It was actually from those little 7oz glasses they had back in the 50s. Real old school place. You could still smoke inside in the mid-late 2000s.
When I see a Budweiser can, the image I get is a couple guys with mullets and **** staches smoking cigarettes and working on a muscle car, while listening to Foghat or Ted Nugent and then going inside to watch a NASCAR race on a TV that needs a wrench to turn the channel.
best made beer in the world, not the best, just the best made in terms of to style consistency and quality over and over again rather have a banquet but i will have a bud now and again. aloha.
I was just thinking the same thing about Sam Adams Boston lager, the only place I see it on tap now is at the airport. I got the urge to have a SABL a week ago, and didn’t find it in two different stores. It’s hard for me to imagine a world without Bud or SA, but neither beer is the staple it used to be. Most everyone I see drinking a US AAL is drinking the light version. The last time I had a Bud Light, the sour apple flavor was overwhelming. It was cool, not cold, and right out of the can.
Consider the US market. Budweiser certainly is viable in some sense, but it's not as the reliable profit maker it was for years. A loss of 14M barrels is about 1 1/2 breweries. They're closing three, and that suggests they aren't counting on Bud rebounding here. In fact, other brands that have fallen this far never recovered. Lower volume makes national advertising more expensive per barrel, possibly double for the same coverage. Internationallly, ABInbev is probably doing OK, but their US performance has been pretty dreadful. .
If that's your criteria, then OK I'll agree. However, the ability to make a bland, insipid, flavorless glass of swill over and over again doesn't resonate with me. If that's genius, then I'll take the less artful, inspiration driven beers made by the craft brewer community every time. If they fail on occasion, so be it... at least most give their best effort in a financial world that has become increasingly precarious. The hell with Ab-Inbev and their cookie cutter AALs that provide nothing but tired, hackneyed, flavorless inefficient alcohol delivery systems of boredom and predictability. Aloha to you as well. Cheers!
Bud is definitely better the closer to iced cold it gets so it keeps your taste buds numb. Putting it on crushed ice as gross as that sounds could be better than drinking it when it warms too much.
I didn't think it was gross at all. It just made a bland, insipid, watery beer even more bland, insipid and watery. It just wasn't something I was accustomed to seeing. And I agree with you though about keeping it cold. Bad as it is cold, bud is flat out nasty once it warms up.
I don't agree with @PatKorn that "best made beer in the world" is a meaningful measure. Mitch Steele's recent (part 1) interview by ron pattinson gives an impressive discussion of AB quality measures of 20+ years ago. But he did allude to the restrictions on flavor profiles that kept their beers from being exciting. Since those days Inbev has been in charge. Has Inbev held to the same standards? Can anybody tell? I'll take a beer that tastes better (to me), and gladly accept some lower quality standards. Many AAL brewers did keep high quality standards in the 70s and later (Coors, Schaefer, Olympia). If their standards didn't reach the heights that AB did, was there a meaningful difference? The main issue for most small AB competitors was that, unlike AB, they couldn't impose stock rotation and other meaningful marketplace controls after the product left the loading dock.
When Labatt first brewed Budweiser for the Canadian market in the early 80s (I think that was the first big "Brewed under license" deal AB made with a brewer in another country), the notable local news was that it was brewed at the standard Canadian flagship alcohol content of 5% abv - at the time, Bud in the US was lower by 0.15% - not uncommon at the time. Coors "Banquet" was 4.5% according to the brewery's own promotional material.
