Related question to thisone (cheap beers around the world):
In the US, domestic macro-beers like Budweiser and Coors are generally dirt cheap and readily available anywhere. Outside the US, these beers would technically be “imported,” so do places charge a premium “imported beer” price or does it cost about the same as it would in the US?
Vacationing in St Maarten, we get Heinicken cheap on the Dutch side. Carib and Presidente are cheap everywhere. Bud(shudder), etc are more expensive. One year we watched the superbowl at a bar that boasted Iron City, and it was triple the cost of local brews.
I think American Budweiser has a brewery in the UK so it’s not an import.
I say American Budweiser as there’s a Czech Budweiser sometimes known as Budvar which is about 100 years older. Unbelievably, the American company (unsuccessfully) used the courts in an attempt to make the older, European Budweiser change it’s name. Bloody cheek. And the Czech beer is a gerzillion times tastier too.
In Irish pubs, Budweiser and Coors on draught are priced similarly to other lagers. They are not regarded as a premium product on the basis of being imported. Lagers in general however are slightly more expensive than stout such as Guinness (typically around 20c/pint more expensive).
I should add that in fact Budweiser is not imported - it’s brewed locally by Guinness.
Germany is, to my knowledge, the only country where the Czech company (it comes from the town of Budvar in the Czech Republic, the German name of which is Budweis - hence the name) won the court battles. Therefore, a “Budweiser” in Germany is actually from Budvar, whereas the American product is sold as Anheuser-Busch here.
Fairly common for mass-market stuff; as I recall the Japanese brands like Asahi, Sapporo, and Kirin available in North America are brewed by A-B, Molson, etc. Can’t remember which do what, though.
I seem to remember in the 80s when (North) American beers first became available in large numbers here (UK), the marketing did emphasise the rugged American-ness of them. Campaigns such as those of Rolling Rock spring to mind. So yes, I would say that there was a certain "import"cachet to them. They’re priced much like other 5% name-brand lagers - not cheap, but not especially pricy either.
You think Bud is “dirt cheap?” I think it’s expensive as hell, especially for what it is.
For less than half the price one can buy a case of PBR, Old Style, or Leinenkugels. While none of those are great, they’re better than Bud hands down.
Around DC, with the exception of bottom-rung Beast and Nasty Light/Ice and their ilk, Bud/Coors/Miller are the cheapest beers you can buy, typically selling at $4.99/6-pack, $10.99/12-pack, $21.99/30-pack. Anything else, and I mean *anything *else, will run you at least $7.99, PBR and Leinenkugel included. You actually want “good” beer it’ll cost you $8.99/6-pack to start.
…or you could trek down to Trader Joe’s in the city and get a 6-pack of “Red Oval” for $2.99.
And it is sold in the U.S. under the name Czechvar.
In Canada, the Buds and Coors, etc are considered the same and priced the same as domestic. They are brewed in Canada and come out of the same vat* as Molson’s Canadian, Labaat’s Blue, Kokanee, etc.
*Hopefully someone who has worked in Canadian brewery can verify this, but they all taste the same to me.
I doubt they literally come out of the same vat, but pop beers generally do taste the same, and I doubt the methodology varies a lot from beer to beer. I think Blue’s a bit worse than the others.
I doubt 98% of beer drinkers could successfully distinguish between most pop beers in a double blind test.
Just about every “foreign” beer commonly available in a supermarket (Fosters, Budweiser etc) seems to have a note that it’s brewed in the UK somewhere, Newcastle-upon-Tyne springs to mind.
Kirin Ichiban (Japanese beer) sold in the US is marked as manufactured by Anheuser-Busch, and I believe it states on the bottle that it is made in the US.
Foster’s, as sold in the US, is marked as made in Canada, or it was the last time I looked on a can. Still an import, just not from as far away as one might expect.
Guinness Extra Stout that is sold here is marked as being made in Canada. I think I read somewhere that it is made by Moosehead. Guinness Draught is marked as made in Dublin.
I went out to a local Japanese place recently, and the drink special was a Sapporo bombshell (26 oz) and a jig of cheap sake for $6 bux. I love a booze bargain, so I of course jumped right in.
On the bottle of Sapporo, the word IMPORTED was printed in HUGE lettering, along with a bunch of Japanese characters. On the back of the bottle, in tiny print, was the mandatory"Made In Canada" disclaimer.
So Sapporo is still an import, it’s just not imported from the country that any sane and decent person/alcoholic associates with the brand.
(It still tasted excellent to me, and I ordered a second round before I finished the first bottle)
Actually importing beer from anywhere that isn’t just over a nearby border doesn’t make a lot of sense, since most of what you are carrying is high-bulk low-value water. Beers which are genuinely imported are likely to be imported in small quantities, and this does tend to make them expensive. The aim of most brewers moving into a foreign market is to build up sales to a point where establishing a local brewery makes sense.
It’s evident from this thread that in the American market a foreign provenance - even if the beer is actually locally brewed - carries a certain cachet; hence the desire to labal a locally-brewed beer as “imported” if it is brewed to an overseas formula under licence from an overseas brewer. (Some might say that this indicates that American drinkers consider domestic brewing practices to yield a second-rate product, but I would never dream of suggesting such a thing.)
I don’t think this is generally true in the European market, so you cannot charge more for your beer simply by marketing it as “imported”, even if it is in fact imported. There are premium beers, and some of them are in fact imported, but the marketing doesn’t lay much or any stress on this. The mass-market American lagers like (AB) Budweiser are not considered premium in any European market, so far as I know.
Oh, it’s worse than that. Eberhard Anheuser and Adolphus Busch knew about the original and famous Czech Budweiser beer whose motto was the “Beer of Kings”. They used the name and switched the motto to “The King of Beer” to help market their product.
Edberhard Anheuser was a soap manufacturer before he went into the beer business. This could go a long way in explaining the flavor of American Budweiser.
Unfortunately Anheuser-Busch do have the legal rights, if not the moral. Although beer called budweiser has been brewed in Budweis/Budvar for many hundreds of years, it’s not as much a trade name as a style and the company “Budějovický Budvar” is younger than Anheuser-Busch.
But you really mean Belgian Budweiser, as Bud isn’t owened by an American company.
In the UK it is Budweiser as well (with the “Budvar” in smaller font underneath)