Issue #3: Budweiser

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Rack ‘Em.

What Adam JacksonBey is describing here is a universal understanding of the purpose of cheap beer. You can go worldwide, examine a number of different drinking cultures and it’s likely you’ll see a similar ritual. Whether it’s young folks grabbing a 30 rack of Aass cans in Oslo or imperial pints of Kirin at an izakaya in Kyoto, it’s undeniable that cheap beer is, indeed, for drinking.

I’ve known Adam for a few years now, and as a fellow coffee professional, I’m always intrigued by the ways that the logic of quality can overlap. Specifically, like myself, Adam is a big fan of the King of Beers. When it comes to domestic American adjunct lagers, many people develop a preference — I thought I was an outlier as someone who skewed towards Bud Heavy, and then I met Adam.

“I have synesthesia so I taste in color, and the color that Budweiser tastes the most like is taupe, which is hilarious because it sounds like tope,” he tells me via an email interview. I love talking with Adam because his mind is constantly working around new ways of wordplay. “Tope” is verb that means “to drink in excess.” It’s an archaic, literary version of the phrase, and I know this now because I had to look it up.

Drinking cheap beer serves its purpose — it’s reliable, consistent, comforting, affordable, accessible, and gets the job done. But it can be more than that. “I gain a particular type of happiness—almost a Pavlovian response—when I even hear the sound of an aluminum can opening, because I am primarily an canned beer drinker. So I feel extremely happy every time I open a can.”

The ritual of a Budweiser, then, is more than just what you’re drinking or tasting. One of my favorite things to do is grab two cans on the way out to the backyard bonfire, say “It’s party time!” while you hold both out and crack them one-handed simultaneously, and then pass them out to cheering onlookers. Aside from giving you a buzz, Budweiser is just part of a Good Time. There is a familiarity and comfort in a Good Time.

It’s affordable, too.

“It’s a bigger factor for what I buy at home than what I buy at a bar, but it’s part of why I generally drink Budweiser at home. It’s typically inexpensive and available most everywhere.”

Therein lies the rub: beer, unlike most products, has a price to quality threshold that is unmatched. Cheap wine is chock full of additives, and cheap spirits tend to contain colorings and artificial flavorings. I don’t think it’s any secret that many American beers use adjuncts like corn syrup to feed the fermentation process. At the end of the day, though, the flagship cheap beers are mostly made with the same ingredients as the expensive craft beers are: water, barley, yeast, hops. Budweiser uses rice in conjunction with barley as a fermentation aid, but it’s still a simple ingredient list.

We’ve come to expect a sort of tradeoff with cheap foods: industrially farmed meat is expected to be pumped full of antibiotics and processed in dangerous conditions for workers. Snack foods are pumped up with chemical flavoring agents and hard to pronounce preservatives. Sodas and “juices” are just high-fructose corn syrup delivery vehicles. Cheap wine could have dimethyl dicarbonate, which is poisonous for about an hour after it’s added to wine before it hydrolyzes. Fireball whiskey has propylene glycol, an antifreeze ingredient.

Budweiser is relatively pure in comparison. It’s familiar and holds comfort, but it’s also reliable. For someone with synesthesia, that reliability is important: “The enjoyment comes from the fact I can drink a thing that I’m used to without getting a brand new color.”

“Another thing I lean into because of familiarity and comfort (these two things are really almost interchangeable for me) is Ohio State/Ohio. I love Ohio, I think it’s an amazing place to be from and I wouldn’t be surprised if I eventually ended up there, but while I’m away, fully enveloping myself in the things that remind me of the best parts of home makes me feel great.”

Being part of the Ohio diaspora means embracing Cleveland’s best known brewery: “I love Great Lakes because of hometown pride and because it’s is really good. Christmas Ale is probably my second favorite beer.” It’s a balance of Budweisers to craft beers for Adam that’s pretty familiar for most beer drinkers.

“Oh yeah. I tend to drink that more when I’m out because I like to have a variety of craft beers and having that many 6 packs about is not fiscally responsible.”

The idea of eating and drinking local, sustainable, responsibly sourced, organic, etc. is a consumer move to better understand what we put in our bodies or how the people who make the things we eat and drink are treated, and Adam is generally a conscious consumer.

“I try to get local fruits and vegetables and prefer local meat I guess. I think about how products are made not necessarily where they are from if that makes any sense,” he says. As a coffee professional, he’s also very conscious of the coffee he drinks and how that’s sourced.

But the rice that Budweiser buys, the hops, the barley malt — it’s pretty impressive to see the initiatives that Budweiser has made to buy American farmed products. Budweiser donated $150,000 to USA Rice which helps support a lot of environmental initiatives for American rice farmers. That same news article articulates how Anheuser-Busch spent $5.5 billion buying rice, hops, corn, and barley from American farmers. Farmworkers in the USA have been one of the most exploited groups of domestic workers, but the worst infractions are usually tied up in produce pickers. In some ways, you can have a cleaner conscience drinking a Budweiser than you can eating a salad.

Big business is still big business, though. Adam recalls a personal boycott on Coors when he was in college because of the rumors that it was owned by a racist. Cursory internet searches do show a history of racial discrimination and conservative politics going back even to 1988. Coors has shown big investments in the LGBTQ+ community as shown in this post, but this story of the Teamster/LGBTQ Coors Boycott of 1977 shows that if you answered “yes” to the question “are you homosexual” on the Coors’ employment application, your application would be terminated immediately. There there’s this breakdown shows that the richest families in America, usually tied to ownership of mega-corporations, tend to donate to both Republican and Democratic causes and candidates.

The focus of personal responsibility in consumer choices has become a smoke and mirrors campaign for big corporations. The idea of a “carbon footprint” was actually created by notorious polluter BP. The ideas is that you can start to tally what your individual choices do to impact climate change and then the weight of the world dying lies on your shoulders. That same article also points out that during the current global COVID-19 pandemic, we saw almost no reduction in carbon emissions. With most people cutting out driving and flying from their day to day lives, if individual choices did have such an impact, there should have been some bigger numbers.

The overall impact of being a Budweiser fan is hard to calculate. As something you consume, the most damaging thing in it is the alcohol itself. As a product of farming, it seems like Anheuser-Busch is doing more than any grocery store is to promote sustainable and environmentally friendly practices. And as far as supporting a giant mega-corporation, at least it’s not Coors. The personal impact — enjoying an affordable product — is hard to deny.

All in all, the choices we have as consumers are limited: there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, you know. But those choices do exist:

“Oh yeah for sure.  I think about where things come from and try to buy as local as possible. I also think about the process a lot, and if folks seem to be doing it correctly then I will try to buy it. I will say that I’m also pretty brand loyal, so when I get attached to a brand, even if practices change it’s really hard for me to switch.”

Adam, this Bud’s for you.

Thanks to Adam JacksonBey for his interview.

Adam JacksonBey is a proud Ohioan, a (former?) competitive barista, a former Barista Guild Executive Council Member, USCIGS Working Group member, coffee community organizer, and Virgo who has worked in specialty coffee for 9 years. While in DC-based barista, he's served on the DMV Coffee board for 5 years, helping to plan, implement, and execute events throughout the DC, Southern Maryland, and Northern Virginia area. He also served on the planning committee for both the Access and Bloom events put on by the newly unified Barista Guild.A notorious sandwich enthusiast, he can often be found on #coffeetwitter both leading discussions and hoping the algorithm will hide his tweets to no avail.  He’s also really smart and kind.You can find him online sometimes on Instagram as @ditriech, and extremely online on twitter as @ditriech as well

Artwork by Ashley Elander Strandquist. You can view her illustration work here and check out her printing business here.