Budweiser Vs. The Craft Beer Culture: The Long, Slow Decline of The King of Beers

– Jordan Weissman, from slate.com

This from uk.businessinisder.com: “Budweiser is quickly losing its status as the most iconic beer brand in America….Budweiser is the third-most-popular beer brand in America, behind Bud Light and Coors Light. It has recently also been challenged by craft beer, which is hugely popular with the millennial set…At the brand’s peak in 1988, it was selling 50 million barrels of beer a year. That number has declined to 16 million barrels.  (emphasis mine) To “stop the free fall,” the company has decided to double down and advertise only to millennials…”It means February’s Super Bowl ads will feature something more current than last year’s Fleetwood Mac,” Mickle writes. “It means less baseball and more raves with DJ group Cash Cash.”

Great German beers – what Budweiser COULD have been

Three and a half years ago, when I wrote, “Why I Don’t Drink Budweiser…”, I figured that it would take another entire generation for Bud to be knocked off its perch in the catbird seat in the non-light beer category by craft as a whole.  It took, in fact, just a hair over 1,000 days. And the Budweiser free-fall is only going to get faster. Recent layoffs at their St. Louis mothership and that telling stat above –  “44 percent of Americans between the ages of 21 and 27 have never tried a regular old Budweiser” – show graphically what’s in store for not only Bud but for all beers of that adjunct lager style. Bud, Coors, Miller, Pabst…these are not low-calorie beers and their makers cannot simply change the recipes because, then, they’re no longer those beers. Their main problem is that they’re Old News. They were never as beautifully crafted, to begin with, as the stunning German lagers after which they were so loosely patterned, mainly because of the cynical attitudes of AB Founder, Adolphus Busch, who reasoned that Americans don’t know anything about beer, anyway, so why go to all the trouble to make a fine German/Czech-style Pilsner when making a half-assed imitation will suffice? Americans have always loved having choices, as is most starkly obvious when you accompany any person visiting from abroad into an American supermarket for their first visit. They are invariably stunned by the sheer numbers of different brands of bread and peanut butter and soda pop and beer on the shelves. We like to have options and, for over 100 years, when it came to the beer styles we could find and still keep our dollars in the American economy, we had, at one point, over 100 regional breweries, all making almost exactly the same beer. Take the quantum change of AB/InBev’s approach (and the sand-bagging of all those poor horses) for exactly what it is: utter desperation, a Hail Mary; the only ploy understood by a company which has always been FAR more about marketing and “message” than about beer.

So, here we sit, in late fall of 2014, and we see the landscape of beer as we have always known it undergoing tectonic shift, right beneath our feet. We see desperate ploys like AB/InBev’s recent purchase of Bend’s 10 Barrel Brewing, as they pathetically scramble to buy the credibility with the craft beer culture that they have always been – despite scores of lame and transparent attempts – simply unable to earn on their own merits. To gain even a scant toe-hold in “craft”, AB was forced to ape another Big Beer competitor, MillerCoors’ “Blue Moon” Belgian-style White Ale, but even failed at that, in every aspect but money, as their clumsy, over-spiced “Shock Top” has exactly zero of Blue Moon’s grace and style and drinkability. Blue Moon is a pretty good beer and it’s at least arguable that Belgian-style American beers all owe a debt to Blue Moon for being the first beer that actually celebrated its Belgian roots to gain significant acceptance with American beer lovers. But AB has shown a befuddled ineptitude with their faux-craft brands that borders on the comical. And, as a result, many of those no longer exist.

Brewers Association’s list of Fake Craft Beers (CLICK to enlarge)

Despite the alarming few who responded to my posts about the 10 Barrel sale with “Just chill and drink a cold one, dude!“, there has been plenty of evidence since that those clueless types are a clear minority. Most American beer lovers do care – and care passionately – about who’s selling them their beer. The wholesale rejection of the mega-brew brands that’s taking place now – fueled by that vanishing reality of kids growing up watching Mom and Dad mindlessly swilling nothing but a tiresome succession of those carbon-copy watery Pilsners –  is only going to continue and expand. Americans have found out, en masse, that they don’t require a huge mega-corp, working in 20,000 gallon batches, to get beer they can like and be excited about. And let’s be honest, Bud fans: when was the last time the sight of a can of Budweasel got you excited and intrigued about anything other than something cold on a hot day? That sense of discovery, the excitement of new experiences that is arguably the best part of craft beer, simply does not and has not – for many generations! – existed in the sprawl of adjunct Pilsners. We all know that sad, old tune note for note, backwards and forwards. There’s no discovery to be made. It’s beer that has always been about the safe and familiar and those folks who cling so desperately to BudMillerCoorsPabst are the same ones who get their panties in a knot if they have to eat KFC on Friday night because Friday, damnit, is pizza night!

One of AB’s past spokespersons

AB/InBev will buy a few celebrities – rappers, country stars, maybe a has-been rocker or ten or even an action movie tough guy – and they’ll stand on camera and take the $$$ and sing about how Bud is the Mo’Fo of American beer…and they’ll be beating a horse so profoundly dead that the real question is how they got past the stank to lay the whip. The folks in Belgium and Brazil will trot out charts and research papers and sling a lot of verbiage about targeted demographics and market penetration and hatch complicated marketing strategies that they will all assure themselves “cannot miss!“…but their ultimate goal of hamstringing the growth of craft beer or controlling it to any significant degree is impossible to attain, because for every set of owners like the Cox Kids, who see only dollar signs and their overweening frenzy to be national-class movers ‘n’ shakers and feed their (apparently starved) egos and bank accounts, there are thousands of brewers and owners who would rather die than watch their life’s work, their passion, be assimilated into the BudBorg Collective. What made craft beer so popular in the first place – integrity, passion, and American pride in one’s craft – is what will save it from flesh-eating bacteria like AB/InBev…and there’s not a damned thing the mega-brewers can do to change it.