This Fourth of July I Ask: Is Budweiser still America's Beer?

In 2008 Anhauser-Bush which controls 51 percent of the American Beer market was sold to the Belguim-Brazilian InBev company. Budweiser, the quintessential American beer, was included in that sale. Since then, fans sitting in front of their hi-def flat screen TVs and in almost every sports stadium, brood and brawl over the question of whether Budweiser is still an American beer. InBev, from the very onset of its takeover bid has been in tune with that sentiment and immediately launched an ad campaign which included Budweiser alongside grilling, football, and of course the American flag, reminding America that Budweiser was still America's bud.

Is it?

Honestly I never liked Budweiser, so at the time the whole issue for me was ephemeral and it was also easy for me to conclude that Budweiser was in fact no longer “American”.

Yesterday, however, as I sat with my bud on his couch sipping some Brooklyn Lager and Hoegaarden, a commercial interrupted John Stewart. There was a collection of men with wigs and stockings, and women with long thick dresses and curled hair on top of curled hair. You know the way they dressed for the 1787 constitutional convention. At first the mood was somber and dry. Then they cracked open some Bud, low and behold, Madison (I think), Franklin (I know), and a host of other delegates were dancing.

I had watched little TV over the last 10 months and so I had not been exposed to such blatant capitalism in some time. My first instinctive reaction was, oh come on! This feeling was compounded when I was reminded, by my friends “tisk tisk”, that this was doubly offensive, as it was a foreign company blatantly “manipulating” nativist sentiment.

As I got lost in this thought my initial emotional conclusion gave way to lucid thinking: the question; what made Budweiser (or anything for that matter) American, its present condition/parent-company or its history?

After all it was “invented” by Busch and Conrad, two Americans visiting the breweries of Pilsen/Plzen (Pilsner) and Budweis, Bohemia, and continues to occupy a major component of the American beer market. Moreover, the fact that it was bought-out by a foreign company is a reflection of American capitalism.

The commercial with the dancing wigs essentially and effectively asserted that tradition and history are the “truer” metric of what is American and not current ownership/profit which also reflects America -capitalism.

Would I like Anheuser-Busch and Budweiser to continue to be owned by American companies? Of course. At the same time one American tradition, Budweiser, should not trump another American tradition, capitalism. If it did that logic would undermine the same American-exceptionalism that produced the car, plane, nuclear energy, the repeater rifle, and co-existence, and then spread them with even more America ingenuity, in this case capitalism.

Instead let's hope someone in this great country has the wherewithal to buy back the company that makes our beer. This July 4th G-d should continue to bless America the home of freedom, innovation, and Budweiser!