Just announced this morning is some bad news: the Belgian-owned InBev has bought Anheuser-Busch for $52 billion. While I am not really shocked by the announcement, we mentioned the potential deal a month ago, I am quite dismayed.
I am not and never have been a fan of Budweiser products, not unless I wanted larger burps and a worse headache. The taste of Bud was never pleasing to me, either. But what is sad is that now one of America’s prides, not to mention the country’s largest brewer, is foreign owned. Over a century ago, European immigrants, many of them German, took their recipes to the U.S. in hopes of making new beer. Their names were Anheuser, Busch, Schlitz, Coors and Miller. Now, nearly all of them are owned by Europeans.
This is the end of an era, but hopefully not of the long-held American tradition of drinking horrible tasting beer. It is every American’s right to drink cheap, mass-produced, bitter beer, preferably while watching a sporting event that shows its commercials during breaks.
Today, it seems like the only new American beers available (you can tell they are new because they don’t sponsor NASCAR cars) are microbrews. Here’s my main problem with them: they are too focused on taste and cool looking labels. These young upstarts don’t know the first thing about mass-producing beer.
Who always sponsors concerts, really cool parties at bars and the occasional ride on a big, beer-filled boat? Not Magic Hat, well, they do concerts I guess. No, it is the big beer producers. Correction: the big AMERICAN beer producers. The future is bleak, friends. We have little hope of maintaining our proud heritage of beer drinking, but at least we still control Big Bourbon.
Buy it! Europe, I hear you drinking over there, buy it!