I'm sure y'all can figure out the topic of today's brief impromptu post. Not the results of the football game. Not the halftime show (although I will admit to flailing and squealing a bit as soon as the opening notes to "Get Your Freak On" came through the speakers). Yeah. That Budweiser ad.
In their 2015 SuperBowl spot, Budweiser asserts that their lager is "brewed the hard way" and that the people who drink Budweiser are "people who like to drink beer." These claims are accompanied by a montage of the brewing process, Budweiser fans having fun at crowded bars, and shots of stereotypical hipsters ordering flights of many-colored beers and swirling them, sniffing them, and sampling them. Maybe it's because I happened to catch the commercial while relaxing at Flying Saucer, one of Saint Louis's many amazing craft beer bars, while surrounded by fellow craft beer enthusiasts, but I found the commercial instantly alienating.
I'm not here to speak on the quality of Budweiser or the other AB-InBev products. I've never toured their brewery. In fact, I respect AB and the other lager giants for having the business savvy and brewing experience to brew a consistent beer, year-round, for decades. But I really think their marketing department really missed the mark on this ad!
Paste does an excellent job breaking down the various hypocrisies in the 60-second ad, from their potentially questionable casting choices to the specific snubbery of "pumpkin peach ale" (seriously), a shot that's even more confusing when you take into account the fact that InBev's most recent acquisition, Elysian, brews a pumpkin-peach ale. Not to mention that, now that I've got that sensory idea stuck in my noggin, I'll certainly be pushing for The OG to brew a pumpkin-peach ale near the late summer and early fall.
Local breweries have so far posted admirable responses to the ad, with Civil Life and Schlafly tweeting excellent remarks!
O'Fallon Brewery, who I'm fairly certain are the largest local purveyors of both pumpkin and peach ales had the following to say.
The response from local beer lovers on the Saint Louis Area Beer Enthusiasts Facebook page, however, was less gracious, with one user even commenting "Next up Boones Farm mocks sommeliers." This raises a pretty interesting point. Sniffing, swirling.. Those are all time-tested tasting and judging techniques BJCP judges use to classify and rate beer.
This article from the Phoenix New Times claims that the ad wasn't meant to be offensive, and I'm sure it may not have been. But the ad sends a message that all craft beer enthusiasts are uptight snobs, and many of Budweiser's die-hard fans will wind up believing that. Of course, in craft beer, there will always be certain pretentious individuals. The craft beer community has even self-effacingly embraced the following sketch from YouTube's Nacho Punch, about hipsters and craft beer.
The difference, though, is just like the difference between an overweight comedian making a self-deprecating joke and someone like Perez Hilton criticizing celebrities who may be overweight or may just be having an "off" day. Instead of using their status to poke fun at craft breweries (who, by the way, do their work the hard way. Just check out Civil Life's twitter feed), they should maybe engage in positive promotion efforts, or take a page from fellow national giants Sam Adams in sharing hops during a national shortage. Instead, they budgeted a classless and inaccurate ad that left a decidedly skunky taste in my mouth.
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