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.

As Joe Sixpack, an old friend and award-winning beer blogger (good work if you can get it), explains:

"After the war it wasn't just beer getting dumbed down. It also was in all the food we were eating, the way we were living. This was more a product of where Americans were headed. This was the age of being bland, of TV dinners and the suburbs."

Mr. Sixpack and I share the view that what makes a beer good are the edges -- the robust flavors that vary so much from one good brand to another.

He says that post-war beer lost those edges because brewers began watering it down as well as using cheaper grains and other ingredients, in part because there was a premium on supplies.

Surprisingly, Mr. Sixpack notes that the precedent for the move toward lighter beers was in Germany, of all places, before Prohibition with the advent of lagers (my day-to-day staple) that are much less dense and flavorful than dark beers and ales (which I occasionally imbibe but fill up on quickly.)

Nevertheless, American lagers just don't compare to their cousins from Germany, Holland and Belgium. That can be attributed to American taste.

And what, pray tell, is American taste?

Beers that are indeed watered down, explains Mr. Sixpack, but not because they are made wrong. Playing to my contention, he says that:

"It's all based on image. It's human nature that we associate ourselves with specific brands. AB has two completely different markets for Bud and Bud Light. That's why people drive the car they drive. And some people do not like being see with an imported bottle in their hand at a bar."

As it is, there has been a righteous shakeout in the imported beer market.

Heineken, which ditched its traditional formula in the late 1970s for a more mainstream American taste that is reflected in its moronic Bud-like advertising, has ceded its longtime title as the best-selling import to Corona, a Mexican beer, which is ironic considered that many Americans want to tighten their borders at a time when Mexican and Latin American foods, beers and other products have never been more popular.

Notes Mr. Sixpack:

"Sure, some Mexican beers are being consumed by immigrants, but the majority of drinkers are born-and-bred U.S. residents. Heck, sales of tortilla chips are now growing faster than potato chips. Isn't that sort of a contradiction?"

Indeed. And having lost the cachet of being a "special" import, Heineken is trying to cash in on the popularity of Mexican brews by buying the marketing rights to Tecate and Dos Equis.

Would Frank Zappa approve?