On Feb. 1, 2015, an audience of more than 114 million were able to watch craft beer get insulted over and over. 

It was during that secularly sacred national coming-together known as the Super Bowl, where 30 seconds of advertising cost sponsors an average of $4.25 million. Anheuser-Busch InBev, the world’s largest brewer, had that kind of money, and it hired advertising house Anomaly to help it train an especially snarky attack on craft beer. 

The commercial started with shots of A-B InBev’s breweries churning away. “Budweiser proudly a macro beer” appeared over the scenes as did the sentence, “It’s not to be fussed over.” Anyone in the know knew what was coming. Still, even 10 years on packs a marketing punch. 

“Fussed over” would be superimposed over the image of a bespectacled, bearded hipster — handlebar mustache included — leaning gravely over the rim of a bulbous glass filled with what looked like dark beer. Flash to another scene of equally earnest hipsters — flannels, cardigans, more eyewear — leaning over their own beers in what appeared to be a fashionable urban bar. “It’s brewed for drinking, not for dissecting” now appeared over the commercial. 

The commercial went on in that mocking vein for a full minute, ending with the kicker: “Let them sip their Pumpkin Peach Ale — we’ll be brewing us some golden suds.”

Reaction to the commercial was fast and furious — and not just from craft beer. “We believe each and every style of beer is worth fussing over,” A-B InBev archrival MillerCooers would tweet. Others were more blunt: “It’s a fuck you to Anheuser-Busch because they sent us a fuck you,” Bell’s founder Larry Bell would tell the Chicago Tribune in explaining his brewery’s limited Pumpkin Peach Ale release in response to the commercial. 

Plus, plenty of critics gleefully pointed out that A-B InBev had not even 10 days before the Super Bowl announced it was acquiring Elysian Brewing, a respected craft operation in Seattle that brewed a … wait for it … pumpkin peach ale.

Dick Cantwell, an Elysian founder who had opposed the sale, eviscerated the new corporate parent in a statement: “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, even as the brewery is dealing with the anger of the beer community in reaction to the sale.”

The spot remains a flashpoint for longtime craft beer fans, an easily recallable benchmark in the industry’s marketplace evolution. (They might not remember the exact year or the game itself, in which the Seattle Seahawks blew a comeback, down by four and deciding for some reason to pass on second and goal at the New England Patriots’ 1-yard line, only to see it intercepted.) 

The commercial probably couldn’t have come at any other moment than around 2015. Since craft beer first began eking out a market presence in the mid-1980s behind Samuel Adams Boston Lager and Pete’s Wicked Ale, larger breweries such as A-B InBev had either basically ignored or simply co-opted these smaller players’ tastes and techniques. The odd acquisition, such as A-B’s 1995 purchase of a major stake in Redhook, or product launches, such as Coors’ Blue Moon, also in 1995, seemed sufficient to keep the competition at bay. 

Then, in the new century, craft beer began to grow at a frenetic pace. The number of craft breweries swelled from around 1,500 in 2000 to well more than 4,800 in 2015. It wasn’t unusual for hundreds of craft breweries and brewpubs to open annually. Production levels spiked, and craft beers enjoyed more shelf space and bar taps than ever before. They permeated popular culture, too. President Barack Obama would famously serve a honey ale, which the White House mess brewed with ingredients he personally bought, at a Super Bowl party in 2011. 

It was time, then, to slap down this growing industry niche. 

It’s unlikely that larger breweries would feel the need today to produce such a withering critique of craft beer. So much has changed in the past 10 years. Big alcohol vendors and private equity firms have taken over legions of craft breweries (2015 would host the first nine- and 10-figure deals for craft breweries in Heineken’s purchase of half of Laguintas and Constellation Brands’ $1 billion deal for Ballast Point). COVID-19’s aftershocks and higher financing costs doomed an unusually high number of breweries last year. 

And, of course, the rise of hard seltzer, the legalization of recreational marijuana across several states, and millennials’ proclivity for sobriety have hampered craft beer sales too. Never mind that Boston Beer/Sam Adams has the wherewithal to do its owner Super Bowl commercials now — including one in 2021 that mocked Anheuser-Busch InBev

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