Clarity. For many drinkers it’s what makes a beer. But in the world of multi-national global brewers and crafty mergers, clarity isn’t always quite so crystal clear. We are all familiar with the happy situation the UK micro-brewing industry has found itself in over the past two decades or so – life has never been better if you’re brewing good beer; but for those who think nothing of corporate takeovers costing billions of £££s, life had become far from rosy; watching their market share slowly shrinking past an unacceptable level as consumers rejected bland global beers in favour of hip, craft brews. So giants such as AB InBev, SAB Miller & Heineken started buying up smaller, US craft breweries - if you can’t beat ‘em, hell, you may as well buy ‘em - and many loyal craft drinkers agreed this was a BAD thing. Then, 2016 saw the third largest corporate takeover in history - AB InBev (which owns more than 500 brands including Budweiser, Stella and Beck’s) bought its rival SAB Miller (Fosters, Miller, Pilsner Urquell) for £71bn, effectively taking control of 30 per cent of the world’s beer production and sales. That same year they bought the Camden Town Brewery, their second English purchase, for £80m, and recently unveiled a brand-new plant in Enfield with greatly increased capacity for the London-based brewery. (Meantime Brewing had previously been acquired in 2015 for a whopping £120m but was later sold to Ashai in 2016 in accordance with regulators’ demands prior to the SAB Miller takeover). Molson Coors UK purchase of Sharps Brewery in Cornwall, makers of the ubiquitous Doom Bar beer for a mere £20m in 2011, seems cheap in comparison! The takeover made headlines again some four years later when the BBC reported that bottled Doom Bar had in fact been produced in Burton-on-Trent for the past two years, much to the anger of consumers who felt that the packaging which still infers it is Cornish brewed, misrepresented the product’s origin. Cask Doom Bar however is still made at the Sharps Brewery in Rock. A year on from their merger in 2016, AB InBev who had just snapped up Wicked Weed, a sizeable North Carolina craft brewery – much to the chagrin of drinkers – also quietly, snapped up almost the entire South African hop market effectively cutting off supply of new and important hops to independent American craft brewers. Now I’m not suggesting that all takeovers are a bad thing – Camden Town brewer and founder Jasper Cuppaidge had been forced to outsource two thirds of its beer production to Belgium due to unprecedented sales growth, but the new Enfield brew plant means an immediate saving and happily, Jasper reports he’s being left alone to ‘get on with it’. Undoubtedly we will see more ‘purchases’ such as this one by big drinks companies in order to combat slower growth of their mainstream brands; whether this will impact on the quality and provenance of ‘craft products’ in the long term remains to be seen.