Today is National Beer Day (is it a government holiday? wonder who lobbied for that...) so this might be a good time to have a look at the overlap between Anheuser-Busch InBev and the federal government. Anheuser-Busch InBev is owned by 3G Capital, a Brazilian investment company. It partners with Berkshire Hathaway for its acquisitions. Anheuser-Busch is also known for its many acquisitions of competing breweries and craft brews. (This venn only includes revolving door employees for the Anheuser-Busch arm of the InBev subsidiaries.)
A few years back, Anheuser-Busch InBev was lobbying with other large corporate brewers for passage of the Fair BEER Act (Brewers Excise and Economic Relief Act), in direct opposition to the proposed Small BREW Act (Small Brewer Reinvestment and Expanding Workforce Act). At issue was a difference in excise tax rates between the two pieces of proposed legislation.
In simplest terms, The Motley Fool described the differences between the bills this way: “The former is known as the BEER Act and proposes reducing the per-barrel tax on beer from $18 to $9 and implementing a bigger reduction for small brewers that would virtually eliminate excise taxes on the first 15,000 barrels. The latter is known as the Small BREW Act and it proposes increasing the qualifying maximum barrel production from 2 million barrels annually to 6 million barrels, while reducing the excise tax by half on the first 60,000 barrels produced, and by $2 per barrel for the next 1.94 million barrels.”
Neither bill was ever passed, which might look like a failure on the part of all this lobbying, but large corporations like Anheuser-Busch got what they wanted simply by preventing passage of the Small BREW Act, which would have given a competitive edge to smaller breweries. Or more accurately, it would have leveled the playing field since large breweries already had a competitive advantage when you figured their effective tax rates (small breweries paid effective rates of 40% while multinational brewers like A-B paid 21.5% according to the Brewers Association).
More recently, the corporation began a lobbying effort somewhat outside of the box: Anheuser-Busch served beer at the presidential debates between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016. Doug Bailey, A-B's Vice President of Government Relations, said the move gave the company “a chance to get our brand out and remind people what we have going on in the United States to an audience that certainly has the opportunity to tell stories.” Visitors to the Anheuser-Busch facility at the debate venue were encouraged to broadcast their visit with the “brewdemocracy” hashtag.
