Ah, ok. I’m not sure that I know what “premium priced” beers are, but I’ll agree that cheap German or Czech beer is better than Bud. Bud, however, is way better than cheap Moroccan beer. Worst I’ve ever had.
I was thinking Bell’s, Stone, New Glaurus, etc, which all put out better beer than you’ll get at a Berlin dive bar.
I’m wondering if that map is supposed to show the most popular beer originating in each country (which may not be the most-consumed beer in that country).
The “most popular” beer shown for Greece is Mythos. I never saw anyone buying or drinking Mythos in Greece; the only evidence of its existence was the occasional decorative sign. Based on my observations, the most popular beer there is Amstel.
Now, I can believe that Mythos is the most popular “Greek beer,” but that isn’t saying much. The only places I’ve seen people drinking Mythos are Greek restaurants in the USA.
Well, around here a case of Bud is about $19 on sale (and Wisconsin is ties for having the lowest beer tax in the nation, so it’s probably more elsewhere.) PBR, High Life, Hamms, Blatz, Milwaukees Beast, Red Dog, etc run from $8.99-11.99 for 30 packs. All alcoholic corn/rice water. You like what you like but no way is there anything except marketing that makes Bud worth double the price of those others.
In fact, at one time in history all of those brands except Red dog were top selling, premium priced beers. There is nothing special about Bud that makes it worth any more than the rest of the swill. They just convinced people at this specific point of history that there is and it’s worth more money. 20 years from now it might be in the same price category as Busch.
I am 99.9% sure that Milwaukees Best first came o the market in the mid 1980’s (when I would have been starting high school) and was marketed as specifically being a cheaper (“Budget Friendly”) alternative to the major label brands (Bud, Coors, and at that time, specifically Miller Genuine Draft, which when first introduced, also in the early 80’s was actually more expensive than the flagship Miller High Life for some reason) and was never a “premium” beer.
Now maybe you are thinking of Old Milwaukee, which has a much longer history, and in it’s heyday might have been a premium beer, but it was also a cheap, low status brand by the 1980’s, at least in my part of the country.
And yet you are 100% wrong.
Milwaukees Best has been around since 1895 when it was brewed by Gettleman. Miller took it over in 1961.
It was taken off the market for a bit in the mid-late 70’s, and when it came back in '84 it came back as an economy brew. But back in the day it was a premium priced beer.
And I think you are confusing “premium priced beer” with “premium beer”. They are not the same.
Budweiser, for example, is not a premium beer by any definition, but it is premium priced. It is about double the cost of most other American pale lagers of the same style, but it’s ingredients, taste, and brewing process are no justification for that. It’s all pure marketing.
You gotta love that ad “Pure and without drugs or poison”!
I’m not understanding what you’re getting at here; original Budweiser, Miller Genuine Draft/High Life and Coors Banquet are ALL priced comparably to one another (~$7 per six-pack), and the same as their light counterparts.
And I’m with Pantastic; the mass market beers are where they are because they’re not awesome, but few people think they’re absolutely terrible either. We see this with any mass-market product- movies, music, hamburgers, tacos, etc…
I mean, I’m kind of a beer aficionado, and I won’t turn my nose up at a megabrew. Hell, I occasionally get an itch and buy a 12 pack during the summer. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy Avery Maharaja or La Fin du Monde as well.
Yes, they are all premium priced as compared to PBR, Old Style, Blatz, Hamms, Milwaukees Best, etc. They cost about double what those other beers cost, but this cost is not justified by their ingredients, taste or brewing process, only marketing.
At one time PBR, Old Style, Blatz, Hamms, etc. were premium priced brands and top sellers, Today they are considered bottom of the barrel yet nothing about them has changed. Only they marketing strategies. When was the last time you saw a commercial for Hamms or Blatz?
And you ought to remove High Life from your list. While it used to be Millers anchor (i.e. premium priced) beer it isn’t no longer. I see it around here for $5.99 a 12 pack, $11.99 a 30. The same thing could happen to Bud in the future. I’ll bet it surprises you that at one time Blatz was one of the biggest sellers.
I see at https://www.ratebeer.com/beer/chang-classic/436195/ that Chang Classic — Thailand’s favorite beer I think — is rated 2.18/5, 5 Overall, 55 Style. I have no idea what any of that means. Apparently Chang has Dimethyl Sulfides — is that carcinogenic or otherwise bad? Or just a flavor changer?
Anyway, I am NO connoisseur — I hardly drank beer before I moved to rural Thailand — but I like Chang, provided it is very very cold. It is similar to, slightly better than, and much cheaper than the local Heineken. Chang Classic in a bottle — I am not responsible for Chang in a can, or without the “Classic” notation.
Provided the beer is served very very cold.
[off-topic] If you Americans are confused why you had record cold while the Earth was, supposedly, hotter than ever, I can tell you that Thailand did its part to keep the average up. We had zero winter this year. February, normally one of the coldest months, was absolutely sweltering, perhaps record-setting.
We put our Chang in the freezer and don’t drink it until it’s almost starting to freeze.
[anecdote] It’s easy to tell how long a Farang has lived up here:
Recent arrival: “You guys put ice cubes in your beer?? Ha ha ha! I never saw anything so funny!”
A year or two later: “This is how you serve beer?” [looks confused] “Where’s the ice?”
But as far as “Premium” goes, I thought that in beer advertising, at least, premium is taken to mean “More Expensive”, or at least that’s the impression they are going for, but like most advertising terms, it morphs into it’s own meaning along the way.
Very few products will come right out and honestly say “This item, which you now hold in your hand, will cost you more of your hard-earned money than the virtually identical items directly to the right and to the left of it on the shelf in front of you”
Felt great to me 
Of course, now I’m in snow, sleet, and rain, and cold and whatever else the hell can be thrown at DC.
I switched from Singha to Leo, because Leo tasted more like Bud Light, but it wrecked my stomach, so I went back to Singha. The trick is to drink them before they get warm
Yes, High Life is cheaper than PBR everywhere I see it.
Price doesn’t have ANYTHING to do with production cost, other than that production cost is a floor below which no profit is made. .
Retailers and manufacturers try and position their products in such a way that they can charge more for some as ‘premium’ products, and less on others as ‘value’ products. The idea is that by appealing to different segments of the market, they can charge each segment as much as they are willing to pay. Sometimes the premium versions are slightly nicer, sometimes they’re not.
So you end up with stuff like Michelob Ultra costing $8/six-pack, Bud Light costing $7 a six pack, and Busch Light costing $6/six-pack of 16 oz cans. They’re all substantially the same in terms of ingredients and production effort, but there are people out there who want to drink Michelob Ultra, and who wouldn’t be caught dead drinking a tallboy of Busch Light, and are willing to pay about twice as much for the privilege.
This happens all the time- we have Pennzoil/Quaker State, Bud Light/Busch Light, Gevalia/Maxwell House, etc… These are all premium/value brand pairs owned by the same company.
That’s what I said. It’s how they market it.
If a new, economy priced beer came out but it was really Budweiser in the can I’ll bet a lot of people wouldn’t like it because it wasn’t marketed with bikini girls and race cars.
Brewers had to market the living shit out of light beer to sell it. Without Madison Avenue nobody would have wanted to drink that watery slop. But they were able to convince the masses that they wanted it.
And, BTW, at one time Busch was a higher priced beer as well. That’s another example of how things change.
Yeah, there’s a lot of marketing in just about any beer besides the generic “BEER”, which being from Texas, I’ve never seen outside of a TV show or movie*. And even that is doing its part in marketing itself to the person on a severe budget.
What’s funny is, there’s craft brewers going through kind of the same dance of selling something that’s not obviously different at a premium price. There’s a craft brewer that’s doing a pretty spot-on imitation of Modelo Especial around here…OK, now that I put down my glass for a second, I realize that’s not funny or odd, just obvious to do. It’s not bad, but it’s also not worth 1.5x the price, and yeah, I still buy it sometimes. That can is just a little more neato, and I don’t want anything more challenging than a light lager that afternoon, and Modelo’s label is just too plain for mowing the lawn. I don’t know if there is logic to be had in it.
But then again, if I’m out grabbing something the band’s going to be drinking on for a few hours – I just grab Modelo Especial, and call it a day. I’m going to be too busy to consider the can. Any creative thinking such as buying a double IPA is just going to end in debauchery.
*I honestly am not certain why that seems to have never happened in this state. I’ve never seen the blue stripe, plaid or just black text on white can “BEER” here. I imagine it’s because any beer manufacturer had to go through a distributor to sell their product to stores, and any distributor would say, “Yeah, or I could just sell them Pearl and make twice the profit.” Texas’ laws on alcohol are dumb and more complex than they need to be. I’m sure it’s part of a general artistic/legislative aesthetic theme running through most of our laws. Hell, for most of my life you couldn’t buy pantyhose on Sundays. I have never bought pantyhose in my life, and I was happy when the stupid blue law was lifted. Now, please allow sales of hard liquor on Sunday. I actually can plan for things, but I always seem to want to impulse buy whiskey on Sunday, and I’m not willing to drive to Louisiana to do it. Just like Chick-Fil-A. I want someone to sell bootleg Chick-Fil-A on Sundays, if nothing else.
Missed the edit window but I have a retraction: I have bought pantyhose. I wore them on my head.
Hell, I remember the 2003 blackout of the US northeast and southern Canada.
Our local pub had all kinds of perishables, and before they went bad, put them on sale. “Salads, half-price!” And so on. The draft taps weren’t working, so all that was available was bottled, and it was warm. In the end, you got a bottle of beer with a glass of ice. (“You want more ice? Here, have some. It’s just gonna melt anyway.”) Beer over ice actually wasn’t bad, and I have since asked for ice in my beer if I haven’t found it cold enough.
That night, they used credit card impression machines for all transactions. No cash, because the electronic cash register wasn’t working. No debit transactions, as the Interac system was down. Just credit cards, and the place was lit with candles. Oddly enough, it was one of the nicest nights I can recall at that pub.
There seems to be an awful lot of disdain and hostility around here toward the practice of marketing, as if it’s somehow removing free will and people’s agency in terms of buying what they want to buy.
That’s hooey. At best, they’re making a market segment VERY aware of a particular product and it’s purported capabilities. I suppose if someone’s weak-minded or lazy, they might just buy Coors Light instead of seeking out a craft beer, but
ALL successful beers are likely to have a pretty significant marketing effort, even if that’s limited to just putting a snazzy set of labels/packaging on their product. A company would be entirely stupid NOT to market their stuff to the best of their ability and budget, unless they’re part of some kind of monopoly or cartel.
I’m shocked to see Budweiser as the number one beer in Canada. They’ve got LaBatt’s Blue! Much much better and totally mainstream and available everywhere.
Corona in Mexico is slightly more believable, but Dos Equis and Negra Modelo are both so much better.
Budweiser is not just a bland beer. Coors and Miller High Life are bland beers. Budweiser is like you start with a bland beer and then add something nasty to it to make it worse. It’s popularity totally confounds me.
Probably they think the same about Blue as we think about Bud. So, I buy Blue, and they buy Bud.