A week before Christmas, Harry Schuhmacher, editor and publisher of Beer Business Daily, sat down to write a column, looking back on a week he called “the blackest in the history of Anheuser-Busch.” Never in the history of the U.S. beer industry, he wrote, had so many been laid off in such a short time. He estimated that approximately two-fifths of A-B’s St. Louis workforce, including contractors, had left the brewery.

“There is little doubt,” Schuhmacher wrote, “that A-B had lots of people, and perhaps more pointedly A-B had a culture of, if you’re going to do something, do it right. Some call it ‘going first class.’ Some call it ‘the A-B way.’ Some call it ‘overkill.’ … At A-B, you could be fired for not getting the job done, but you never got fired for using too many resources to get the job done.” It was a culture in which, if it was good to send one person to a meeting, it was even better to send five.

“The till was bottomless,” said Schuhmacher. But with InBev taking over and needing to repay billions of dollars in debt, the till “just got a bottom.” How would A-B respond to the new, belt-tightened regime? Would it lose its fifty-percent share of the U.S. market?

Schuhmacher soon heard from Dave Peacock, president of Anheuser-Busch, who wanted to respond. Excerpts from that interview with Beer Business Daily are below.

Dave: “I don’t think that having big cocktail shrimp at the distributor conference is going to help us gain share. We’re focused on cutting things that don’t help us gain share and reinvesting those dollars into the  activities that help us gain share. Some of the money we save will go to the bottom line, but some will be reinvested. The idea is that we should test which activities give us the best yield, and which activities don’t, and reinvest heavily against what works. We are not going to walk away from marketing, we are not going to walk away from sports sponsorships, we won’t walk away from the quality of our product, and we won’t walk away from constantly communicating with our distributors.”

Dave on sharing ideas with InBev: “We have shared a lot of ideas, and they have developed a lot of best practices that can enhance and complement what we’re doing here. And we have competencies and skills here that can help what they do in other parts of the world. In the short term, we are focused on keeping our momentum in the marketplace. We don’t want to see that sacrificed. Right now, I don’t know a lot of things about the rest of the company - there is a lot for us to learn. I’m joining a best practice sharing team from A-B on a trip to Brazil in the first week of January…And many people from the global company will be coming to St. Louis at the end of January, early February. But the trick is to not disrupt the business as we bring together the best of what we both do.”