Yeah, here's more on the Labatt USA thing. From WikiPedia:
In 2009, Labatt sold Labatt USA, including the American rights to its core Labatt products (such as Blue, Blue Light, and Labatt 50) to North American Breweries, and agreed to brew those brands on Labatt USA's behalf until 2012. This sale was mandated by the U.S. Department of Justice for competitive reasons following InBev's merger with Anheuser-Busch, since Budweiser and Labatt Blue were both among the top brands in upstate New York, despite the latter having less than 1% market share in the U.S. overall.
The sale did not include U.S. rights to Labatt products not carrying the "Labatt" label, such as Kokanee or Alexander Keith's, which are now distributed in the U.S. by Anheuser-Busch. Moreover, the underlying intellectual property (such as the Labatt trademarks) remains the property of the Canadian firm. Finally, the sale did not affect Labatt's Canadian operations in any way; Anheuser-Busch InBev retains full control of the Labatt brand portfolio within Canada.
North American Breweries, the company mentioned above that owns Labatt USA, is also parent company for Magic Hat and several other US breweries. They are headquartered at the Genesee brewery in Rochester. It's quite possible that they are now brewing some Magic Hat beer there for capacity reasons.
Also, an interesting side note: While the Wikipedia quote above indicates that Labatt Canada would brew the Labatt USA brands from 2009 (year of the sale) until 2012, the deal was actually that they would brew the brands for NAC for UP TO 3 years, until NAC found another place to brew them. And in 2010, NAC did find another brewery to brew the Labatt brands for the US market - Molson-Coors!
http://www.canadianbeernews.com/2010/08 ... -s-market/
In the two years since, they have purchased several US breweries, so they might be brewing the Labatt brands in the US now. But for a period of time, Molson was brewing Blue and Blue Light in Canada and shipping it to the US.
