A-B Buys Rolling Rock - Brookston Beer Bulletin

Last week it was just a rumor, today it’s now official. Anheuser-Busch, in it’s drive to pick up new brands, has agreed to purchase the Rolling Rock brand from rival brewing giant InBev for $82 million.

Since Rolling Rock is not technically a craft brewer, buying them is perhaps a little more curious than their courting of other craft brands. But Rolling Rock was sold, nationally at least, beginning in the 1980s as if it were a microbrewery. This was done quite successfully and it did in fact create a pretty good image for itself when their weren’t very many national micros. Those of us who grew up in Pennsylvania weren’t fooled but generally speaking the unsophisticated beer consumer believed — and perhaps still believes — Rolling Rock is a craft beer. And I think it’s that very quality, it’s status as essentially a faux micro, that makes it ideal as an A-B product. A-B is very good as selling brands as much more than they are in reality so this will, I think, be a marriage made in heaven, albeit a heaven with no real beer.

From the press release:

Introduced in 1939 by Latrobe Brewing Co. and acquired by InBev’s Labatt U.S.A. in 1987, Rolling Rock is an historic American lager that is well-known for its distinctive, full-bodied taste and painted green bottle. Rolling Rock has established itself as an authentic, iconic American lager with a loyal following.

Anheuser-Busch acquires the Rolling Rock brands and recipes with the transaction, and will now start to work with the existing Rolling Rock wholesaler network and Anheuser-Busch wholesalers to define plans for the future. Anheuser-Busch will begin brewing Rolling Rock and Rock Green Light in August using the brands’ same time-honored recipes, maintaining Rolling Rock’s craftsmanship and heritage that its fans expect and appreciate. Internationally, Rolling Rock will continue to be sold in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

“We have an ideal opportunity to grow this historic brand,” said August A. Busch IV, president of Anheuser-Busch Inc. “This beer is not like others, and its consumer following is equally distinctive. We live in a diverse world where consumers are hungry for variety. Acquiring Rolling Rock enables us to reach a new audience and to continue building our broad portfolio of products that meet the wide-ranging needs of consumers.”

InBev plans to sell its brewery in Latrobe, Pa., separately to focus its U.S. business on imported beers. It is in discussions with potential buyers to determine the best available options for the brewery and its employees.

“The decision to sell the Rolling Rock brands was based on InBev’s strategic approach to the U.S. market, which is to focus on the high-growth import brands in our portfolio,” said Doug Corbett, president of InBev USA. “Our sales and marketing efforts will emphasize our leading imported beers, including Stella Artois, Bass Pale Ale, Beck’s, Brahma and Labatt Blue.”

[…] I read one forum post on the BrewBoard by a prominent (or at least active) member who took the position that Rolling Rock’s beer isn’t actually great craft beer and the Latrobe Brewery hasn’t been owned by the community for a long time now so what’s the big deal. It may be an unpopular position, but there is a lot of truth to it. InBev has owned the brewery for years. And even my first post when the sale was announced I wrote about Rolling Rock’s faux micro status. It’s been marketed as a craft beer but generally the only people who bought that was bridge buyers and casual beer buyers, no hardcore beer geek thinks of Rolling Rock as a craft beer. But the potential closing of a an over sixty-year old brewery is another matter and erases any negative thoughts I have about the beer itself. Why? For one simple reason. I believe our brewing heritage should not disappear. I have mourned too many brewery closing in my brief lifetime. Back in the golden age of brewing, the latter quarter of the 19th Century there were something like almost two-thousand breweries in this country. After Prohibition we lost more than half of them in one fell thirteen-year swoop. Over the subsequent half-century the number of breweries continued to steadily decrease until by the early 1980s there were only a few dozen left. If you read the Breweriana magazines you’ll quickly see how many abandoned and ruined breweries there are out there. And not all of them closed a long time ago. My wife and I visited the Olympia Brewery in Washington on our honeymoon night quite ten years ago. Olympia, of course, didn’t make a great beer but the brewery itself was beautiful and they had an unbelieveably beautiful collection of beer steins. But it’s closed now. The Henry Weinhard brewery in downtown Portland — itself a beautiful brick building — was torn down only a few years ago. Now I didn’t drink either of those beers, either, but I still mourned their passing. And the same is quite appropriate for the Latrobe Brewery, too. The effort to save should be supported by all of who love beer, regardless of personal feelings about Rolling Rock itself. It’s the history and heritage that is worth saving. […]

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