Remember the Budweiser Superbowl ad attacking craft beers?

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Budweiser is “proudly a macro beer”

This is like that “reclaiming” of a negative word thing we’ve heard about before, yes? “Macro” being the opposite of “micro,” the term that was once applied to what are now typically referred to as craft brewers. But yeah, they’re proud to be big, because big obviously correlates to “best.” After all, McDonald’s makes the highest quality hamburgers in the world, right?

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It’s not “brewed to be fussed over”

You know that the mustachioed hipster in this shot isn’t drinking a Bud, because

a. It’s not yellow, and
b. He wants to smell it, and that would be pointless with a Bud.

I find myself wondering about the casting for this ad. “Wanted: People willing to visually resemble the segment of society we don’t understand and don’t want as customers. For pay!”

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“This is the only beer Beechwood Aged”

“Alright guys, hear me out. So, what if right after we say it’s not to be fussed over, we IMMEDIATELY trumpet the fact that it’s beechwood aged, something that roughly 1% of our target demographic understands? It’ll be great, and not sound fussy at all.”

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“It’s brewed for drinking, not dissecting”

“Please, if at all possible, try not to taste our beer. If you’re able to disable your gag reflex and just pour it straight down your gullet and into your stomach in one fell swoop while bypassing the taste buds altogether, that would be ideal.”

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“The people who drink our beer are people who like to drink beer brewed the hard way.”

The average Budweiser drinker clearly appreciates beer made “the hard way.” The hard way, as it turns out, is being bought out by a Belgian brewing conglomerate, gutting American jobs and leveraging the full lobbying and marketing power of an international business goliath. “The hard way” is definitely not starting a small business that brews experimental beer to compete with those giants. There’s nothing hard about the latter. Craft beer is easy, didn’t you know that? Maybe that’s why craft beer’s sales numbers continue to surge every year, because it’s just so easy.

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Let them sip their pumpkin peach ale, we’ll be brewing us some golden suds.”

Only losers drink pumpkin peach ale. Everyone knows this. Except, wait, what’s that? Elysian Brewing, the Seattle brewery that Anheuser just purchased last week, makes a … yes … pumpkin peach ale. It’s called “Gourdia on My Mind .” Anheuser is literally mocking the consumers of the COMPANIES THEY NOW OWN. Honestly, how devastating is that for the Elysian brewing team? Your owners think your customers are pretentious hipsters. These are the people who own your business. I’m sure you’ll be surprised to learn that Twitter handles of employees like @ElysianMatt have already been deleted after they informed the public that employees weren’t even informed of the acquisition before it was announced online.

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What’s more, they won’t even own up to their own attack. Already, there have been pieces published with company executives explaining that this is definitely not an attack on craft beer. As Brian Perkins, VP of Marketing for Budweiser states in that piece, this ad isn’t intended to skewer craft beer at all, despite the obvious, stereotyped characters of mustachioed hipsters sniffing flights of craft beer. Instead, he says AB “acquires and sells craft beer. We love craft beer. This is an affirmation of what Budweiser is, not an attack on what it isn’t.” Note that in another piece, he refers to the earlier-mentioned “pumpkin peach” beer as “a fabricated, ludicrous flavor combination,” apparently blissfully unaware that his company was in the process of buying a brewery that made EXACTLY THAT PRODUCT. We’re at Irony Defcon 1, people.

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