Keith Lemcke of the Siebel Institute says that they have been watching the interest in small-scale commercial distilling grow over the last decade or so and noticed that in the last couple of years that interest seems to be accelerating.

Mr Hickenlooper moved to Colorado almost 30 years ago to work as a geologist. After getting laid off during the 1980s oil bust, he and several partners opened the Wynkoop brewpub in downtown Denver, thus kicking off the revival – some say gentrification – of Denver’s dilapidated city centre which today is a booming business and residential area.

You have to give it to Peru’s Ajegroup: its owners waste no time. When their plans to build a brewery in Mexico were thwarted by Mexico’s duopoly brewers FEMSA and Grupo Modelo pulling strings, they changed their minds quickly and set up a 300,000 hl brewery in their homeland of Peru instead.

For those people, the Siebel Institute of Technology will host the Professional Beer Tasting & Styles course on 4th and 5th February 2010. This two-day workshop gives participants a solid foundation of beer knowledge, with a special emphasis on beer styles and tasting. Designed and created by brewing historian and beer style expert Randy Mosher, students learn about the world of beer styles through presentations that include:

The fines, among the highest ever paid by individuals in a financial lawsuit in Brazil, stemmed from a complaint filed in 2004 by Previ, a large Latin American pension fund, against terms of the sale of AmBev to Belgium’s Interbrew and the takeover of Canadian brewer Labatt, the regulator said.

Constellation Brands said that a lawsuit, which Grupo Modelo had filed against Constellation in December 2009 over funding increased spending on promotion and marketing for Crown, won’t affect the joint venture.

Mexican brewer Grupo Modelo announced on 15 December 2009 that it is suing its partner Constellation Beers in a New York court in a dispute over marketing expenses.

MBAA and the American Society of Brewing Chemists (ASBC) will co-locate the MBAA Convention and ASBC Annual Meeting in 2010, creating Brewing Summit 2010. The Summit will run as follows

Already in November 2009, Pabst’s owner, the Kalmanovitz Charitable Foundation, based in California, hired Bank of America Merrill Lynch to find a buyer willing to pay around USD 300 million.

Like other Japanese beer companies, Suntory is scrambling to expand its overseas businesses to reduce its dependence on a shrinking domestic market.