American beer is in the midst of a .
Domestic sales of light beer fell again last year, while imported lagers, spirits and wines climbed. The biggest beer brands in the United States — think Budweiser, Miller — are now owned, respectively, by companies in Belgium, England and Canada.
The nation’s two most popular American-owned beer brands? Corona and Modelo. Both are brewed in Mexico.
Then came for flag-waving American beer drinkers: Pabst Brewing, owner of some of the most well-loved, all-American, blue-collar brews in the country, will soon be bought by a Cyprus-based beverage conglomerate that calls itself the biggest independent brewer in Russia.
The iconic brand behind Pabst Blue Ribbon, the red-white-and-blue-canned lager founded in Milwaukee before the Civil War, announced recently that it will be bought by Oasis Beverages, which runs breweries in Moscow, Kazakhstan and Ukraine.
Even in a country where beer ads are typically marked by stock cars, soldiers and patriotic horses, few breweries have American credentials as deep as Pabst’s. The largest private brewing company in North America, its beers include cheap malts such as Colt 45, Schlitz and Old Milwaukee, as well as regional favorites such as Lone Star (“The National Beer of Texas”), National Bohemian (a Baltimore classic from the “Land of Pleasant Living”), Rainier (“We Heart Seattle”) and Old Style (“Chicago’s Beer since 1902.”)
Oasis has voiced no plans to change that.
Oasis Chairman Eugene Kashper, a U.S. citizen who lives in New York and will become Pabst’s chief executive, said he will keep the company headquarters in Los Angeles. In a statement, he extolled the brewer’s American virtue, calling Pabst Blue Ribbon “the quintessential American brand — it represents individualism, egalitarianism and freedom of expression — all the things that make this country great.”
But the announcement of Pabst’s sale to Oasis, which brews a bevy of Russian beers as well as soft drinks and juice, was quickly painted as an American betrayal. Fans of PBR unloaded on its Facebook page, with one critic pledging to dump all of what he called “the new Communist beer” down the drain.
Drinkamerican.us, and celebrated Pabst’s American heritage, was replaced, briefly, with a large four-letter word.
“I was actually surprised at how frustrated I was … that an American icon was even considering something like this,” said David Lauterbach, the New Yorker who started the Drinkamerican blog after Anheuser-Busch’s sale to foreign buyers in 2008. “That a red-white-and-blue beer can that so long had symbolized America would consider essentially selling out.”
Pabst executives have gone on the defensive, issuing a statement poking holes in media reports touting a Russian takeover and saying, “Our new colleagues will remain vigilant in staying true to the brand’s identity.”
Publicly, , posing a can of PBR like Gen. George Patton in a flag-draped tweet saying, “Pabst will remain American-owned and operated.”
The brewer’s purchase, though, is only the latest drop in the long-swirling sea of the nation’s hyper-globalized beer industry. Miller Brewing became SABMiller, based in London, when it was bought in 2002 by South African Breweries. Coors merged with Canada beer giant Molson in 2005. In 2008, Anheuser-Busch, the St. Louis-based maker of Budweiser that had run ads poking fun at Miller’s international roots, was bought by InBev, a Belgian-Brazilian beer conglomerate.
There are online communities and detailed guides on how to find out whether a beer is American-made. But analysts at Euromonitor International said, and that’s leading them to turn away from light Americana domestics such as Old Style.
Pabst Blue Ribbon has surged among the hipster set, and sales have doubled since 2004, but the broader Pabst brand is still weak in sales, its losses
tied to the trend of light domestic lagers losing ground to wines and spirits.
U.S. drinkers are opting against buying from big brewers and instead turning to a growing flood of craft breweries. The country had 2,822 running breweries last year, up 39 percent from 2011, and more than 1,000 new craft breweries are in planning nationwide.
Why do some drinkers show such a feeling of loss when an American brand extends overseas?
“I buy an iPhone even though it’s made in China, but it’s designed in California. I buy Fords even though the parts are made globally but still assembled in the U.S. But there’s just this historic, iconic value to a can of beer,” said Lauterbach, the Drinkamerican blogger.
“Pabst has got a history, it’s got a heritage, it has a vintage factor,” said Amin Alkhatib, an alcoholic beverages industry analyst for Euromonitor in London. “They’re not going to change the brand, what it stands for. . . . They’re going to push to increase market share, take on those craft-beer [profit] margins and add a premium factor to the brand.”
