Budweiser: Good Riddance To Bad Beer

You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.
– FRANK ZAPPA

While I suppose that red-meat Americans should be up in arms over the impending sale of venerable Anheuser-Busch for 52 billion large to Belgian-Brazilian brewer InBev, it certainly won’t change my leisure-time habits.

The AB stable of beers, from the flagship Budweiser brand to Bud Light and a seemingly limitless range of other hopped-down beverages, is a triumph of image over quality — flashy marketing based on big-breasted babes, golden retrievers wearing sunglasses and college frat house pranks.

The $90 billion a year domestic beer market dominated by AB, Miller and Coors is nothing to sniff at. It’s just that my taste buds prefer imported brews (about 7-8 percent of the market) and craft beers (about 3-4 percent) to the watered-down taste of the big domestics.

American brewers did not always have to find clever ways to market their beers.

Prior to the advent of Prohibition in 1919, most American cities had at least one brewery with beers and ales that compared favorably to their counterparts in the Old Country, most often Germany. This is because the owners and brewmasters were direct from the Old Country, or were first or second generation Americans.

But a funny thing happened in the years after the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. Brewery owners who survived those 14 dry years and the shakeout as shuttered breweries began to get back on their feet realized they had a big marketing problem: There wasn’t a ready-made way to increase sales.

But with millions of beer drinkers returning home at the end of World War II, brewers stumbled on an idea startling for its ingenuity: If their products were watered down, people would drink more of them.

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