Brewery sued over watered down beer

Beer enthusiasts across the U.S. have filed a lawsuit against Anheuser-Busch for watering down some of its most popular brands, hoping to nett millions of dollars in damages. The case involves 10 of Anheuser-Busch's best known beers including Budweiser and Michelob.

Lead attorney Josh Boxer claimed that a 'whistle blowing' former employee had confessed: "as a matter of corporate practice, all of their products mentioned (in the lawsuit) are watered down". Boxer went on to allege that the measure had been introduced to save the company money. "AB (Anheuser-Busch) never intends for the malt beverage to contain the amount of alcohol that is stated on the label. As a result, AB's customers are overcharged for watered-down beer and AB is unjustly enriched by the additional volume it can sell," the lawsuit said.

One of the complainants stated, "Anheuser-Busch employs some of the most sophisticated process control technology in the world to precisely monitor the alcohol content at the final stages of production and then adds additional water to produce beers with significantly lower alcohol contents than is represented on the labels".

The incident left many loyal customers infuriated, they cheated by what they saw as a breach of their trust which paid no heed to the concept of customer loyalty.

St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch became the world's largest alcohol producer in 2008, after a successful merger with InBev. With its headquarters in Belgium, the company produced 10 billion gallons of malt beverages, 3 billion of them in the U.S. and reported profits of $22 billion in 2011.