The Stag Brewery at Mortlake, which is located on the Thames right by the finishing line of the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, is to close with the loss of up to 182 jobs.

The brewery, which produces Budweiser, Bud Ice and Michelob Ultra, will be shut next year as part of the $1.5 billion (£690 million) cost savings programme announced by InBev following its recent $52 billion takeover of Anheuser-Busch (AB).

The merged company, dubbed Anheuser-Busch InBev, has unveiled more than 3,000 job losses in the United States but has promised to retain all 12 of AB’s American breweries.

The group, which also brews Stella Artois and Beck’s, blamed the closure on challenging market conditions with UK beer consumption falling in the economic slowdown and costs rising as a result of big increases in beer duty.

Analysts had been predicting the closure since the merger was announced last July, arguing that InBev’s existing brewing facilities — in Magor, Monmouthshire, Samlesbury, Lancashire and Glasgow — had more than sufficient capacity to take on production of AB’s beer brands.

The brewery sits in one of London’s more affluent areas, close to Richmond and Barnes, and is likely to prove valuable for residential development when the property market recovers.

Overcapacity has sparked a series of brewery closures in recent years, including the Young’s brewery at Wandsworth, southwest London. Other breweries set to close over the next two years include Scottish & Newcastle’s Reading brewery and Carlsberg's Tetley’s brewery in Leeds.

The Stag Brewery, London’s biggest beer production facility, dates back to the amalgamation of two smaller breweries in 1811, although beer has been made in the area since the 15th century, when the local monastery had a brewhouse.

Brewery mergers have resulted in numerous changes of ownership over the past two centuries, until it became the main production site for Watney’s pale ales and bitters. According to the brewing blog The Zythophile, at its peak in the 1960s it had more than 1,400 employees.

AB has occupied the plant since 1995, initially through a lease from Scottish & Newcastle (S&N). It bought out its brewing joint venture with S&N two years later, then in January last year it acquired the freehold of the site for £35 million.

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