I did see a show on AB earlier this week on CNBC. Randy Mosher appeared in the show a few times. They did a bit of the history of AB, and AB's future dominance is related to that they were among the first to adopt pasteurization, automated bottling lines and creating a distribution network that protected the beer in transit. Bevo and a few other products allowed them to survive the idiocy of the Prohibition years that the elected leaders forced us to live under at that time.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/25348737/The mega-breweries are becoming even larger and multi-national as it appears to be the only way for them to continue to grow. They don't really question why growth is required or is in their best interests, they just pursue it. Might be good news that interest has appeared to have peaked here in the US of the mega brand and the only real area of growth is swinging back towards diversity and the regional craft brewers.
The growth in the US beer industry today appears to me becoming more like what has occured in the US wine industry over the past 20 years. Both have producers of low cost mega-swill, but the trend appears that overall total individual consumption is dropping off with an emphasis more toward quality than quantity. In the show they mention that total sales of Budweiser in the US have dropped from 50 million barrels in 1988 to under 25 million in 2005. The only major difference is that there was not a "light/lite" product in the wine market to also fight for market share between the mega swill and craft makers of wine.
