This Bud’s for them

UPDATE: Check out this clever, Northwest-centric response from Hopstories.com.

Another Super Bowl is history, and folks are still buzzing about that controversial call.

No, not the Seahawks’ second-down pass play. We’re talking about Budweiser’s third-quarter commercial that essentially trashes craft beer (see it here, if you haven’t already), at the same time Anheuser-Busch is buying up craft breweries around the country.

Curiously titled “Brewed the Hard Way” (you know, in those huge plants with all the automated equipment), it includes such lines as “It’s brewed for drinking, not dissecting” and “Let them sip their pumpkin peach ale,” accompanied by stereotypical images of hipster beer geeks.

As craft fans nationwide took to the Web to howl in outrage, A-B began insisting that the ad wasn’t really a hatchet job.

“We love craft beer,” Brian Perkins, Budweiser’s vice president for marketing, told Examiner.com. “This is an affirmation of what Budweiser is, not an attack on what it isn't.”

To Advertising Age, he added: "The only other beer that we reference in the spot is a fabricated, ludicrous flavor combination of pumpkin peach ale."

Thing is, there really was a pecan peach pumpkin amber ale, Gourdgia On My Mind, made last year by Elysian – the Seattle brewery that Budweiser bought last month. That beer’s Untappd page was blowing up today with people posting phony check-ins just so they could trash A-B.

Elysian co-owner Dick Cantwell (who was outvoted by his partners on the sale) told the Chicago Tribune: "I find it kind of incredible that ABI would be so tone-deaf as to pretty directly (even if unwittingly) call out one of the breweries they have recently acquired, even as that brewery is dealing with the anger of the beer community in reaction to the sale. It doesn't make our job any easier, and it certainly doesn't make me feel any better about a deal I didn't even want to happen. It's made a difficult situation even more painful."

Then again, Budweiser’s ad wasn’t aimed at craft drinkers in the first place. Rather, it’s an attempt to bolster its image among the macrobrew crowd (both current, and those coming of age) and shore up its shrinking market share.

And if customers keep defecting to craft, well, that’s why A-B has invested in such breweries as Redhook, Widmer, Goose Island, 10 Barrel and now Elysian.

Are they talking out of both sides of their mouth? Of course. Is that good business? We’ll see.