The Chris Moeller Archives

This is beer

There are four topics capable of whipping me into a patriotic frenzy. They are baseball, America's rich heritage of both music and film, and lastly, beer. The latter is the topic of headlines this morning after Dutch soccer fans at the World Cup in Berlin "dropped trou" to achieve entry into the Netherlands/Ivory Coast match. The fans were originally denied entry after attempting to "ambush" Anheuser-Busch's exclusive beer sponsorship of the Cup by wearing bright orange pants with the logo of a Dutch brewing company.

First a journalistic disclaimer: I have a small financial stake in Anheuser-Busch, and have since I was 15 years old, but am not receiving compensation to shill for them today. The company's 53-year partnership with the St. Louis Cardinals, including 42 years of direct ownership encompassing six pennants and three World Championships, cemented a lifetime of loyalty on my part towards them and their products. Founded in the heartland by German-Americans like me, A-B brews have taken their grains from American farmfields and their water from the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. A neon "Bud" sign in a blues club in the Delta is as American as Grandmama's cobbler.

My German immigrant predecessors made the light golden lager of a longer fermentation time an American original, and in the days before refrigeration, the natural caverns of the Mississippi River Valley helped to keep the product cool during that process. All the way back to Mark Twain, the lager's success was documented. Samuel Clemons found dissenters only among the Irish laborers along the river. "They don't drink it, sir," a man told Twain, "They can't drink it, sir. Give an Irishman a lager for a month, and he's a dead man. An Irishman is lined with copper, and the beer corrodes it. But whiskey polishes the copper and is the saving of him, sir."

Superstitions perhaps aside, knee-jerk U.S. bloggers like Steve Gilliard still have their noses so far up the Europeans' asses and so little esteem for their own unique heritage that they can't see the barley for the barley fields. As it's capable of existing, A-B is nearly the ideal U.S. corporation. They brew an affordable product for working people. They employ union laborers. They not only keep their jobs within our borders for products to be shipped and sold throughout the Americas, but they've been loyal to their specific community of origin, St. Louis, by maintaining the original brewery operation there, despite their claims that it is less productive than their other breweries throughout the south where the U.S. population has been gradually migrating over time.

They gratefully employ one of America's most liberal political commentators, George Clooney, as the official voice of their signature product, Budweiser. Unlike the one-time "Miller Brewing Company" of Milwaukee, they are still American-owned, and unlike "Coors" of Golden, Colorado, they have not committed to generations of union-busting, funding illegal and covert arms deals, or perpetuating the ancient bigotries of their founder against Hispanics, gays, and lesbians. In fact, A-B happily markets their products specifically to those and other marginalized groups, proving to all American companies along the way that you can work with principles and still dominate market share (49 percent.)

Make no mistake, this European and partly American backlash against Budweiser is an attack against you and your principles-- a manifestation of their low self-esteem, really. The FIFA World Cup sold an exclusive beer partnership, and 15 global companies bid for it. Some Americans would probably prefer that a foreign country's company have secured that sponsorship, one that doesn't employ American workers. Perhaps one from a former Soviet-bloc country where breweries were shuttered for generations, everyone forced to drink vodka, and beers only recently returned to markets. Perhaps they would have preferred the any one of a number of western European breweries that still believes beer should be served in warm glasses, among them, Ireland, where the signature dark ales polish their copper stomach linings, but the pubs still close at 10.

Anti-American soccer fans know that their grip is precarious on this one final sport not yet under U.S. dominance, and that's why the Big Eagle's presence, that of an American business and sporting classic, and brewer of the best-selling beer in the world cuts them to the quick. Bizarre reactions and demonstrations should make Americans swell with pride over having such a noble and ethical representative on the global stage. It's good to be The King.

posted by CM @ 10:39 AM