I died when Miller bought Lienenkuegel and I've neither bought nor drank any A-B products in over 30 years and likely never will. Yawn.

I like ales, I like lager...

And I like Budweiser. So sue me.

I'm not accusing anyone of snobbery; that's snobbery in its own right. But there's a reason why A-B built a dominant market share, and its not just advertising. When you open a mass domestic you can expect consistency. This is absolutely untrue for microbrews.

+++++++++++++++++

I agree completely.

And I will add that the posters here are not "snobs", they are contrarians. If Sierra Nevada was as big as A-B, you would slam it.

Keep A-B profits in America!

You like beer. You like Obama. You like America. This was your finest day. Thanks for keeping it all straight.

...aquired Labatts in 1995 without provoking a significant outcry. And if you can't get Canadians to make a fuss over who owns our beer, I doubt the average American will either.

And I'm sorry to report that having a Belgian company buy Labatt's didn't improve the product. It still tastes like knat's piss.

I don't care that the companies are local, it is brand fetishism run amok. My beer needs neither a scrappy backstory nor essence of dragonfruit. Not that I'm about to defend the powerhouse stalwart of American rice beer, you can sell it to the moon for all I drink of Bud. So, where oh where does the best beer come from?

Mexico! Tecate. Dos Equis. Sol. Negro Modelo. THOSE are real beers. As you can plainly see, rather than selling Anheuser-Busch to some Brazilian equivalent, we should just allow it to be taken over by a horde of undocumented workers. Then everything will get better.

I'll join you on the elitist side of the fence. I haven't had a Bud since I knew better. I had a difficult time keeping a straight face during the quote.

Kirin and Tsingtao were brewed first by Germans recreating pilsner, which suggests that they were hardly copying Budweiser. Fosters was indeed started by a couple of Americans, but it's a bit player on the Australian domestic scene - it is primarily an export beer / brand.

My father's step-father was a managing director at Tennants before it was bought out in the brewery amalgamations in the UK, and was quite open about the fact that when they decided to brew a lager, they copied Becks. I can't say that I care for either, though as a child in the 70s I did like the pin-up model cans that Tennants used. I'm as baffled by people who drink it here as I am by people who drink Budweiser in the UK, but that's a separate issue.

I lived in St. Louis for 15 years.

AB is an excellent corporate citizen in a city of many good corporate citizens.

AB's brew masters are fully capable of making excellent beer. AB has excellent quality control (e.g. they retreat the city water before using it) But a corporation as large as AB cannot turn a profit selling craft beer - so instead they sell profitable crap beer - lots and lots of it.

Augie Busch III (Grandfather of the current patron) was the marketing genius who figured out that the way to sell lots of beer was to sell it to alcoholics. (!) So after WWII AB focused on marketing beer to the 10% of beer drinkers who drink 90% of the beer. People in St. Louis still get rankled when you call Auggie the biggest drug dealer this country has ever seen - though he is.

Selling beer to alcoholics made AB very rich and let them buy up other breweries which all started brewing beer like AB so that it all started tasting like Bud after a while. The backlash to this homogenization of course became the great beer revival of the 1980's which we are still enjoying today.

So, St. Louis will suffer if AB does not remain a local company but no one outside of the area will notice any difference in the products.

that's all.

As we speak, I've got cans of Bud next to some bottles of homebrew in my fridge. I like the Bud for when i'm working out in the yard on hot days. My financial situation prevents me from being too much of a beer snob anyway.

As for A-B, what they're doing to St. Louis sucks, but anytime a company goes public, it opens itself up to these possibilities. It's a mistake for communities to depend too much on publicly-held companies for anything. Any allegiance the companies might have to their local community is easily swept away by the promise of making more money.

Who do you think Soccermomerica will come after next? Beer, Wine and Spirits. So it's probably a good bet that it should be someone else's liability.

Whenever a Brit tries to tell me how nasty Budweiser is, I point out that Stella Artois, the best selling beer in the UK, is ten times the pisswater.

Though InBev's Hoegaarden isn't that bad on tap, and Beck's and Bass are certainly better than Budweiser.

Bud Light is my go-to beach beer- it's better than any other accessible light beer that comes in a can and I typically drink a case or so of beer during a day on the beach- and I've always preferred the way they do business in comparison to their nearest competitors. Really a shame to see them go under and take another blue collar American city with them.

And to defend by beer cred to a bunch of online strangers, note that I typically give away any Bud Light anyone leaves in my fridge. It's beach beer only...

Then we are of a similar mind about the effects, if not the products, of a company like Anheuser Busch being sold.

Again, I don't think it's a laughing matter for the people who are going to be sold down the river for the sake of a bump in the stock prices.

. . . for what it does. It brews a light, thin lager in multiple breweries on something like five continents with such consistency that most human beings simply could not detect any difference in the finished product. Consistency is the hallmark of good brewing, and A-B has it in spades.

That said, I'm not a fan of any of their products. Light lagers in general barely deserve to be called beer, and Bud Light is the worst of the bunch. And there's nothing wrong with Budweiser - its not terrible, its not great, its just boring. I drink about a six pack of Bud a year, right at the hottest point of the summer, when I'm more concerned with refreshment than taste. (A-B does own a stake in a couple of microbreweries, such as Redhook and Goose Island - but those beers weren't developed by A-B and so really aren't their products.)

I probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference between Bud, Miller and Coors in a blind taste test. But that isn't surprising at all, given that all three beers belong to the same style - American Standard Lager - and they're all brewed to be bland and inoffensive. More to the point, I'm damn sure that I could tell the difference between any A-B product and some of my favorite microbrews (Summit, Surly and August Schell come to mind).

I don't look down my nose at Bud drinkers, but I do feel sorry for those Bud drinkers who think Bud is all there is to beer. There's so much more out there, and anyone who says they can't taste the difference between Bud and an IPA or an ESB or a porter is kidding themselves.

As for the InBev deal, I say: why not? That's the way capitalism works, and A-B has done very well in the past by playing the same game.