Yes, that favorite brewer of Tuppers Pils and Dominion Ale and so many other fine brews is being sold to what appears to be a joint venture of Rams Head Tavern and Anheuser Busch. I haven't read any details like percentage ownership, whether Jerry Bailey would stay on, etc. He opened Dominion in 1989 after leaving the USAID. Not a bad secondary retirement package.
Like so many others who have enjoyed the beer and had fun at the pub I hope the new owners don't tinker with the recipe. And pullleeze don't turn the Ashburn pub into another Ramshead.......
Has already been sold, some changes at the brewpub and talk about the survival of the OD summer fest has begun. There is still discussion if Tuppers Pils and Ale would continue to be brewed at OD.
Look, I dislike A-B and it's products as much as anyone but they got rich and successful in part by building new, state-of-the-"art" (well, their take on the art) super-efficent breweries that are very labor-UNintensive and brew huge quantities of beer at once. The very opposite of how micros like OD worked. One interesting fact I read the other day is that while A-B has a bit less than 50% of the US beer market, they have close to 75% of the beer PROFITS.
They have, so far, not converted any of the small breweries they have an interest in into "industrial beer factories"- it just doesn't make economic sense. I'll leave it to others if they've influenced the recipes of the beers- the ones I'm familar with seemed pretty "middle-of-the-road" to begin with. Certainly, their record is better than Miller's in this situation.
Take a look at A-B's approach to the buying of the Rolling Rock label. They had NO interest in the Latrobe Brewery itself, even tho' it was large, modern and efficent when compared to most of the industry, to A-B it was a small antique. Much easier for them to buy a well-known brand that could fill a gap in their product line and take up some percentage of the excess capacity they had at one of their dozen or so breweries. (If anything, it's unusual for any A-B brewery to even HAVE excess capacity- they're well-known for high gravity brewing to squeeze out MORE beer than they've got the capacity to brew).
Anheuser Busch may be more efficient and have a higher gross margin on sales, or they may control non-production expenses very well, or there may have been a non-recurring gain of some kind taken as income. Hard to tell without seeing the numbers.
The involvement of Rams Head makes me think they willl have a significant say in the direction of this venture. The Old Dominion brew pub would be a natural for being converted to another Rams Head pub. I wonder if Anheuser Busch also has a stake in Rams Head...???
Hard to tell what they will do with the brewing facilities. I'm going to guess they they will not abandon the brand name and specific beers, but they may no longer be brewed at ashburn. Time will tell who among us guessed right.
One of the rumor's was that A-B wanted to purchase OD so they could use some of the unused resources at their Red Hook facilities out in the Northeast to brew OD products. As someone who has enjoyed OD beer for 7 plus years and have been to all and pured at all but the first couple of summer fests, it's a little hard to swallow. It was a double whammy when I heard the sale of Goose Island last year.
Back in '85 during a three week stay in England, I found out that the reason I always got headaches from drinking beer (in the USA) was the preservatives that had to be included in the beer to ship it long distances before it could be consumed. About the same time I went to England, I was at a beer tasting party, where the expert speaker quipped that Miller Beer had lobbied against a law that would require the bottles of beer to have all the ingredients listed on the label, since they would have had to include a fold out label about three feet long.
I had recently found Rams Head, since I live close by and one of our favorite restaurants just got purchased by them. I could drink their locally brewed beer and not get a headache, nor any other after effect.
My biggest fear is that it will be near impossible to find the beer without preservatives, since, as indicated in the local paper, they will be distributing it all over the East Coast.
I guess I will have to find another local brewer that does it for the love of it and is not too greedy. By the way, the menu at the restaurant they took over is not that great. They used to have an excellent shrimp platter, but after Rams Head took over they switched to a beer batter that is like biting through a rock to get to the shrimp.
An urban legend about beer? Shocking! (By the way, when is the local brewery gonna clean their tanks? I'm dying for some Bock Beer! I drink Guinness Stout, but it's made out of FISH!)
The Center for Science in the Public Interest put out a small paperback back in the early 80's (during the height of the A-B-Miller "Beer Wars" not coincidentally) called "Chemical Additives in Booze". Much of the material in the "beer" chapter comes from various lawsuits the two filed against one another, of course, and the book did contain a 3-4 page list of allowed additives from the BATF (but, of course, no data of which, if any, beers contain them), grouped by usage- "Enzymes that Convert Starch to Sugars" "Clarifying and Chillproofing" "Foam Stabilizing/Anti-Gushing" "Anti-Oxidants" "Natural and Artificial Flavors" "Artificial Colors" and "Anti-Microbial Preservative" .
In addition, they have a Appendix with a list of brewers and what they'll admit to as far as ingredients (like Heileman's "water, malt, corn, rice, hops, yeast and trade secret ingredients").
Miller Lite's was probably the most extreme (and was probably based on information *other* than that which was supplied by the Miller Brewing):
An eye-opening list, and quite unheard of- well, except if you've ever read just about any commercial food product label, like those found on bread, meat, wine, soda pop, snack food, etc.
One of my favorite parts of the book was an investigation of the-then food scare item "nitrosamines" (a by-product of drying malt). Coors was even advertising "No Nitrosamines in Coors Beer" at the time. The Feds did a study after maltsters changed their process to eliminate the carcenogen and found only 3 beers with unacceptable levels, all Imported beers. (For that matter, the only beer I've ever seen with a label that warned it contained sulfites (a preservative, and an allergen for many people) was the UK's Watney Red Barrel ).
In the example above on UK vs. US beers, I'd imagine the difference in alcohol level may have played a bigger part in a headache than the "preservatives". Certainly, a blanket statement that "beer in the USA has preservatives for shipping long distances" isn't the case, nor, necessarily, is the fact that a joint venture of A-B *means* that Old Dominion beers will become chemical stews.
As far a "long distances"- my understanding is that most beer travels by truck or rail (refrigerated in the case of draught beer) in the US (canal barge and mule trains having priced themselves out of the running), so most markets are only a few days away from the brewery.
Oh, yeah, the two most infamous cases of the negative effects caused by additives in beer:
16 deaths were found to be from the use of cobalt sulfate (for head retention) in beer from the Dow Brewery of Quebec.
At least 70 deaths and thousands ill after beer was found to contain arsenic (from improperly processed brewing sugar) in London in the early
1900's.
So it looks like the UK and it's former Empire is way ahead of the US industry in death toll .
So far, the worst US examples was some Dixie beer that was contaminated when a freshly painted brewhouse floor was flooded (smelled bad and most people poured it out, never to drink Dixie again).
Oh, and there's that Ed's Chili Beer, that's been known to sicken people by just thinking of it.
And how did you find this out? Frankly, it sounds like you were fed a line. The major breweries - A-B, Miller - have multiple breweries throughout the country, meaning that most markets get their beer sourced from relatively close by. Most of the major brewers do pasteurize their canned and bottle product, which is a form of preservation. And the whole point of that method is that you don't need additives.
There are a few "additives" (usually various salts, enzymes and/or organic matter) used in the natural course of brewing, but even the major brewers tend to stick with the basics of water, yeast, malt, cereals and hops.
One thing: in the 80s, did you drink primarily Budweiser? If so, there's where your headaches come from. Bud's yeast produces high levels of acetaldehyde, which is a natural fermentation byproduct. It's also one of the chemicals in your body that results from metabolization of alcohol and contributes to hangovers. A lot of people over the years have found themselves more susceptible to headaches from drinking Bud.
Doubtful. The only remarkable thing that Miller does with some of its beers is use a special hop extract that eliminates the components that cause the lightstruck ("skunked") reaction. What chemical processes may be need to create that extract, I don't know, and I don't know how much would carry through into the beer. However, it's worth noting that German brewers who adhere to the Reinheitsgeboot (allowing only water, malt, hops and yeast) have routinely used hop extracts for years without running afoul of the purity law (granted, their extracts aren't geared toward eliminating the light-sensitive components).
I'm not aware of any craft breweries that are using any sort of preservatives in their beer. It's typically the usual four key ingredients.
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