• St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Thursday, March 5, 2009 10:45 AM

Industry observers say that Anheuser-Busch needs to maintain its nearly obsessive devotion to consistency and quality if it wants to remain the leader in the brewing industry. But the cost-cutting predilections of Belgium's InBev, which purchased A-B last year, have raised questions about whether that will be the case, Jeremiah McWilliams reports.

The Budweiser brewing process is "exactly the same," claims Peter Kraemer, who oversees Anheuser-Busch InBev's breweries in North America. Charles Bamforth, Anheuser-Busch's endowed professor of malting and brewing sciences at the University of California-Davis and author of Grape vs. Grain, concurs. "I've tasted Bud from all over the world, and I couldn't taste any difference," he says.

A-B has long been willing to pay for processes and materials it believes contribute to quality. Beechwood aging, for example, dates back to 1876, but very few brewers use it today. Workers rake the chips into massive fermentation tanks, and then rake them out again. It would seem to be a tempting target for cost-cutting managers but Kraemer says there are no plans afoot to change.

"The brewery that you see today is the same one you saw six months ago, and it's the way it's going to continue to be," he says. "I'm in trouble if it doesn't stay that way." ;

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