Your favorite beer may not be what it once was. It’s now a division of a worldwide beverage corporation. “Bud” of St Louis is now Anheuser-Busch InBev NV (AB InBev) of Anderlecht Belgium. Coors of Golden Colorado is now Molson Coors EH. In a series of complicated mergers and acquisitions their brands now include Coors, Molson, Miller Brewing and Sharps’s Brewery of Cornwall, U.K.
With fewer beer companies, how are global beverage brands doing? Fortune Magazine in a 2018 article had a storyline, “Big Brewers Take a Hit to the Gut as Americans Move Away from Beer.” By Q1 2018, AB InBev, Heineken and Molson Coors had all reported significant drops in beer volume in the U.S. According to The Wall Street Journal, AB InBev saw a 4.1% drop, Molson Coors a 3.8% drop and Heineken saw a “high-single-digit percentage” drop. Beer is not doing as well as it once did, especially among younger drinkers.