“Who cares, they’re always changing corporation names”
Name that tune? It is, of course, an extract from the lyrics of Starship’s “We Built This City”, which tops various lists of songs most hated by serious rock journalists. But who cares. It’s a banger. The lyrics come from the legendary Bernie Taupin, best known for his collaboration with Elton John. And they gave me the inspiration for my sermon this month.
Sometimes a marriage changes history. Think Antony and Cleopatra. Marie and Pierre Curie. Ferdinand of Castile and Isabella of Aragon, which is the foundation of modern Spain (and the wedding of their daughter Catherine to Henry VIII did of course have its moments. The “Elephant and Castle” pub and therefore district is believed to be named after her, as the locals couldn’t pronounce “Infanta de Castile”. But I digress).
I would argue that the marriage that trumps them all happened in St Louis, Missouri in 1861. A German immigrant brewer married the daughter of one of his customers, a soap manufacturer who had provided finance to a brewery and then taken it over. Their names were Adolphus Busch and Lily Anheuser.
One hopes that they were happy. They were married for 52 years until Adolphus died, and had thirteen children. The alliance created something so momentous that 100,000 people lined the streets of St Louis to mark his passing, including the US Secretary of Agriculture and the President of Harvard University. Lily turfed various dead relatives out of the family mausoleum in Bellefontaine Cemetery and commissioned a bigger one, at huge expense, for Adolphus’s sole use. Which was sweet of her.
The legacy was the Anheuser-Busch corporation. It is a story of highly effective marketing, exploitation of technology and the ferocious use of acquisitions and intellectual property law against competitors. Adolphus’s genius was to see the potential for pasteurisation, refrigeration and the railway network to enable mass marketing of beer across the USA. His ambition was to produce a national American beer, and decided that this should be a German pilsner-style beer. He chose Czech “Saaz” hops. He named it as being in the style of the beers produced in a city called Ceske Budejovice in Bohemia - a place that the German-speaking majority of its inhabitants called “Budweis”.
Beer produced in Budweis was called “the beer of kings”. Adolphus trademarked “Budweiser, King of Beers”. I think you know what happened from there.
Although much of the ensuing history is of battles between Anheuser-Busch and the Budweiser Budvar brewery of Ceske Budejovice regarding who is allowed to call their beer what, and where. The very short version of the story is that the American product has to be called “Bud” in much of Europe, whereas the Czech beer has to be called “Czechvar” in the US. This follows over twenty court cases.
At the beginning of this century, Anheuser-Busch was the biggest brewing corporation in the world. And yet eventually they ended up running into someone even bigger.
The next phase of the story begins in Belgium. In 1987, three renowned Belgian aristocratic families with long beer histories and a combined wealth running into billions - de Spoelberch, de Mevius and Van Damme - merged their operations to form Interbrew. (I can find no evidence of a young noblewoman from any of the three families being offered in marriage as part of the deal). From there, they seem to have got the taste for swallowing other breweries, and they went international. Buying the big Canadian name Labatts in 1995 was a major jumping off point. Then they quietly slipped over to England for a bit of shopping in 2000 and came away with Bass and Whitbread. Then to Germany to buy Becks.
The record shows that, in 2005, they merged with the Brazilian giant AmBev to created InBev. Dig deeper and you find a very strong Brazilian flavour to the merged company. Specifically, you find a group of private equity billionaires headed by Jorge Paulo Lemann, a former tennis champion. Lemann’s protegee, Carlos Brito, headed up InBev. The inside view is that the Brazilians drove the decision to make the ultimate move and bid $46 billion for Anheuser-Busch in 2008. Neutralising any opposition by promising that nobody in the US would notice that anything had changed, they won out and created a beer behemoth - Anheuser-Busch InBev - the like of which the world had never seen. 630 brands in 150 countries, over $50 billion in sales annually.
Is all this a bad thing? Well, there were a few bad things along the way. In 2016, their Indian joint venture was fined for bribing public officials and then silencing a whistleblower. (They said that they had addressed this by some extra training. Good to know.) The following year they bought up the entire South African hop harvest and then sat on it to stop any other brewer using it. Then they picked a fight with Molson Coors by running a 2019 Superbowl ad which stated that “their beer is made with corn syrup; ours isn’t”. It ended up in court, and the eventual judgement could be paraphrased as “look, both of you just stop it!”
Yet… their vast empire of brands does include some exceptionally fine ones. In the USA they own Goose Island. In Belgium they brew Leffe. In the UK they have Camden. The purists may rebel, but they have not messed with these beers and others, so I still drink and enjoy them. Indeed, they played a key role at a vital point in my life - I toasted the end of my O Levels while at school in Brussels with the beer on which the de Spoelberch family built their dominance. A beer from their historic Artois brewery called “Stella”. (In Belgium, Stella is regarded as a pleasant session beer at "only" 5%, and the brilliant “Jean de Florette” ads which market it in the UK as something premium are viewed as rather odd)
At the same time, when it comes to the Budweiser trademark wars, I am 100% on Team Budvar. Again, this comes from personal associations. I spent my 21st birthday Inter-Railing through Czechoslovakia. The Iron Curtain had only recently lifted, and in 1990 there was no beer in the world better value than Czech beer. Having stepped off the night train in Prague, I made my way down to the beautiful Ceske Budejovice (the city of Pilzen is probably a more famous beer name, but is ugly and industrial) and joined a bunch of extremely fat German-speaking locals in a beer hall, partying like it was 1938. I have tasted even better beers since, but back then the beautiful smooth clean taste of the Budvar was a wonderful experience that no trademark lawyer could ever take away.