As they say....Breaking News....

It's better for Budweiser that they were bought out... now you'll be able to drink a Bud everywhere!!!
Americans never need feel lost when traveling out in the world, they will always be able to partake of their culture and brands weather in Paris of Bangkok.

Which is why we need universal Culture Police. If an American is caught ordering a Bud overseas then they need to surrender their passport on the spot.

We were in Inverness, Scotland last year and my precious boy (10 at the time) noticed a line going into McDonalds. "Why would people eat that when they could have black pudding?" . Good question, I said. Let's go get some black pud!

I can only hope that your prophesy is correct. Don't forget Leinenkugel. Loves me some Leinie's.

Leinie's been in bed with Miller for years, and Miller is partnered with SAB (i.e., South African breweries).

Perhaps they still have American ownership in some remote fashion.

I posted the following on my MySpace blog today. Some of you won't like it, and I couldn't figure out a way to insert "fungible" although I was going to try and rhyme it with "bungee cord."

---

In the beer world, today's big news is that InBev agrees to buy Anheuser for $50 billion.

Big deal?

Not at all.

Not one bit of it has the remotest thing to do with beer, as opposed to shares of stock and the sort of big business news that makes fetishists giddy. Sorry, but I'll take my kinkiness in bed – where it matters.

The useful thing all this has accomplished is to expose so many Americans as hypocrites. Already they clamor about foreign-this and foreign-that, yet dutifully troop off to Wal-Mart to buy Chinese plastic at every opportunity. Now, with the "American icon" Budweiser falling into the hostile hands of a Belgo-Brazilian consortium, there's a predictable din, and yet none of them gave a damn when A-B bought into Chinese and Mexican breweries, and tried to buy Budvar in the Czech Republic.

What about their national icons?

I'm doing my best to suppress a yawn as big as distance between Budweiser and anything truly worth drinking, and remind readers that all these good ol' boy Americans never minded at all that A-B has always been just the same type of rotten-to-the-corporate entity that they'd slam their Bud Lights on the bar top to abuse as they were being downsized and sold to the highest bidder.

Nor did they care during A-B's march to the top, when its carnivorous tactics chewed up and spit out countless small, local competitors – locals just like the Confederate-flag, waving, tobacco-chewing, gun-toting Bud drinkers, who've never grasped the irony and probably never will.

That's why I gleefully point out: Very soon none of the "big three" – Coors, Miller or A-B – will be independent and American owned.

The perfect time to switch to locally-brewed beer, don't you think?

As my friend Brandon has noted, it's the patriotic thing to do.

[My intent was not to be a fear mongerer. Just open up your history books. No superpower has ever lasted. They all fall and will continue to do so.

It's unfortunate that so much of American identity is tied up with being a superpower. All that chest thumping just can't be healthy. My preference is to be a citizen of the universe, to paraphrase Edwin Moses at the '84 Olympics.

My intent was not to be a fear mongerer. Just open up your history books. No superpower has ever lasted. They all fall and will continue to do so.

All that chest thumping just can't be healthy.

Correct, as all superpowers before us have found out.

And I for one, welcome our new insect, uh, (megacorp) overlords.-- Mayor Quimby
http://www.buynlarge.com/

How very Brazil...

[Robin Garr]

Dude, you mean I can get a Bud at Pizza Hut in Amsterdam, Paris, or Praha now? Sweet!

Nothing new here. It really bummed me out to see the familar US red-and-white Budweiser signs all over the place in England and Ireland back in the '80s.

In fairness, Bud isn't that much worse than the mass market light lagers in Europe. I've heard (it could be a myth) that Stella and Jupiler are the exact same beer with just different brands. Not that anyone could tell anyway.

Globalization here is. We can complain about it all we want, but it is not going away. What we have to do is figure out how to adapt.

All superpowers fall and so will the United States of America. It saddens me as I type this, but history is undeniable.

Well, I wasn't referring to whether or not the corporations sell out. That won't make America decline, has little to do with that awful product AB makes. Our decline is complacency and lack of foresight or just plain ignoring the warning signs.

Nothing new here. It really bummed me out to see the familar US red-and-white Budweiser signs all over the place in England and Ireland back in the '80s.

We need to export something. Even if it is Bud, it is better than nothing. Must be that the British and Irish like Bud. Nobody is forcing anyone to drink it.

I can only hope that your prophesy is correct. Don't forget Leinenkugel. Loves me some Leinie's.

Didn't Leinie's get bought out by one of the megas a few years ago? Good ol' Chippewa Falls!!!
Here's the story, straight from their website. It is still good beer, IMHO. I am especially fond of their seasonal brews.
http://www.leinie.com/5th_gen_history.html

I am truly (and pleasantly) surprised about Lienie's. I drank this beer back in the '70s, not because it was an outstanding brew, but because it was okay and cheap. A couple of weeks ago I was in our local market here in Maine looking for a six-pack to take to the neighbor's house for the 4th. What should my eyes behold but good old Lienie's in an upmarket presentation, and at an upmarket price. It's amazing what good marketing can accomplish for a brand.

Speaking of companies that have sold out to foreign interests, Poland Spring, our local brand of bottled water, is owned by Nestle, a Swiss conglomerate that also owns San Pellegrino and Perrier. There's currently a big to-do in the south end of our state over their desire to buy water from a small town here for bottling and sale. It seems that some folks are finally coming to see drinking water as a valuable commodity that should be protected and not sold off.

My intent was not to be a fear mongerer. Just open up your history books. No superpower has ever lasted. They all fall and will continue to do so.

All that chest thumping just can't be healthy.

Correct, as all superpowers before us have found out.

I think Douglas MacArthur said it best :

"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear — kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor — with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it."

The US is a few hundred years old. Most of the countries of the world are many thousand. I think we'll be fine for the near term of history... say, the next 500 to 1000 years or so. What you call decline is more like puberty.

You need to go back and re-read your history books. You are wildly misinterpreting or misunderstanding events of the past.

Now, back to much more important topics... like beer.