The Three Most Annoying Things About That Budweiser Superbowl Ad

By Melissa McEwen in Food on Feb 3, 2015 7:00PM

No, not the cute/sad puppy one. The one that tried to make all craft beer lovers look like caricatures out of Portlandia. If they wanted to irk beer nerds, they did a great job.

Where to even start?

1. "Let them sip their pumpkin peach ale."
As All About Beer Magazine pointed out, this is hilarious for its hypocrisy, considering Anheuser-Busch has a pumpkin-peach beer in their portfolio— Gourdgia on My Mind Pecan Peach Pumpkin Amber by Elysian Brewing. Elysian Co-founder Dick Cantwell told the 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." But overall the craft beer community tends to not be a huge fan of pumpkin beers anyway. There are great pumpkin beers out there, but many are sadly cinnamon flavored mediocrity that plays on pumpkin pie nostalgia.

2. "Brewed the hard way"
What's the hardest way to brew? Where do you even start with that? Every type of brewing from macro to nano scale has its own challenges. I don't think anyone would ever call any type of brewing easy. Nano breweries operate on tiny budgets with little room for error and tough hurdles in the distribution and regulation areas of business. Large macrobreweries have the advantage of scale and mechanization, but managing these is no walk in the park either. There's hard work to be done either way, but it doesn't always have a relationship with how the beer tastes.

3. Be a faceless unthinking consumer
It's interesting because it would be easy to focus on the fact that the "craft" beer people in this ad are all men, and most of them have glasses. Or the fact that somehow we are supposed to believe that them thinking about their beer is bad for unspecified but implied reasons. But it's really kind of interesting that these stereotyped men are the only humans—besides the women serving beer—that the camera focuses on at all that have memorable faces. The Bud-drinking men are unthinking faceless automatons focused only on consuming their product. It underlines that one of the main threats to macro beer is that craft beer has personality. It has individuals behind it that people know. The ad tries to make this a bad thing, but I think it's a strategy that won't win.

At least Budweiser have horses, which are pretty cool.