InBev’s purchase of St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch this week raises more questions than it answered. Among them: Who will stay and who will go at Anheuser-Busch when InBev takes over? Will A-B’s marketing stay as good as it has been? (A-B execs insist the answer is yes.) Will InBev have to cut deep to pay off its leveraged takeover? We’ll be following those topics, and more, in the coming weeks.

For now, Forbes.com has an interesting piece on how Chinese authorities told InBev it could not buy up stakes in several big Chinese breweries, or increase Anheuser-Busch’s stake in brewer Tsingtao. The regulators said those types of investments would raise anti-competitive issues. So it looks like Anheuser-Busch InBev will have to grow organically in China, the world’s biggest beer market.

And whither SABMiller, not long ago the world’s biggest brewer? The London-based company is now dwarfed by Anheuser-Busch InBev. SABMiller, no stranger to mergers itself (it’s a combination of South African Breweries and Miller Brewing Co. of Milwaukee) may feel the need to bulk up to keep pace. Will InBev’s takeover of Anheuser-Busch touch off another round of buyouts and mergers in the beer business? One analyst told Lager Heads a few days ago that we have probably not seen the end of consolidation in the beer business. Stay tuned for deals, deals, deals.