In a nutshell: not very. ABI, which produces on the order of one-third of the beer made worldwide, does clearly have enormous purchasing power. But nearly every ounce of that production goes into mass market lagers. Those beers require high-alpha bittering hops, not the lushly-flavored varieties prized by IPA-makers. ABI is putting together an impressive portfolio of craft breweries in the US and abroad, but these constitute a small amount of production, even weighed against the craft market. Craft breweries require vastly more hops per barrel than the big breweries do, and they punch way above their weight as buyers. Hop growers love craft breweries. It's hard to see how they could affect the supply of American hops right now.

Fair enough, you might say--but what about the future? Might things not change enough that this calculus would change? Notte raises this point in his piece:

The greater issue, which beer writer and historian Stan Hieronymus touches on in his 2012 book, “For the Love of Hops,” is that Anheuser-Busch InBev has never been shy about controlling the means of production. Before Anheuser-Busch’s merger with InBev in 2008, it had no problem buying up the majority of a hop farm’s acreage in Oregon. In fact, Anheuser-Busch alone once accounted for more than 75% of all of Oregon’s hop acreage.

But this is exactly the reason hop growers are going to be resistant to such an arrangement in the future. Gayle Goschie was one of those farmers who grew almost entirely for Anheuser-Busch. About ten years ago, they decided to pull the contract, and Goschie Farms was in big trouble. Fortunately, craft breweries came to the rescue and she began forming relationships with them, and the farm survived. Yet her case illustrates that farms with one client become vassals, and the entire business survives at the lord's whim. It was also the case that the big breweries funded research into ever-higher alpha hops so that they could use fewer of them--an arrangement that probably didn't sit well with growers. By contrast, craft breweries keep buying more and more hops every year.

It's worth keeping an eye on ABI's High End (their portfolio of craft breweries). Should the largest craft breweries all be collected by two or three of the giants, supply issues could be a future problem. But for the foreseeable future, there's no reason I can see to worry that AB InBev--or any large beer company--is going to endanger our supplies. The South African case was a weird one in which all the circumstances lined up; nothing like that exists here in the US. We should be fine.