It’s a funny thing, this idea that all craft beer drinkers are fussy. Have you seen Budweiser’s Super Bowl ad? The implications are strong. The words, “NO FUSS” fill up the screen in big white letters, over the image of a mustachioed hipster sniffing a tulip of dark beer.
Look, some craft beer drinkers are extremely fussy, but in my experience these are fussy people by nature: they’re fussy about music, about the weather, about life in general.
I’d say the definite majority of people filling up Brassneck’s tasting room on a Saturday night are there for a good time and not to dissect what it is exactly they’re drinking.
And yet, the words “NOT DISSECTING” flash across the Budweiser commercial, over top of three nerdy white males squabbling over flights of beer.
Have you seen the commercial? If not, here’s the full text:
“Proudly a macro beer. It’s not brewed to be fussed over. It’s brewed for a crisp, smooth finish. This is the only beer beechwood aged since 1876. There’s only one Budweiser. It’s brewed for drinking. Not dissecting. The people who drink our beer are people who like drinking beer. To drink beer brewed the hard way. Let them sip their pumpkin peach ale. We’ll be brewing us some golden suds. This is the famous Budweiser beer. This bud’s for you.”
Never mind that this ad reeks of the sort of elitism that it’s trying to make fun of in craft beer. It’s very clear – with the music, the “humour” and the young, pretty faces – that this ad was designed to target a younger, hipper audience that needs encouragement to come back to the familiar embrace of Bud. Instead, it stinks of desperation.
But it’s a failed ad for three reasons. First, the music is indefensible. Second, it paints macro beer drinkers in a negative – that macro beer drinkers are people who aren’t craft beer drinkers. As Canadians, we should understand the limits of identifying as not being something else.
Finally, and far more important, the ad attempts “to pitch mass market as its niche,” as the Atlantic writes. It’s a faulty idea because Budweiser’s far too big to facilitate any of the community benefits that niches inherently provide. Budweiser’s marketing team, just like Anheuser-Busch’s team behind the Shock Top campaign, fails to grasp what makes craft beer so appealing to begin with. It’s what those three white male nerds are sharing: a sense of belonging. You know how hard it is to find that these days?
Look: I got in to craft beer back in 2012. I’d just moved back to Vancouver, to the Hastings-Sunrise neighbourhood, and heard that this new brewery had opened up nearby.
I’d tried Parallel 49’s beers a few times before and liked what they were doing. The tasting room was another thing entirely. The zany cartoon figures as tap handles. The staff drinking and cracking jokes at, like, 4pm. These were young people, people my age, running the show. It was like a group of monkeys had taken over the zoo. I found this immensely appealing.
The following year, Brassneck opened and that was it. Vancouver was now a beer town. But for me, it was never about the beer itself. That has always been secondary.
It was always about place. About community and my identity within it. It was about standing in the growler fill line, among other people who generally seemed to like the same things as me.
It was – and still is – about the ritual of filling the growler. About choosing. About chatting with the stranger behind the counter, making small talk about the new brews on tap. I felt connected to my city in a way I’d never felt growing up in and around Vancouver.
I’m aware I’m a bit hung up on this “my-identity-within-the-beer-scene” trip, but it’s fascinating how little effort local craft breweries have to work to facilitate this sense of community and belonging for their customers. There’s nothing fussy about it. They just have to be there and make, at the very least, passable beer.
And it’s funny how hard Budweiser has to work – and how much money they need to spend – just to maintain the what it hasn’t already lost.
