It's Discount Week! 🎁 Pick up new Marketplace gear at a discount when you donate today! Get My Gear!

Beer giant buys a craft brewery

Alisa Roth Mar 29, 2011
HTML EMBED:
COPY

Beer giant buys a craft brewery

Alisa Roth Mar 29, 2011
HTML EMBED:
COPY

Kai Ryssdal: Anheuser-Busch makes beer. A lot of beer. A lot of fizzy, yellow, not-all-that-flavorful beer. The market for that kind of beverage is shrinking.

So Anheuser, the parent company of Budweiser, is buying Goose Island, a small craft brewer out of Chicago, parent company of the much lesser-known Honker’s Ale.

We asked Marketplace’s Alisa Roth how Goose Island and its brews might survive the merger.


Alisa Roth: Anheuser-Busch produced more than 100 million barrels of beer last year. Goose Island produced about 127,000.

Tom Pirko: It’s funny. We have an elephant mating with a mouse here. You know, you wonder what kind of babies they’re going to have.

Tom Pirko runs a beverage industry consulting firm called Bevmark. He says it’s not just the size; they’re different species.

Pirko: It’s difficult to reconcile how you are in that business producing a very large amount of beer with this other sort of boutique-y business and that you have a clash of values. These are almost two different products.

Craft beers like Goose Island make up a tiny portion of beer sales. But it’s one that’s actually growing. Overall, beer sales dropped by 1 percent last year. But craft beer sales were up 11 percent.

Anheuser-Busch says it’s planning to keep Goose Island’s recipes and brewing processes, just on a larger scale. It’s investing more than $1 million to expand the smaller company’s brewery in Chicago.

Benj Steinman is editor of Beer Marketers Insights, which is a trade publication. He says it shouldn’t be too hard to maintain the flavor of the beer, but what might be trickier is something more elusive.

Benj Steinman: It’s the identity, it’s the unique, local identity that they have had. Will they be able to maintain that?

Anheuser-Busch isn’t the only one trying to get in on the small beer action: last year, MillerCoors — the other big brewing company — created a subsidiary to focus on smaller beers.

I’m Alisa Roth for Marketplace.

There’s a lot happening in the world.  Through it all, Marketplace is here for you. 

You rely on Marketplace to break down the world’s events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible. 

Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you.