A posting I did here two weeks ago: Is Budweiser Going the Way of Wonderbread? and a column I wrote in the Oakland Tribune/Contra Costa Times and on the Aleuminati on “why do Americans still drink light lager and what can we do about it” drew a lot of response.

Among people calling, e-mailing me and posting was George Reisch, whose official title is “Brewmaster, Anheuser-Busch. I’m not sure if this means he’s the head brewmaster of all the many brewmasters at A-B, but I do know he’s the point person when it comes to craft-style beer at the company.

In truth, a lot of craft beer fans disparage A-B’s efforts, but I don’t. They don’t make a bad craft-style beer. I might find some of them way too bland for my taste, but bad beer? Nope.

OK, here’s what he wrote me:

William – As any good brewer, AB gives the customers what they want. They want Bud and Bud Light for a variety of reasons. First and foremost is refreshment. Secondly, both beers enhance the flavor of foods (humble servants of culinary taste).

Lastly, pour your Bud or Bud Light in a glass (right down the middle) and see how refreshing it tastes at serving temperature (38-40 degrees Fahrenheit) and then how great it tastes as the beer warms to 50 degrees F prior to the last sip. I like to say that any great beer needs to “start with refreshment” and “finish with great taste”. That is a winning combination.
Budweiser is by far the most difficult beer I have ever brewed. Bud provides the brewers no room for errors in taste and aroma. I know as I have brewed many styles over my 29 years with AB and also thru my home brewing.

George elaborated on what he meant in a cel phone conversation with me as he drove from Los Angeles to San Diego last week where was a judge (one of more than 100 judges) at the World Beer Cup.

It’s unfair, he said, to compare say Budweiser with a strong and rich craft beer. In food, one never compares, say a souffle to a rich chocolate dessert. We should compare beers within a style. “If you want to compare stouts, for instance. We make Bare Knuckle Stout You can compare our stout with other stouts. But why compare it with Budweiser?”

About serving temperatures, he says, it’s correct to serve Budweiser ice cold. “Ice cold, Budweiser is refreshment. “

I can’t argue with you George. Bud is indeed refreshing. It’s easy to drink several. It’s just too dry and the flavor’s too delicate, far too thin for my clumsy tastes. I like thick malt and savage hops _ the malts exquisite, silky and mouth-filling and hops taking the edge off the sweetness, providing a peppy counterpoint to all that malt.

No, I couldn’t down a sixer of a beer like that if my life depended on it. So I’m willing to pay a lot more for the experience.

But when it comes to sales, A-B has it down. They’ve got over 50 percent of the beer market. My hope is that someday, a larger percentage will be Bare Knuckle Stout or the new (coming this fall) Budweiser American Ale and less of it Bud and Bud Light.

In my What’s on Tap column today: Craft Beers challenging lager’s monopoly, I speculated about the end of rice beers, like Bud and blatantly said that maybe old Bud’s going to go the way of Wonder Bread.

Bud lovers disagree. Here’s the first comment of the day? What do you thiink? Let me know, sign up and post here or shoot me an e-mail at whatsontap@sbcglobal.net.

Yeah….I just came home….sit down in the backyard to relax and have a nice slice of Wonder Bread! Refreshing! I enjoy having craft beers but there is also a place for a beer like Bud….so your theory or wish that it will go the way of Wonder Bread is a bit far fetched……as long as the younger generation enjoys these beers and their prices….they are here to stay………All the Best, MD

P.S. Is your picture the one you use regularly or just when you want to look disgusted about light lager? Cheers!

Hey MD…..wanna make a bet on that? I think some sort of wheat beer, maybe a hefeweizen will be the Bud of the future…rice beer’s gonna die.

William...Not in our lifetime! Wheat is great but still to heavy to a lot of folks…MD

Well MD, time will tell.

My parents, who lived through the Great Depression and the end of the national prohibition on alcohol,were young and not really drinkers, so growing up in the 1950s, Prohibition was not a subject they ever mentioned. So about all I ever knew about it came from Elliot Ness and the movie and TV series.

But as the 75th anniversary of the end of the that horrendous experience, which gave us the Mafia, approaches, I’ve begun to realize that it was a deal and as the damn thing ended, people celebrated big time. Hard to realize, but the president of Anheuser-Busch August Busch Jr. made a national address on the CBS radio network as the first legal barrels of beer rolled out of the St. Louis brewery. Historians say 25,000 people turned out in St. Louis to celebrate the end of Prohibition. There’s a link to the speech in the post below this one.

This comes from the Brewers’ Association, the craft beer trade group, based in Boulder, CO.

Historians note that Prohibition officially ended on December 5, 1933, with the ratification of the 21st Amendment. But earlier that year, newly-elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt took steps to fulfill his campaign promise to end the national ban on alcohol. He spurred Congress to modify the Volstead Act to allow the sale of 3.2 percent beer in advance of the Twenty-first Amendment being ratified.

Thus, on April 7, 1933, Roosevelt himself received newly legalized beer at the White House to toast what was the beginning of the end for Prohibition. In the 24-hours that followed, more than 1.5 million gallons of beer flowed as Americans celebrated. http://www.75YearsofBeer.org

There are mini-celebrations at brewpubs and craft breweries around the country. Check with your local to find out what’s happening. No, I’m not going to do a roundup. No time. No time.

Want to know what beer must have tasted like when Prohibition ended? Check out Urban People’s Common Lager from Linden Street Brewing in Oakland. One place I know that always has it is the The Trappist Beer Cafe, 460 8th St. in downtown Oakland.

Also Linden Street proprietor/brewer Alex Lamoreaux has an open house with barbecue every Friday beginning at 4 p.m. The beer flows freely. Oakland’s newest brewery, what a perfect place to toast the end of Prohibition.

One Monday, April 7 event I know about will be at Rogue Ales Public House, 673 Union St. in North Beach San Francisco. The event, a Rogue publicist says, will feature casks of Younger’s Special Bitter, beers poured in mason jars, and prizes for best 1930s outfits.

In my next post, I’ll run through what Anheuser-Busch Budweiser Brand Director Tom Shipley, who has researched the issue, told me. Last note: That’s a Sam Adams barrel, once held bourbon, it’s part of the Utopias aging project.

Do you ever get off the craft beer train and talk about average swill — like beers for baseball, or Asian beers?

This question from someone I work with has bugged me for the last three days. Best word I can find to describe my condition is “flummoxed”. My first thought was, “Sure, and let’s get our wine columnist to write about the “best of Gallo and other ‘great’ jug wines.”

Why is it that the idea of a wine columnist writing about jug wines seems utterly absurd, while a beer columnist writing about crappy beer seem normal and appropriate.

Damn you Budweiser, Coors and Miller and all the rest of you corporate lager-sellers and your funny, sexy commercials. You’ve stolen the soul of beer.

After an initial burst of sarcasm and consternation, I got serious. If the beer we like is so good, then why are American beer drinkers still imbibing cheap lager?

This isn’t a rhetorical question. I’m asking all of you reading this to tell me what you think. Post a comment here or shoot me an email at whatsontap@sbcglobal.net.

For research, I turned to one of my kids, who is grown, teaches film at an Oregon university and has traveled the world and is very sophisticated.

Basic answer: Alcohol delivery vehicle in an unobjectionable format. He admitted to drinking 10 beers this past Saturday night out with his friends: 2 Japanese 22-ouncers (equals nearly 4 beers) plus, 6 or so Coronas. I guess when you’re fairly young, are 6-1 and weigh 240, 10 beers is nothing.

But, I persisted, why not drink something decent?

He thought about it for a minute. “I don’t like dark beer,” he said. “I really like Corona, because -” he thought for a minute - “it doesn’t leave a bad taste. It’s not bitter.”

Whew. What can you expect from someone raised on Slurpies.

I gave that some thought.

I believe we can expect a lot, but until very recently, we’ve left the discovery of good beer to chance. That’s why craft beer and other good beer has somewhere between 4 and 10 perrcent of the total beer market and swill lager has the rest.

I grew up much like him, drinking sodas. I hated beer. Coors tasted like water and Budweiser tasted bitter; it burned my tongue. I went into the Navy right out of high school and did my share of under-age beer drinking, but like our kid, it was just being social. The beer — all bland lagers — was tasteless.

My epiphany came at a German restaurant in Washington, D.C. when I was 19. I got served a glass of Wurzburger, a Bavarian lager. Still remember it: rich, golden, silky malt that flowed across my tongue and just a bit of spicy tingle from what I now know were Hallertau hops. I became a convert. I realized there was beer and there was real beer.

It was pure chance. The waiter might not have served me, I could have decided not to go into downtown Washington that Saturday. We need to stand up and shout about good beer, I think. The way it’s going is way too slow.

What do you think? Opinions anyone…

The 2007 craft beer statistics are out and they’re impressive: sales by “independent” craft brewers rose 12 percent by volume and 16 percent in dollars in 2007, the Brewer’s Association reports.

Great news. It means craft beer continues to grow in popularity, that it’s not a craze or a fad or whatever. The stuff we like to call good beer is here to stay. But there are a couple of caveats.

One. Craft beer share. Just 3.8 percent of all beer sold in America is what the association defines as craft beer. So 94.2 percent of beer sold is what? Lager swill?

Not exactly, the association has it’s own definition of craft beer. They rule out Redhook, Widmer, among others, because they’re partly owned by a big brewer (Anheuser-Busch). They also don’t count Coors Blue Moon, because well, Coors is a mega-brewer.

But if the criteria is taste, rather than who makes it – the picture looks a lot brighter. And the percentage sold of “beer with real taste” jumps a couple of points. Don’t have production figures yet, so it’s just a guess.

The trouble with the association’s figures is they partially hide a real shift in American beer-drinking taste away from lager swill, toward beers with more flavor. It gets more complicated, but when you add quality imports the percentage of Americans drinking full-flavored beer grows a bit more.

It’s tedious to sort out the imports, but important. There’s little difference between Euro-lagers like Heineken and Mexican beers like Corona and your basic America lagers.

Two. This is probably the most important trend. Light beer sales continue to rise and now have about half the total market. At the same time sales of what the mega-brewers call “full calorie” beer, are falling rapidly.

Food for thought, huh? What do you think? Opinions anyone? Personally, I can’t fathom why anyone would drink light beer.

Lew Bryson is a Philadelphia beer writer and author with impeccable credentials. He’s just reviewed three new beers from SABMiller aimed, apparently at craft beer drinkers and aiming, I guess, to compete with Coors Blue Moon. These babies haven’t made it out here to the Left Coast. Check out his Seen Through A Glass blog…

Miller Lite Amber: Aroma is somewhat sharp, grainy. Head forms well, and lasts…READ MORE

Miller Lite Wheat: Cloudy medium yellow; cloudiness is very uniform, most likely protein haze rather than yeast. ..READ MORE

Miller Lite Blonde: Slightly ruddy gold color — actually darker than I would have expected from a “blonde.” Head is the worst of the three: big bubbles, not much retention…READ MORE

Oh my gawd a week’s gone by and I’ve never had a chance to post this. Well, now’s the time. I loved the Anheuser-Busch Super Bowl commercials for Bud Light, especially the one with Will Farrell (in a shameless promo for his new film.

But did you notice the ending shot. It was same in all those commercials. Fade to a shot of a glass of beer and some blather about enjoying Bud Light.

One question: What in the hell kind of beer was in that glass? It sure wasn’t Bud Light. It was too golden, to rich-looking. Check out the screen shot of that closing sequence on the left and my own personal photo of a glass of Bud Light. I tried to get that shot from the commercials posted on the web, but that closing shot isn’t there. So I took a photo of the screen. Had it, because I’d recorded the Super Bowl on my DVR.

I sent my 21-year-old daughter to buy a Bud Light, she went into a mom and pop in Oakland and came back with a “40″. That’s the only size they had, she said. I photographed it, but stupidly, put a yellowish file folder behidn the glass for backgroup. I’ve already dumnped the 40, so I’ll have to grab another tonight and reshoot it with a white background. But anyway, I believe there’s a definite differnce.

My personal suspicion here is that someone on the ad agency photo crew hates Budweiser and substituted the Czech Budweiser, sold here as Czechvar (and imported by whom else — Anheuser-Busch. I’m probably wrong, but check out the photo below of a glass of European Budweiser.

What do you think? Post a comment here or shoot me an e-mail at whatsontap@sbcglobal.net.

Photo By Danielk Zolli

Glasses of Budvar Budweiser make a beautiful sight in a cafe in Europe.

Photo: Daniel Zolli.

WILLIAM BRAND: BEER OF THE WEEK

Make new friends with the original Bud
TALK ABOUT THE WORLD spinning ’round. There was a momentous piece of beer news last year for those of us who like great beer. The original Budweiser — labeled as Czechvar — is coming to the United States and the importer will be (drum roll here, please): Budweiser.

There are two Budweisers in the beer world: The world classic Budvar Budweiser (****) that has been brewed in a town in the Czech Republic for centuries and Anheuser-Busch Budweiser (**), long the world’s best-selling beer, brewed in St. Louis, Mo., since the 19th century. The two companies have been in courts around the world, battling for the right to sell Budweiser. A-B argues that it registered the trademark Budweiser in 1878 before the present Czech company, Budejovicky Budvar, was created. There’s always a local angle isn’t there?

This wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for Kip Bruzzone, who owns World of Wine Limited in Lafayette, CA.

He discovered Budvar Budweiser in Prague as an exchange student and fell in love with the beer. During the course of a decade, he made friends with Budvar’s brewers and in 2000 won approval to import the beer here as Czechvar. Four years later, the brewery dumped Kip and signed on with a larger importer: Distinguished Brands International, Littleton, Colo.

Now A-B has aced Distinguished: A-B’s sales are nearly flat, and the company’s been scouring the world for premium imports to build income. The prospect of having its beer distributed nationwide in A-B’s distributor network was irresistible.

Anheuser-Busch has found a European champion this time. This is a ruddy copper beer with a spicy, malty nose from the Saaz hops and the Moravian barley. The taste is mouth-filling, malty, mildly sweet well-balanced by a hoppy dryness. It’s the kind of beer that drove visiting Americans, like Bruzzone, wild and helped ferment the craft-brewing revolution in America.

Try this: Pour yourself a glass of Czechvar and a glass of American Budweiser. Notice the difference in the pour, in the aroma and in the taste. If you like dry and kind of sweet and light, then Budweiser’s the one. If you like a full and hearty taste, you’ll really like Bud … er … Czechvar.

You can find more on the dispute and the history in my blog, Can’t find this beer? E-mail me at whatsontap@sbcglobal.net or call 510-915-1180 and ask for our 2008 Bay Area Retail Beer Store List.

Do you believe in a phoenix rising from the ashes? Did you ever hear about Oakland’s Brothers Brewing Co.? Read on.

An Oakland homebrewer Ralston Brown, a graduate of the American Berwers Guild when it was in Davis and his brother-in-law Thomas Parker and his friend, Michael LeBlanc, a former Polaroid exec, signed on and invested their savings in the company launched Brothers Brewing on the usual shoestring in 1998. Their first beer, recipe by Ralston, Brothers Honey-Brewed Amber Ale *** (my rating in 1999), contract brewed by Alec Moss at the late and still-lamented Golden Pacific Brewing in Berkeley, was a moderate hit.

It was the only African-American-owned brewery in America.

Two years down the road, they produced a lager: Brothers Golden Classic Lager, at Golden Pacific and tried to expand to urban places (guess, that’s code for heavily black neighborhoods) across the country.

They discovered that it’s impossible to beat mega-giants like Coors, Miller and Anheuser-Busch at that game; they’ve got urban black America locked up tight, a fact that still pisses me off. Don’t believe me? Check out those new Miller High Life ads. They’re not pitching to Walnut Creek (Out of state? It’s a mostly non-black San Francisco suburb.

Anyway, Brothers Brewing quietly closed their tent and folded. About the same time Golden Pacific also closed, another fact that still hurts. Capitalism’s a cruel uncaring bitch.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that Everett & Jones Barbeque, the large restaurant in Jack London Square, was a major account. Yep. You got it.

“We hated to see them fold,” co-owner John Jernegan says. “We wanted Ralston to come to work for us and brew beer here,” he adds. “But Ralston had other plans.” Besides being an excellent brewer, he never quit his day job.

So Saucey Sistah was born. It’s contract brewed; he won’t say by whom. But I’ve figured that one out and I won’t tell. Jernegan says they offered Alec Moss a job too. He bounced around a bit and is now happily brewing away at Half Moon Bay Brewing on the San Mateo Coast.

One more point about Saucey Sistah. The sexy woman on the label’s John Jernegan’s wife, Dorothy King Jernegan. Her mom, the late Dorothy Everett Sr., founded the Everett & Jones barbeque business on 92nd Avenue in East Oakland in 1973. There are several Everett & Jones Barbeques, two in Oakland, one in Alameda and one in Berkeley, each owned by a family member or members.

The Everett girls – there were eight – called themselves the “Saucey Sistahs”, her husband explains. Great name for some sexy young ladies, great name for a beer here in Oak Town too.

The E&J in Jack London Square’s the only one with a restaurant and the only one that serves beer. “I keep telling everybody to add beer and sell Saucey Sistah,” John Jernegan says. Everett & Jones is at 126 Broadway, between 2nd Street and West Embarcadero. See ya’ there tomorrow night.

Addendum. This place is becoming famous as an after-game hangout for us diehard Raiders fans. There’s even a post-game show. Food’s excellent. The boast endorsements from Whoopi Goldberg, John Madden, Jami Fox and yes – Pete Slosberg, late of Pete’s Wicked Ale.