Craft Brewers Get Snarky At Phenomenally Dumb Budweiser Super Bowl Ad

After Budweiser’s “HUR HUR, ONLY SISSIES LIKE CRAFT BEER” ad from the Super Bowl, it should be no surprise that craft brewers are snarking at them pretty hard.

First, let’s all watch this piece of shit ad to remind ourselves of what rampant stupidity looks like in montage form:

For those too lazy to click: yadda yadda real Americans, yadda yadda mustache hipster, yadda yadda PUMPKIN PEACH! AIN’T THAT WEIRD?, etc.

It didn’t take long for multiple breweries to respond, as the Washington Post reports. Abita Brewing in Louisiana basically said “fuck you” straight up with a counter-ad that proclaimed, in part, “yeah, we released a pumpkin peach beer, and it was good. Damn good.” Northern Brewer, a homebrew supplier, immediately released a homebrew kit for pumpkin peach beer called “Peach of Resistance.” The most on-point was probably Ninkasi Brewing in Oregon, which released a parody ad asking “if you aren’t drinking a beer for taste, what are you drinking it for?”

Hell, even Miller is poking Budweiser in the eye over this commercial, which is pretty fucking rich coming from the company that produces Miller High Life, aka The Closest Thing to Anti-Prozac Humanity Has Yet Concocted:

I’m not even a craft beer guy (I’ll drink pretty much whatever you put in front of me, with the obvious exception of complete crap like Budweiser, Miller, and Coors) and even I find Budweiser’s commercial obnoxious. Christ, Budweiser, couldn’t you at least say what you mean? Your beer’s not for liberals, it’s for “real Americans.” That’s the subtext. We fucking get it. We got your dog whistle, assholes.

The core of the Budweiser ad is thus the unspoken implication that yer not a real man’s man with a pickup and a dashboard Jesus and a gun rack if you drink anything other than what essentially amounts to carbonated sheep’s urine with an almost-negligible alcohol content. It was a pretty blatant paean to the sort of caveman-browed fuck-knuckles who were apparently the only ones who voted in the 2014 midterm elections. Come on, it implies, you’re not like one a’ them sissy Portland mustache vegans, are ya? Yew don’t want to be like them there Socialists.* It’s honestly a little surprising to me that the commercial didn’t come straight out and say, “hey, I bet OBUMMER likes craft beers.”

The really laughable part of this commercial, though, is something else entirely: it relies on the pretense that taste is irrelevant. There’s a direct and hilarious implication that Budweiser’s craft beer competitors taste better than Budweiser! They’re not even pretending any more! But Bud wants viewers to think taste isn’t the important thing; the important thing is not to be associated with those durned commies. So what if you’re drinking Mardi Gras gutter runoff? It’s ‘MURICAN Mardi Gras gutter runoff! Except it isn’t, since Budweiser is owned by InBev, which is based in Brazil (compared to craft breweries, which by necessity are generally based in America).

OK, to be fair, they do make a couple claims regarding taste, such as when they claim Budweiser has a “smooth finish.” Sure, it has a smooth finish, in that it tastes like the grim loss of innocence all the way through from the first taste to the last. I mean, it sucks to be that kid from the Nationwide ad and not get to experience all the things grown-ups do, but silver lining: at least he’ll never get stuck at a college party where all they have is Bud Lite and Natty Bowe. If I had to pick between that and an untimely death right now, I’d at least need a while to mull it over.

The truly sad thing about that commercial, though? It probably worked. Even given that anyone with more brain cells than teeth know it’s a piece of shit ad, it probably still encouraged idiots to run out and buy Budweiser. I’ll bet their sales are up right now. God, fuck everything, I need a drink.

* A term which apparently half the country defines as “someone who said a thing I don’t like about not beatin’ up queers no more.”