Taps for an American Icon

I'm late to the wake on this item, but exactly how much does it suck that Anheuser-Busch is being bought out by InBev?

Or to restate the question in more than appropriate terms, how much Budweiser will I have to drink until I no longer care that the King of Beers is now a chap named Albert II?

I suspect the answer is infinity-plus-one. Not that I'll be drinking any more Bud for a while. I feel too betrayed.

"Betrayal" may be too strong a word and an emotion. After all, it's just business. And $52 billion would be tough to turn down.

Logic has no place in this discussion, though. Just ask the St. Louisan quoted at the beginning of the linked article who remarked, "“We were betrayed. The good Lord was sold out for 30 pieces of silver. We were sold out for $70 a share.”

A-B was the quintessence of an American success story, from its origins as a corner tavern peddling a recipe and label stolen from some Czechs to it's frog-themed television ads.

In between those cultural touchstones, the Busch family did everything a family business was supposed to do to become successful. They hired the world's best brewers -- veritable magicians who were able to produce an identical-tasting product whether they were working in Williamsburg, Virginia, of Jakarta, Indonesia. They perfected systems of refrigerated distribution for a product that hadn't travelled well for millennia. They made a product that became such an icon that when people around the world think about what kind of alcohol Americans drink, those people think about Budweiser. Just like someone would think about Guinness and the Irish, of Scotch and the Scots, or kumis and the Turkmen and Kazhaks.

It's worth noting for the sake of this post, of course, that Guinness is now wholly owned by the British company Diageo. Pernod owns The Glenlivet. Nobody owns any kumis distilleries because ... well because kumis is fermented horse milk.

Knowing that the sale of A-B and its signature brand were probably inevitable provides no comfort. Misery hates company (and presumably kumis).

What rankles more than just about anything with the A-B sale is that the company's board was dead set against an InBev takeover when the offer was $46 billion. Everyone has a price, but is there that much of a difference between 46 and 52? It's like the difference between just leaving the money on the nightstand and actually walking down to the front desk to call the lady a cab. A nice gesture, but the transaction remains what it was.

What rankles most about the A-B sale is that it leaves avid beer consumers with few everyday options for expressing our displeasure by keeping our money out of the pockets of the executives of the conglomerate soon to be known as Anheuser-Busch Inbev (just rolls off the tongue, don't it?). The list of brands brewed and/or distributed by the merging companies runs to more than 150. Here are a just few: Bacardi malt beverages, Bohemia, the Bud family, the Busch family, Grolsch, King Cobra, Michelob, Bass, Beck's, Boddington's, Hoegarten, Jupiler, Kirin, Lowenbrau, Red Hook, Quilmes, Rolling Rock, Stella Artois, Tiger, and Widmer.

Switch to Miller or Coors? Not a chance. See, those companies just merged their own selves, taking South African megabrewer SAB in tow.

It's enough to make a man build his own still in his back yard. He'd have to figure it would only be a matter of months before SABMillerCoors Anheuser-Busch InBev Diageo Pernod came around talking buyout. Neil Young got it a long time ago. Clapton, not so much.

P.S. I know this rant is all over the place. It is a rant. Still, I got to this point, and I was going to go back and bring some coherence to the proceedings. Before I could start wiping the flecks of spittle from my laptop screen, though, this song started playing on my Internet radio station. I started laughing and didn't have the blackened heart necessary to screed it up any longer. Maybe tomorrow, I'll just chuck it all and go down to the YWCA and inquire after a position as a back-scrubber.