While I posted my first entry in jest, this does bring back to mind an earlier post, which mentioned how many local breweries there used to be. In short, there were vast numbers. And there are starting to be vast numbers again. Denver Colorado and the surrounding region seems to introduce a new brewery per week. Seriously, there's something like well over 100 small breweries in Colorado now, just in the Denver region.
But there were also a lot of large breweries making regional nor nationally distributed brews in the late 19th and for most of the 20th Centuries. Budweiser is the best known example, but Pabst was another, having a major market share in its day.
Well, through the process of globalization and consolidation, the number of these companies has grown smaller. Their brand names are still there in many (but certainly not all) cases. Budweiser, Pabst, etc., are still around. But they're part of bigger outfits. Budweiser belongs to a Belgian alcohol concern. Pabst will now belong to a Russian one.
This is simple, and global, economics, but it also brings to mind our earlier discussion on distributist economics. Here, however, local breweries exhibiting the principle of subsidarity are plentiful, and some of them have grown in size themselves, repeating the original histories of Pabst and Budweiser.
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