Budweiser

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Budweiser

Along with Coca-Cola, Budweiser beer is America's drink. One out of five alcoholic drinks sold in America is a Bud, and, now that the King of Beers is being sold in more than 60 countries worldwide, Budweiser is the world's most popular beer. This lightly-hopped, smooth lager has a long history in the United States, but it was beginning in the 1970s that Budweiser became a true icon of American culture, thanks to a model of commercial development that is the envy of the world. Faced with increasing competition from the Miller Brewing Company, Budweiser parent Anheuser-Busch began putting the Budweiser name everywhere: on coolers, blimps, and boxer shorts; on football games, car races, and other sports. The company's carefully crafted advertising campaigns were equally ubiquitous: "This Bud's for you"; "Budweiser … The King of

Beers"; the Bud Bowl; the Budweiser frogs and lizards; and, of course, the Budweiser Clydesdales all kept the Budweiser brands alive in the consumers' mind. The brewery bought the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team and opened theme parks in Florida and Virginia; these were family entertainments, but the ties to the beer brands were always evident. Such marketing tactics were backed by the most efficient beer production and distribution systems in the world.

The Anheuser-Busch brewing company traced its history back to St. Louis breweries in the mid-1800s. In 1865, the brewery produced 8,000 barrels; these numbers grew quickly when Budweiser Lager Beer was introduced in 1876. The brewing company expanded horizontally, purchasing bottlers and glass companies. Soon it controlled all the means for producing its beer and in 1901 Anheuser-Busch was well on its way to being America's brewery, breaking the million-barrel mark for the first time with 1,006,494 barrels. With the nation under the grips of National Prohibition in 1920, the brewery unveiled Budweiser near-beer (selling 5 million cases) and began manufacturing ice cream. With the retraction of Prohibition in 1933 the company introduced the Budweiser Clydesdales, which have remained an icon of the company's commitment to tradition. In the 1950s, the company implemented plans to open Busch drinking gardens in various cities, in an attempt to tap into a European tradition. In addition, advertising gimmicks became a significant part of Bud's appeal. From the Clydesdales of the 1930s, advertisers welcomed "Bud Man" in 1969, a campaign which sought to tie the beer to gender roles and expectations of masculinity. Today, Budweiser still uses the saying "This Bud's for you," but it most often aims toward a broader, un-gendered public with advertising gimmicks such as the "Bud Bowl" and talking frogs. Budweiser was also one of the first beers to incorporate requests for responsible-drinking in its advertisements in the late 1980s.

In 1980 Budweiser made history by expanding into the global marketplace with agreements to brew and sell in Canada, Japan, and elsewhere. This corporate development fueled Anheuser-Busch's staggering rise in production, which exceeded 100 million barrels per year in the late 1990s and gave the company nearly half of all beer sales worldwide and around 40 percent of beer sales in the United States. Budweiser—along with the brand extensions Bud Light, Bud Dry, and Bud Ice—is thus poised to become to the rest of the world what it already is to the United States: a mass-produced, drinkable beer that symbolizes the "good life" made possible by corporate capitalist enterprise. Beer purists and fans of locally-produced microbrews may decry the bland flavor and lack of body of the world's best-selling beer, but millions of beer drinkers continue to put their money down on the bar and ask for a Bud.

—Brian Black