Spirits

Pound some Bud: Do 'real' men drink craft?

Scene from the controversial Budweiser commercial aired on the Super Bowl.
Scene from the controversial Budweiser commercial aired on the Super Bowl.

Maybe the biggest surprise of last Sunday's Super Bowl was a Budweiser ad.

Not the one with the puppy and the Clydesdales. The one in which Anheuser-Busch proudly declared its flagship product a "macro-beer" and then proceeded to take shots at twirly mustached hipsters and their "fussy" craft beers. Budweiser went hard after millennial beer nerds and their "pumpkin peach ales," declaring that their product is "brewed for drinking, not dissecting."

As George Takei might say, "Oh my."

Maybe we shouldn't be too surprised at the content of the ad for, after all, Budweiser has experienced a worrisome slippage over the past couple of decades. While it's still the third most popular beer brand in America, behind Bud Light and Coors Light, its market share has eroded drastically since its peak in 1988. That year, 50 million barrels of Bud were sold. By 2013, the figure had declined to 16 million barrels.

Not coincidentally, craft beers have exploded over the same time frame. It's understandable that Bud might want to assert itself as a straightforward, economical alternative to the gnomically complicated micro-brew scene and the inevitable snobbery that attaches to any activity that privileges intellectual engagement. But the regressive schoolyard bully tone of the ad -- the mockery of the funny-looking beer sniffers who probably aren't real Americans (or real men for that matter; the only women who appear in the ad are comely serving wenches delivering "golden suds" to jocky he-men) lands as ugly, defensive, anti-intellectual and desperate.

It's like Budweiser has given up on attracting new drinkers (according to The Wall Street Journal, Anheuser-Busch internal surveys indicate that 44 percent of drinkers aged 21 to 27 have never tried Bud) and is simply trying to hang on to its base. They're giving cover and comfort to the people who already consume their product, providing them with talking points to argue that they're consuming a more authentic and superior product to craft brewers. They are suggesting that there's "no there there" when it comes to micro-brews, and that there's probably something wrong with the effete, label-reading folks who drink them.

You hear this sort of argument all the time from people who prefer action movies and bro-country to art-house films and Sturgill Simpson. While it's a stupid argument, it's understandable coming from an individual who is looking for diversion and escape rather than the sort of stimulation engagement which art can provide. No one wants to be told that what they like is pablum; most of us are able to enjoy things that are basic, obvious and require little from us. It's annoying to hear some tastemaker chirp on about some band that never made it when all you want to do is dance.

It's something else when a global corporation starts smearing potential customers.

Sure, a lot of people would never touch a Bud under any circumstances. But a lot more of the people who drink craft beer are like me: I would drink a Bud if I was hot and it was cold and my options were limited. I wouldn't complain.

Now I don't self-identify as a beer nerd. I have a few basic ideas about beer that might be categorized as prejudices: Generally, foreign beer, especially European beer, is better than mass-produced "American" beer. (Though it's kind of interesting to note that the All-American Anheuser-Busch is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the multinational Belgian-Brazilian-American beverage and brewing conglomerate Anheuser-Busch InBev, which is headquartered in Leuven, Belgium.) Also, regional brands are better than national and micro-brews are generally best (unless you happen upon a bad one).

So if the Budweiser ad alienated me, then I'd suspect it made a few people mad enough to swear off Anheuser-Busch products forever. Which wouldn't seem an advisable strategy, but then people do dumb things all the time. Like call a quick slant on the one-yard line when you've got Beast Mode in your backfield.

...

Anheuser-Busch disrupted my plans for this column. I was going to write about the burgeoning growler trade. Basically a growler is a reusable container (usually glass) that holds 64 ounces of beer (I imagine there are other sizes, but let's keep things simple) that you take to your favorite liquor store, brewery or gastropub and have it filled up.

In July, the state Alcoholic Beverage Control agency changed its policies to allow grocery, convenience and liquor stores as well as bars with retail beer or native retail beer permits to install "growler stations" where 32- or 64-ounce containers could be filled from kegs for off-premises consumption. Before this, only brew pubs and microbreweries were allowed the option of growler sales.

Before Prohibition, especially before bottled beer became economical (before pasteurization), if you wanted to enjoy a beer outside a saloon, you carried your own vessel -- most often a galvanized or enameled pail, but a pitcher or a glass jar or a jug would do as well -- down to the bar and bade the barkeep fill it up.

One of the theories why growlers are called growlers holds that because these containers weren't of uniform size, there was a lot of "growling" back and forth between bartenders and customers. Another more generally accepted if still dubious-sounding reason was that the covered pails made a growling sound after being filled with beer (and a generous head of foam).

Anyway, the so-called "Bucket Trade" -- which often involved children fetching beer for working men -- was one of the chief targets of temperance advocates, and prior to the enactment of the 18th Amendment in 1920 many communities passed laws to outlaw the growler.

A 1912 Little Rock city ordinance made it "unlawful for any person, firm or corporation owning, operating, managing or controlling, or bartender or any employee working in any dramshop, tippling house or saloon to sell, or permit the sale of, draught or keg beer deposited, or to be deposited in cans, cups, buckets, jars, bottles, jugs, crocks, pitchers, or other utensils than glasses or steins, and drunk or to be drunk on the premises; or to permit what is commonly termed and known as 'canning beer,' 'rushing the can,' or 'rushing the growler,' to be drunk on the premises where the sale is made."

Interest in the growler trade only revived with the advent of the craft-beer movement in the 1980s. And while Vino's has been in the growler business for at least 20 years, the proliferation of craft breweries around Little Rock and Northwest Arkansas has put us in the enviable position of being able to buy fresh hand-crafted beer while minimizing one's carbon footprint (another thing that Budweiser probably thinks calls one's citizenship and masculinity into question). Like the guy in the liquor store at the bottom of my hill said (as he filled a growler for me) the other day, there are gas stations with growler stations now.

It's a simple concept, but is it really better than bottled beer?

Well, yes. Usually. But there are some things to consider. Once you open a growler, the beer has a limited shelf life. How long a shelf life is a matter of debate, but almost everyone says that after the seal has been broken, the beer's only good for three refrigerated days, tops. (There are those who insist that beer is a living thing, but only for 23 minutes after it has been drawn from a tap.) In our household, opinions differ. I thought the Lost Forty extra dry pale ale -- which was excellent upon opening on Saturday -- wasn't so great on Tuesday, but Karen liked it a little bit better after it had flattened out a bit. It tasted more ale-y to her.

Whatever. My advice is that if you open a growler, you need to be prepared to drink the growler. And 64 ounces is just eight ounces shy of what you'd get in a typical six-pack. So a growler might be great to take to a party, but not so great if, like me, you're the sort who only drinks a beer every now and then.

Or if you just want to pound the Budweiser.

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

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Style on 02/08/2015

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