I'm staying about 200m downwind from the Stella Artois brewery--the biggest brewery in Belgium, the most beer-obsessed country in the world. It smells quite nice here. This is the beer that's marketed as "Reassuringly Expensive" in the US, although it's considered low-end and is relatively inexpensive here.
I heard from a little brewery around here that Stella is the only brewery in the country that makes its own malt.
Commercialized in 1926, Stella Artois was run for a number of years ago by InterBrew, a Belgian firm that bought a bunch of major breweries around the world during the 1990s, including Labatt's Brewery which has about 40% market share in Canada. Then InterBrew bought the giant Brazilian beverage firm AmBev and changed its name to InBev.
I talked to a few Belgian purist types who stopped drinking Stella once it was bought by InterBrew, and still others who stopped drinking it after "the Brazilians" took over (ie AmBev), which is a bit of a stretch.
If you haven't yet seen Mundo Vino, the documentary about the globalization of the wine industry, then you're missing an incredible portrait of the state of modern viticulture. It begins with a peasant in Languedoc stating in a most sombre way... "wine is dead"--referring to the demise of old school traditions and livelihoods associated with its cultivation and production. I'm wondering if a similar film could be in the works about beer.