Budweiser Beer .... R.I. P.

Excuse me while I wipe the remains of that huge crocodile tear I shed off my keyboard....

... OK. .. Budweiser has been bought up by InBev, a Belgian company. Ha. Belgium, for you geographically challenged Americans is just a bit to the north of France. You can tell when you get there from France because the people speak better French.

I suppose I should be sorry to lose such an American icon, but I just can't. During its career Bud and its masters crushed dozens of regional breweries on its march to the seas. As Edward McClelland puts it in his Salon.com article,

Imagine the Budweiser Clydesdale team on a cross-country rampage, with a decrepit, tipsy August A. Busch Jr. strapped to the lead horse, wearing a bright red St. Louis Cardinals cowboy hat. Starting on the West Coast, platter-hoofed horses trample a can of Blitz-Weinhard, spewing suds all over the streets of Portland, Ore. Moving south to San Francisco, they stamp on bottles of Lucky Lager. In their hometown of St. Louis, they crash through the wall of a Griesedieck* Bros. brewery, rolling hundreds of barrels into the Mississippi. They're seen next in Cincinnati, kicking a Hudepohl taster to death. The Clydesdales' tour of destruction ends in Brooklyn, N.Y., where Busch orders them to urinate in a vat of Piels, cackling that no one will be able to tell the difference.

Alright - so it's a bit much, but he makes a good point. And tells quite a bit about the history of beer in America.

As for me, I've never gotten over moving away from St Paul: no more Pigs Eye Beer for me. Well, we'll always have Busch Gardens.

*btw, does anyone else remember the Poppa Joe Griesedieck (pronounced just the way to produce maximum giggles) radio commercials? Or the National Bohemian fox singing 'brewed on the shores ... of the Chesapeake Bay!


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