i highly doubt it ... btw, you forgot moderately

what does your conscience say about it ?

It's not a burning issue for me.

Hey, FS, have you seen this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lsd7DGqVSIc&sns=fb

i hope that is what you shared with me on fb... absolutely LOVED it...and had never heard of it...

It is, and neither had I until another FB friend posted it. Such great commercials for such a lousy beer..........

that was actually going to be my comment... t'was a crying shame the beer had to be of the bud variety

I am convinced that a beer is not without honor, save in its own country. Mexicans feel the same way about Corona that we do about Bud---blech!

really..had no idea..learn something new every day....i can't talk...my favorite beer back in the day...the kind that i took to my poker games was molson golden

The trouble with Bud is not so much that it is disgusting, although it is. The trouble with it is that Anheuser Busch and the other two big breweries together eradicated most of the decent beer made by small, local brewers in this country, and now they use their influence to keep the start-up companies out of the stores.

My DH says those types of beer (Bud and Busch) are basically carbonated water....all fizz.

We support microbreweries as much as possible. There's a good local one now started by a small group of friends.

SV

Oh and as I understand it Sam Adams has a fund where they give 'seed money' to start up small group breweries.


SV

Wow, talk about an epic fail, even in a small, rural grocery store I can easily find more than 200 brands of beer....more if I go to the liquor store in the same town....

There might be 20 here...if that many.

SV

The little documentary Beer Wars shows a bit of the backstory here.

One thing to bear in mind is that lots of the apparent microbrews you're finding in stores are actually owned by AB. They see the writing on the wall as far as the significant market movement towards drinking real beer, so in cases where they can't keep competitors off the displays, they will do their best to buy them out, while taking care not to make it obvious on the packaging that the "microbrew" you think you're buying actually belongs to AB.

At any rate, to some extent the die is cast here. People want real beer, and AB is going to surrender market share to local brewers. Stores that have a clientele that wants real beer, will put it on the shelves even if AB punishes them for it. You can find smaller breweries on the shelves at my local stores, too, if you're looking for them. Yuengling has made a strong move recently around here, for example. But they get a two foot wide space in a cooler that stretches for probably thirty yards. Guess who gets almost all of those thirty yards? AB, Coors, and Miller. And not by accident.

There's one microbrewery beer on the local grocery store shelf here and it's the local one (from an hour away). If you go to the local liquor store you go up to about 5 true mircobreweries..and I include Sam Adams in that since they are still as far as I know not owned by AB.

To get into any real number of them you'd have to drive over an hour and even then it's not a huge number of true microbreweries.


SV

Well, the city I am talking about IS a college town, so obviously there is more alcohol than in the usual small town...

But the real reason why people go to the 'big breweries' is price, you can buy 3 times as much Miller Lite for the same amount of money as a microbrew or imported beer.....since beer drinkers are disproportionately poor, and since the main reaon 90% of people drink beer is to get drunk and they don't really care about the taste...they naturally gravitate towards the cheaper options.


Do you have any idea how many people have told me that they know Miller Lite or Milwaukee's Best or Pabst Blue Ribbon isn't very good but they don't care because they aren't connessiours and they only want to get drunk? Easily in the low hundreds.

Cheap beers are bought by people who want to get drunk, expensive beers are bought by connessiours. Guess which group makes up 90% of the market for beer?

So, the reason why people are not buying more expensive beers is not because those beers aren't being given adequate shelf space, if a person who wants to get drunk sees a $10 beer and a $5 beer, he will always go for the $5 beer.

Lots of people who don't want to get drunk still drink bad beer, simply because they don't know any different. They've always drank Bud. It's their brand. They wouldn't buy anything else. Even though there's no mortal reason for preferring Bud over, say, Miller, they'll pass on Miller even when it's for sale for much cheaper than the Bud. You know what? I like that. I like people having a kind of loyalty to "their" stuff. The trouble is that Budweiser isn't actually anyone's. It's not some great local brewery that you can get behind. It's this huge, inhuman monster. This situation where the average beer drinker--not the well-off beer aesthete, but the average guy--drinks stuff only from one of the big 3 brewers, that's not normal.

Now, for a Pennsylvania native to have a kind of pre-rational commitment to drinking Yeungling, that's normal: it's his beer, made in his state and owned by people who still live there. But Budweiser killed most of those local breweries, and substituted themselves for these natural, local ties.

I'd say the norm for beer drinking is this kind of thing: the average guy who has a couple of beers after work, and just buys what he's always bought. 100 years ago, he'd have bought something made in his town. Now, he buys something made by one of the big 3. It never occurs to him that he even could be drinking a local beer, made by his friends and family, in his community.

"Support your local brewery!" as the bumper stickers around here say. And there are several here.

If you ever see 'Mothers' be sure to try it! They make seasonal beers, DH says they are really good.


SV