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MillerCoors and Pabst Brewing on Wednesday settled a dispute in which the hipster favorite brand claimed that the biggest brewer had lied about his ability to continue brewing Pabst beers in order to bankrupt the company.
The settlement came as jurors closed their second day of proceedings after a two-week trial in the Milwaukee County District Court.
"We have reached an amicable settlement and are happy to resolve any outstanding issues with Pabst," MillerCoors said in a statement. The details of the bylaw have not been disclosed.
Since 1999, Chicago-based MillerCoors has been manufacturing and shipping almost all Pabst beers, including Pabst Blue Ribbon, Old Milwaukee, Lone Star and Schlitz. Pabst's lawyers said in the company's 2016 lawsuit that MillerCoors was concerned that Pabst would reduce its market share and develop a plan to stop beer production for the smallest competitor. MillerCoors's lawyers said Pabst's claim was a conspiracy theory and said the company was deciding what was economically sound.
The agreement between MillerCoors and Pabst, founded in Milwaukee in 1844 but headquartered in Los Angeles, expires in 2020 but provides for two possible extensions for a five-year term. The companies disagreed on how the extensions should be negotiated: MillerCoors argued that it had the sole discretion to determine whether it could continue to produce for Pabst, while Pabst said the companies had to working "in good faith" to find a solution if Pabst wanted to extend the agreement but MillerCoors lacked capacity.
However, Pabst said that MillerCoors 'internal documents showed that the company was worried about Pabst' s competition and was going as far as hiring a consultant to find a way out of the business. brewing agreement.
"They decided on the solution before determining their sufficient capacity," Paris Paris Adam said Tuesday, one of Pabst's lawyers. "Their problem was not a capacity problem, their problem was a financial problem."
Pabst needs 4 to 4.5 million barrels of beer a year and says MillerCoors is his only option. Pabst's lawsuit sought more than $ 400 million in damages and an order for MillerCoors to honor his contract.
MillerCoors' lawyer, Eric Van Vugt, told the jury that Pabst had presented them with "a story of conspiracy and deception that is quite convincing enough," but that's not true.
"Most of what you have heard is a complete distortion of the evidence, it was taken out of context, the facts were distorted, keywords were dropped," he said.
MillerCoors and Anheuser-Busch, which hold the largest market shares in the United States, with 24.8% and 41.6%, respectively, lost customers to smaller independent brewers, imports and wines and spirits in recent years, according to the Brewers Association, an American company. trading group based. Overall beer sales in the United States decreased from 213.1 million barrels in 2008 to 204.2 million barrels in 2017, according to the association.
Anheuser-Busch does not brew, which makes MillerCoors the only American brewery with the capacity to make Pabst beers.
During the contract extension negotiations in 2015, MillerCoors announced that it would close its brewery plant in Eden, North Carolina, and that it could possibly have to close another plant in Irwindale, California . Pabst claimed that MillerCoors had refused to provide information in support of its claim that it would no longer have the ability to continue brewing Pabst beers.
The lawyers at MillerCoors said at trial that the company was forced to project its future ability to determine if it could continue its partnership with Pabst, and that it had always intended to continue brewing for Pabst until the expiry of the contract, which included a period of two years. downstream layout. This meant that MillerCoors would still be active for Pabst until 2022.
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