malt-based fermented products.

Does salvation lie with the brewingly non-adjusted? Anheuser-Busch obviously thinks so. On 10 May 2011 the U.S. unit of AB-InBev named chewing gum executive Paul D. Chibe, 45, to become its marketing executive as of 1 June 2011, filling the post vacated by Keith Levy’s sudden departure in January. Mr Chibe has been Vice President and General Manager of U.S. Gum and Mints at Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co. in Chicago, where he worked for more than eleven years.

They may deny the rumour till Judgement Day but Schincariol’s refutations are beginning to sound a bit hollow. Relations seem to have turned from terse to sour between Schincariol’s thirty something owners, the brothers Adriano and Alexandre Schincariol and their cousin Gilberto over the past few weeks ever since the London Sunday Times reported in April 2011 that SABMiller was interested in buying Brazil’s number two brewer.

The world’s number one brewer AB-InBev on 4 May 2011 posted a sharply higher net profit for the first quarter, but the results were skewed by a 0.4 percent drop in volume to 91.45 million hl compared to the year-earlier quarter.

There’s only a thin line between high hopes and heartbreak. Having already sold its brewery to SABMiller in November 2010 for an estimated USD 45 million (EUR 30 million), Germany’s brewer Warsteiner has now disposed of its wine company Casa Orfila in Mendoza. In April 2011 Warsteiner clinched a deal with the local beverage company Cepas Argentinas SA for an undisclosed sum.

Conglomerates, daaahlings, are so yesterday’s fashion. Which is what Fortune Brands found out to its detriment when the activist investor Bill Ackman told the board that the aggregate value locked up in its three divisions (golf/home products/drinks) was higher than the company’s total.