Something was off at the Olympic Stadium in Berlin.
It was a chilly Saturday night in January. German fans of the Hertha Berlin football club were lining up to buy beer from the concourse taps. But the beer was not German.
The stadium had replaced its domestic brew, Beck’s, with an American import, Budweiser.
Fans seemed surprised. What was this mass-market lager of American baseball parks doing at a German football match?
Why was it being sold to Germans as ‘Anheuser-Busch Bud,’ instead of under its American name?
And why was its parent company trying – at a challenging time for American products abroad – to persuade Germans to drink it?
The answer appears to be: It’s a bet on a small but growing corner of one of the world’s biggest beer markets.
The multinational company that has owned American Budweiser since 2008 is called AB InBev. It is based in Belgium, and it also owns Beck’s. Its representatives declined to answer most of my questions about what the third attempt is now to sell Bud in Germany.
The officials would not say why they chose, once again, to introduce a quintessentially American product to such an insular beer market. Or why they picked a moment when many Germans are flush with anger at President Donald Trump and not at all enamoured of the United States.
‘Germany is probably the hardest beer market in the world, I would think,’ Oliver Lemke, who runs a namesake brewery with a series of restaurants around Berlin, told me. ‘You’ve got plenty of breweries. You’ve got a public that does not appreciate any other beer styles than what they’re used to.’
Lemke said he does not mix politics with sales. But based on the market, he said, ‘I don’t see why they’d come here.’
The company has cast the move as a homecoming. Eberhard Anheuser and Adolphus Busch were born in Germany, emigrated to St. Louis and, in 1876, began brewing a sweet lager. They called it Budweiser, after a Czech beer they admired, hoping to appeal to immigrants who remembered the brand.
I’ve always had a soft spot for it. When I was a senior in college, my favourite professor and mentor would take me to lunch at a sports bar off campus to discuss the magic and mystery of journalism. His name was Bill Woo. Because he came from St. Louis, we always drank Budweiser.
Most Germans have no such affection for the beer – and no such exposure. That is because Anheuser-Busch failed for more than a century to sell its version of Budweiser in Germany.
The Czech brewery that Anheuser and Busch took their name from, Budejovicky Budvar, claimed trademark infringement. The parties agreed in 1911 and 1939 to divide their beer-making worlds. The Czechs couldn’t sell their Budweiser in the United States, and Anheuser-Busch couldn’t sell its version in much of Europe.
Twice, the Americans tried to crack the German market under different branding. Both attempts fizzled. The first was abandoned after several years of disappointing sales. The second was scuttled amid ongoing legal questions over the Budweiser name.
Last fall, AB InBev announced another go, now with a product that, for legal reasons, it had to call ‘Anheuser-Busch Bud.’ A company official said the expansion would bring Bud back to its German ‘roots’ – its founders’ country of origin – in time for its 150th anniversary.
‘We are proud to make Anheuser-Busch Bud available in Germany again,’ Florian Farken, a spokesperson for AB InBev Germany, wrote me in a message.
Hertha Berlin, the football club, announced Bud would replace Beck’s during home matches. Later, Bayer Leverkusen, a topflight club, and Wolfsburg, recently relegated, followed suit with a similar sponsorship deal.
Otherwise, the beer is hard to find. It’s rare to see in grocery stores, not even with the special packs the company is selling to commemorate the World Cup football tournament.
The story has one other explanatory data point. German beer consumption is declining by the year. It was down 6% last year and is already down 9% this year, said Holger Eichele, CEO of the German Brewers Association.
But one segment of the market is gaining, slightly, from a very small base: imports. Announcing its German push for Bud last year, AB InBev noted that ‘international lagers are among the fastest-growing beer segments in Germany.’
Eichele could not speak directly about InBev’s strategy. But he told me that ‘consumers in Germany are very interested in testing, finding out new products, new styles, new brands.’
Analysts have doubts. ‘Given the continuing difficult situation in the German beer market and the recent decline in the image of American products,’ the trade publication Getränke News wrote this spring, Bud sales in Germany are ‘likely to fall short of expectations.’
At a Hertha match this spring, one visiting American fan was also sceptical: my father.
‘Can’t we get a German beer?’ he asked in line.
But back at our seats, he called to me from across the row. He held up his cup.
‘It tastes better here!’ he said.