Through first-hand material originating from company and private archives as well as interviews with managers and key family actors, this book presents a unique the history of Interbrew in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Goose Island opened as a family-owned Chicago brewpub in the late 1980s, and it soon became one of the most inventive breweries in the world. In the golden age of light, bland and cheap beers, John Hall and his son Greg brought European flavors to America. With distribution in two dozen states, two brewpubs and status as one of the 20 biggest breweries in the United States, Goose Island became an American success story and was a champion of craft beer. Then, on March 28, 2011, the Halls sold the brewery to Anheuser-Busch InBev, maker of Budweiser, the least craft-like beer imaginable. The sale forced the industry to reckon with craft beer's mainstream appeal and a popularity few envisioned. Josh Noel broke the news of the sale in the Chicago Tribune, and he covered the resulting backlash from Chicagoans and beer fanatics across the country as the discussion escalated into an intellectual craft beer war. Anheuser-Busch has since bought nine other craft breweries, and from among the outcry rises a question that Noel addresses through personal anecdotes from industry leaders: how should a brewery grow?

How could a small Belgian brewer become the world's largest brewing group within two decades? Interbrew's transformation into InBev and then into Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB-InBev) is emblematic of the race for unchallenged market domination between the world's four biggest brewing companies. The Beer Monopoly explores how this happened and examines the economic drivers behind globalisation. AB-InBev's takeover of SABMiller - the world's number one and two brewers respectively - closes an amazig epoch in beer history. This book charts the fascinating rise of these two brewing ginants as they showed that dealmaking provided a faster path to profit growth than any sales hike could ever accomplish. The importance of deals - those made and those missed - is also visible in the track record of Heineken and Carlsberg, the brewers on the next two rungs of the global ladder. While all of these brewers pursued the goal of building empires, each had different reasons and faced a viriety of obstacles along the way. Sharing a keen interest in the brewing industry - not to mention a passion beer - two economists, Ina Verstl and Ernst Faltermeier, have provided a timely out-of-the-box analysis of globalisation.