Beer: Microbreweries

The giants continued to battle when, in 1971, Philip Morris absorbed the Miller Brewing Company as part of a series of acquisitions. By 1978 Miller had passed Schlitz and Pabst to take second place, but Anheuser-Busch triumphed, becoming the first brewer to sell 40 million barrels a year. Soon the two top brewers were producing over 50 percent of the beer sold in America, largely at the expense of smaller, independent breweries. (While the brewing industry was churning out billions of bottles and cans of beer, the challenge of what to do with the empty containers was first addressed in 1972 when Oregon became the first state to enact a bottle and container deposit law.)