German brewers in decades-long price fixing scandal Documents seen by Focus reveal that during an interrogation in January, Volker Kuhl, head of the Veltins brewery, said large breweries would pass the price-rising agreements along to smaller producers. "Then it often came to a branch-wide beer price increase," he was reported as saying. The Bitburger Brewery Group and leaders of the brewery association in the country's most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, apparently gave similar revelations. The companies involved now face fines in the hundreds of millions of euros, Focus reported.