Beer Can Blog

A few weeks ago, I posted on the purchase of the Rolling Rock Beer label by Anheuser Busch.

Just thinking about, that A-B would spend $82 million probably means that they have some respect for the label, unless they were trying to keep a competitor from buying it. The Latrobe brewery itself was purchased by City Brewery of LaCrosse, WI (formerly the home of G. Heilemen Brewing Co.). I just hope they don't over-extend themselves.

A-B doesn't buy out other breweries' assets or properties very often. Going strictly from memory, the Anheuser Busch brewery in Syracuse (actually Baldwinsville), NY, might have once been a Schlitz brewery. Again from memory, I think the last time that A-B bought out another brewery, lock-stock-and-barrel, was the American Brewing Co. of Miami, FL, in the mid-1950s. That purchase gained them a Miami-area brewery and the Regal Ale and Regal Beer labels, but the government, in an anti-trust move, forced them to sell the brewery and the labels after a couple of years.

Another example of a large brewery buying "a label" from a small brewery and really making into something big was what is now "Miller Lite". Prior to the mid-1970s, "Lite" was a brand owned originally by the Meister Brau Brewing Co. of Chicago, which (from memory) may have been bought out by the Peter Hand Brewing Co., also of Chicago. So what has been Miller Lite since 1974 was orginally Meister Brau Lite.

[Cross-posted at geosciblog.]