As St. Louis was noting yesterday’s one-year anniversary of the Anheuser-Busch InBev merger announcement, word came out of Japan that another big beer merger was brewing. Kirin and Suntory confirmed today that they are talking about a deal, setting off a lot of talk about how big they’ll be in the beverage industry. Most of the stories focus on their combined revenue of $41 billion, which is far ahead  of A-B InBev and even larger than Coca-Cola, the world’s biggest beverage company.

Kirin and Suntory, though, are in a lot of businesses besides beer. They sell soft drinks, whiskey and even fresh flowers. Having just taken a year-later look at the performance of the world’s largest brewer, we wondered where Kirin-Suntory would rank in the beer pecking order. After searching several reports in vain for this information, we finally found the answer in the Wall Street Journal: Based on volume, the combined Japanese beer operations would only rank ninth in the world. That’s based on preliminary numbers from Euromonitor, a market-research firm.