Beer

Make that “water filtered through a horse”:

[German soccer fans] are furious that Budweiser will be the official tipple for the World Cup, which starts next month. The American lager has secured a near-monopoly of beer sales inside World Cup stadiums and within a 500m radius of the grounds, supplanting more than 1,270 domestic breweries.

A Bavarian politician has called Bud “the worst beer in the world.” I haven’t tried every beer in the world (and I applaud Franz Maget for doing so), but I agree that Budweiser is truly awful. Wretched, really. I would rather drink water—it’s that bad.

It’s an odd projection of US power abroad. An American “beer” sponsoring a soccer event? Soccer? We can’t even manage to call it by its proper name!

It also reminds me of a brand of beer I drank rather too much of at Jimmy’s, the watering hole on 55th Street near the University of Chicago: Schlitz. Like Budweiser, it was made with rice. I got to calling it sake—I could taste the ricey overtones. Blyech.

Three cheers for American industry—lowering standards of taste everywhere!

Addendum 2006.05.24: A commenter at Newsrack Blog says Budweiser tastes better in Europe, speculating that a different formula is used. This changes things a bit, as I noted there. It might actually be illegal to sell American-style Bud in Germany as bier. In which case the beer mandated for the World Cup might not be the best in the world, but at least it won’t be the worst (despite what Herr Maget says).