Once the takeover of Anheuser-Busch by InBev is completed, a curious thing will happen to the landscape of American brewing. It’s certainly something I never expected to be writing in my lifetime, but it’s true. The Boston Beer Co., who brew the Samuel Adams line of beers, will be the biggest brewer in America.

Once the merger of the two companies is finalized, Anheuser-Busch InBev, will be a Belgian company. MillerCoors consists of MolsonCoors, managed from Canada, and SABMiller, which is either a South African or London-based company, depending on your point of view. That leaves Pabst, the fourth largest beermaker by volume, but they do not own a brewery, instead contracting to have all their beer made at Miller’s breweries. So in terms of actual brewers (that is companies that own and operate a brewery) and who are U.S. owned, the biggest one remaining will be Boston Beer, making Samuel Adams as the undisputed biggest American brewer. Way to go, Jim. It also means Yuengling, America’s oldest brewery, becomes number two and Sierra Nevada comes in third. Amazing, simply amazing!
 

Raise a toast to Jim Koch, whose Boston Beer Co. will soon be the biggest American brewer.

Having a wife, friends and family who are all attorneys, along with my own eight years working in a law office, I just found my new favorite quote. Interviewed in today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Carlos Brito — InBev’s CEO — responded to a question asking “what about the nasty rhetoric in the lawsuits?” The question was referring, of course, to the multiple lawsuits filed by InBev and A-B against one another and the aggressive arguments advanced and language used in them. Since the initial June 11 takeover bid by InBev to acquire Anheuser-Busch, relations between the two have become increasingly rancorous as the takeover bid grew more and more hostile. But Brito brushed aside all that ill-will with four beautifully concise little words. You can all but see him waving his hand as you read his words.

“Eggh — written by lawyers,” he said.

That’s just wonderful. He distilled more than a month’s worth of gamesmanship down to its essence. This whole public charade has been nothing more than the parries of two giant corporations locked in battle over the price of their deal. My earlier Godzilla analogy never seemed more accurate than in Brito’s words.

The big news, of course, was InBev’s Friday morning increase in the purchase price from $65 a share to $70. As the weekend winds down, speculation continues that the two parties are and have been meeting, and that an agreement may even be reached before the weekend is over, meaning literally at any moment now. Financial analysts are near unanimous in their belief that A-B will now accept the deal — under some terms — at the new, higher price.

Saturday evening, the London Financial Times was reporting that the two remaining issues on the table were “how InBev would honor Anheuser-Busch’s commitments to its employees and beer wholesalers” and “the roles of Anheuser-Busch’s executives in the merged company.” If the deal goes through, the merged InBusch will leapfrog over SABMiller into first place as the world’s biggest brewing company. It would mean worldwide, one out of every four beers sold would be one of their brands, giving InBusch “an unprecedented collection of beer brands and power over suppliers.”

But my other favorite quote from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch article, about the machinations of this deal, was expressed by Stuart Greenbaum, formerly with Washington University’s Olin Business School.

“It’s like a ritual mating dance.”

Now that’s quite a mental image. One, in fact, which makes me think of Monty Python. To wit:

 
The ritual of corporate negotiations in the modern world, as represented by Monty Python’s The Fish Slapping Dance.
 
UPDATE: As of around 5:00 p.m. PDT, Reuters is reporting that a deal announcement could be coming this evening and that the issues of executive roles, board make-up and price have all been resolved. The parties are meeting at the Spirit of St. Louis airport in the St. Louis suburb of Chesterfield and a final vote is expected this evening, barring any new hitches.
 

Having lost my own mother to breast cancer when I was only 21 (and she was 42), I try to attend Marin’s Breast Fest, officially know as “‘Fermenting Change’ Microbreweries Battling Breast Cancer.” It was held this afternoon, and while I thought I might miss it this year, I did manage to get down to the festival for a few glorious hours. Held behind Marin Brewing in the shopping center at Larkspur, across the street from the ferry landing, every year it seems more and more people attend this festival. And why not, it’s a great cause with free music and plenty of terrific beer. I certainly had a great time.

Host brewers Arne Johnson, from Marin Brewing, and Denise Jones, from Moylan’s.

Glynn Phillips (Rubicon), Brendan Moylan (Marin/Moylan’s), Alec Moss (Half Moon Bay), Brian Hunt (Moonlight), Rodger Davis (Triple Rock) and Josh Minor (Drake’s).

For more photos from this year’s Breast Fest, visit the photo gallery.
 

Yesterday, July 10, the highly anticipated first bottling run of the popular Pliny the Elder took place at Russian River Brewing‘s new production brewery in Santa Rosa, California. I was on hand to help out for the eight hours it took to do the run, emptying nearly three pallets of 16.9 oz. bottles onto the line and making hundreds of case boxes — my particular jobs — while Vinnie and team attended to the other details. Before we were even done with the bottling run, the first pallet was loaded in the van and whisking its way to area retail stores, but only accounts that agreed to store and display the beer cold. Suggested retail is $3.99, though you can also buy bottles at Russian River’s brewpub for $4.50, which is more in line with their pint pricing of $4.25. While we were still there bottling, both Vinnie and I got e-mails from friends saying they’d already bought bottles of Pliny at Ledger’s in Berkeley, which was fun. It was a long, exhausting day (I’m glad I don’t have to work that hard every day) but also very satisfying, too. The day before, Russian River also bottled several pallets of Blind Pig IPA.

The very first bottle of Pliny the Elder coming off the bottling line.

The new label.

A happy and tired Vinnie Cilurzo, after a day of bottling his Pliny the Elder Imperial IPA.
 

For more photos from the first bottling run of Pliny the Elder, visit the photo gallery.
 

Political pundit George Will, in his most recent column — Survival of the Sudsiest — took issue with Investor’s Business Daily considering beer to be a non-essential during hard economic times. And he was quite right to do so, as statistical data tends to suggest that beer is all but recession-proof. One would have thought somebody at IBD would have known that — or looked it up? — instead of just winging it with statements like the beer “industry’s continued growth, however slight, has been a surprise to those who figured that when the economy turned south, consumers would cut back on nonessential items like beer.” I don’t know who “those” people are, but I don’t think I want to take my financial advice from people who would ignore decades of historical data and go with their gut. Obviously, those guts are not filled with beer.

But perhaps the most interesting part of Will’s column was something he read in a 2006 book by Steven Johnson entitled The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic — and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. In Johnson’s book, he discusses how at the dawn of civilization, survival often depended on how a person’s body reacted to and could tolerate the beer that was generally safer to drink than water. Over time, only people who were genetically predisposed with the ability to drink large quantities of beer survived, passing that trait down to their children so that perhaps today most of us have such an ancestor as evidenced simply by the fact that we’re here. As Will (and Johnson) explains.

The gene pools of human settlements became progressively dominated by the survivors — by those genetically disposed to, well, drink beer. “Most of the world’s population today,” Johnson writes, “is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol.”

There’s a curious side consequence to this idea. I wonder how neo-prohibitionists will feel knowing that it may have been beer that made it possible for them to be alive today, complaining that beer is inherently evil and destructive of society. If indeed, as Johnson argues, beer may have saved civilization by offering those who could tolerate it a safer alternative to the disease-laden water of ancient times, then it becomes harder to defend the position that beer destroys society.

Last year, I got a particularly venomous, hate-filled comment, by a person calling himself the “savagist,” to one of my posts about hunter-gathers and early beer-making. It was one of those screaming screeds claiming I had no archeological evidence (but offering none of their own) and calling me and the ideas I was writing about all sorts of names. His attack was quite personal and very verbally savage (pun intended) which was all the more surprising since one of his points appeared to be that a society with alcohol created “imperialistic, druken (sic) goofs who create warrior classes.” I would have thought the opposite of such people might reasonably be expected to communicate their disagreements a bit more gently than the drunken warrior class that I — apparently — belong to.

No matter, Johnson is saying essentially what I was last year, but with even more authority, research, evidence and science. Between his book, and the wealth of historical record and scientific research, it seems to me pretty well settled that beer and wine had a very positive impact on early civilization’s growth. That most of us are here today as a direct result of alcohol, is just the icing on the cake, or perhaps more appropriately, the head on our beer. Survival of sudsiest, indeed.

Both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are reporting that InBev has increased their offer to buy Anheuser-Busch from $65 a share to $70.

Warren Buffet is now saying he’s leaning toward endorsing the InBev takeover. Both Business Week and the CBC are also reporting that talks have turned “friendly” and they’re discussing takeover. Many analysts are also speculating that A-B will likely accept this offer, with a few even suggesting that this could all be over as early as Monday.

When this whole brew-haha began last month, there were several people who predicted that the offer could go as high as $70. It appears those people were correct. But it’s disheartening to think that all this ugly spectacle we’ve been witnessing was nothing more than A-B trying to get a higher offer. I’m cynical enough to understand that’s how business works, but every time such negotiations are revealed to be mere gamesmanship makes it even harder to trust corporate behavior than ever. There could be a sad day for the brewing world coming.

The Busch family is squarely in the public spotlight these days, with August A. Busch IV pitted against his uncle, Adolphus Busch IV in InBev’s takeover bid to acquire Anheuser-Busch. Today, as it happens, is the birthday of the original Adolphus Busch, who was born today in Germany’s Rhineland, in 1839. He moved to St. Louis in 1857, when he was eighteen, and eventually got a sales job with Charles Ehlermann Hops and Malt Co. After a distinguished stint as a soldier during the Civil War, he returned to his brewery supply job and married Lily Anheuser, the daughter of Eberhard Anheuser. Together, they had thirteen children, including Adolphus Busch II and August A. Busch I. after marrying Lily, he joined the family business, then known as E. Anheuser Co.’s Brewing Association, and eventually became a partner. When Lily’s father passed away in 1879, Adolphus changed the name to Anheuser-Busch.

In St. Louis, Adolphus Busch was busy transforming his father-in-law’s (Eberhard Anheuser’s) once-failing brewery into a grand empire. Adolphus, perhaps more than any other brewer, became known for his flamboyant, almost audacious persona. Tirelessly promoting his Budweiser Beer, he toured the country in a luxurious railroad car immodestly named “The Adolphus.” In place of the standard calling card, the young entrepreneur presented friends and business associates with his trademark gold-plated pocket knife featuring a peephole in which could be viewed a likeness of Adolphus himself. His workers bowed in deference as he passed. “See, just like der king!” he liked to say.

For more on Adolphus Busch’s history and legacy, see:

• The King of Beer (from 1929)
• U.S. Department of Labor
• Wikipedia

Today’s L.A. Times, in the food section, has an interesting looking recipe for beer cake. The recipe is adapted from a new book by food writer Tessa Kiros entitled Piri Piri Starfish: Portugal Found. She writes. “Use a lovely dark, full- flavored beer that will show up well in your cake. I used acacia honey and you can use other nuts instead of walnuts, if you prefer.”

It apparently takes about 1 1/2 hours to make and looks relatively easy … and very tasty, too.