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Beer, Bars & Brewers in November I

Hello and welcome back to Beer, Bars & Brewers. This week we take a look at Pete Brown’s opinion on the AB InBev & SAB Miller merger.

Also Guinness goes vegan, a Munchies writer disagrees with BrewDog’s “transgender beer”, and Graz gets its very own craft beer festival. Let’s get started.

Pete Brown on AB InBev/SAB Miller Megadeal

The beer world has been abuzz about the AB InBev/SAB Miller merger for the past few weeks, though we had yet to year from the beer writer himself: Pete Brown. Brown points out how Anheuser Busch’s history of unjust power and influence over retailers, something they’ve been fined for several times over the past decades. In October of this year, “the US Justice Department announced that it is probing allegations that AB Inbev is seeking to curb competition in the beer market by buying distributors with the intention of making it harder for craft brewers to get their products on store shelves”. Brown reads this as a warning to all beer markets: “a continued attitude of trying to put rivals out of business by cutting off their access to market”.

There’s many tactics as to how this can be achieved, and it’s common practice in the British market, Brown says. The question now is, how will this play out when one single company controls a third of beer production? He suggests that a sentence like ‘If you want Stella, Stella Cidre, Peroni, Becks, Bud and/or Pilsner Urquell, you can only have them if you refuse to stock anything by Carlsberg or Heineken?’ will most likely be heard around the world. Same goes for craft beer of course.

Brown warns: “Mainstream beer is about to become a meaner place full of nastier products, and craft beer and real ale may well find it harder to compete against this mainstream”. It’s a very cynical take on the whole situation, but by no means an unrealistic one. The outcome remains to be seen.

Guinness to go Vegan

At this moment in time, Guinness is still produced by a “clarification process done at its flagship St. James’s Gate Brewery that uses isinglass, a gelatin obtained from dried fish bladder”. Quartz reports that this is about to change soon, with an alternative, vegan method in the works. The new filtration plant is set to be completed in late 2016 and vegan beers should be available readily after. The common, fish bladder method has been used at the Dublin brewery since the mid- to late – 19th century.

Munchies on BrewDog’s “Transgender Beer”

Last week BrewDog announced the launch of its “non-binary transgender beer”, a term that Munchies writer Anthony Lorenzo has a huge problem with. The “No Label” brew use hops that have “changed sex from female to male, used to emphasise that just like humans, beer can be whatever the hell it wants to be”. One term Lorenzo gets particularly upset about is the fact that transpeople do not simply “change sex”.

He names the following as an example: “A transwoman, for example, is born a woman but with outward signs of the wrong gender. She often seeks to redress this with gender reassignment surgery, so that her genitalia matches the sex she actually is”, none of this hops-like change of sex from male to female. Lorenzo also criticizes the language BrewDog uses in its marketing, because many trans people do not transition or do not identify with binary genders. His hope is that, of course, many people will drink the beer and see the error of their ways. However, his realistic view is that people will have a beer, make a bad pun about growing genitals, and then move on. Seems like a misguided attempt at a good cause.

Graz’s Craft Beer Festival

We always welcome the announcement of another craft beer festival and this time it’s Graz’s turn. Tomorrow, Friday the 13th of November, the city’s city hall will turn into any beer lover’s mecca. More than 40 beers will be presented during tastings and presentations, right up until November 15th. Their slogan is lovely, “life is too short … for bad beer”. More information here.

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