No beverage stays fizzy forever. Bud Light has been America’s best-selling beer since 2001, but its run at the top finally seems to be ending. The troubles started in April, when the brand unveiled a sponsorship deal with the transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, sparking a massive anti-trans backlash. Kid Rock filmed himself blasting cases of Bud Light with a rifle. A boycott swiftly spread. By June, the Mexican lager Modelo Especial had claimed the top spot in retail sales, according to the market-research firm NielsenIQ. By one measure, at least, Bud Light was officially no longer America’s most popular beer.
The boycott’s success was stunning. Bud Light had been so popular, for so long, that its sudden decline seemed unthinkable. The truth, however, is that its dominance was never as secure as it appeared, and the boycott merely accelerated an existing trend. America no longer shares a united taste for beer. There are more than 9,500 craft breweries in the country turning out flavorful IPAs and fruited sour ales—the antithesis of light lager—and beer faces ever-stiffer competition from cocktails, wine, spirits, and seltzers. Grabbing a light lager is hardly today’s drinking default. Even when it is, no law of nature requires Americans to prefer Bud Light over similarly bland competitors.
“We have the most diverse collection of drinkers in the country’s history, who get to choose from the most diverse collection of beverage alcohol brands that have ever existed,” says Bryan Roth, the editor of the alcoholic-beverage newsletter Sightlines. If Bud Light doesn’t appeal to people, they “can very easily find something that does.”
Humans have fermented beer for millennia, but American light beer only dates to the early 1940s, when Coors Brewing Company introduced Coors Light. That brand was quickly discontinued, however, because of World War II grain shortages. The real story of light beer begins in the 1960s, when Brooklyn’s Rheingold Brewery developed a low-calorie, zero-carbohydrate beer using a process invented by the Swiss chemist Hersch Gablinger. They named it Gablinger’s Beer.
Rheingold released Gablinger’s in 1967, positioning it as a diet drink for calorie-conscious women. It flopped. Joseph L. Owades, Rheingold’s in-house biochemist, then shared the recipe with Chicago’s Meister Bräu, where it became “lusty, full strength” Meister Bräu Lite. After Meister Bräu went bankrupt in 1972, Miller Brewing bought the brand, reformulated it, and reintroduced it as the 96-calorie Miller Lite. It would be the first truly mass-market American light beer.
Executives at Anheuser-Busch, Budweiser’s parent company, were skeptical. “We think our beer is light enough,” the company’s vice president of brewing said at the time. (In 2008, Anheuser-Busch merged with the Belgian conglomerate InBev to form Anheuser-Busch InBev, the world’s largest brewer.) They were quickly proved wrong. Miller seems to have been the first company to discover that having success with light lager is less about how it’s brewed than about how it’s marketed. Miller Lite went national in 1975 with an advertising onslaught featuring professional athletes selling men on a lager that tasted great and was less filling. The message was: Guys can drink light beer too! It worked. Miller Lite became a hit, shipping 5 million barrels in its first full year. Other companies were forced to respond. Coors brought back Coors Light, and Anheuser-Busch debuted Natural Light and Michelob Light in 1977 and 1978, respectively. But the company was reluctant to release a light version of Budweiser, America’s best-selling beer.
“They didn’t want to hang their company on it,” says William Knoedelseder, the author of Bitter Brew, a history of the Anheuser-Busch dynasty. Chairman August A. Busch III, the great-grandson of the founder, Adolphus Busch, viewed Budweiser as the company’s “crowning glory” and the family’s heritage. “Nothing with the Budweiser name on it had ever failed.”
By 1981, however, with Miller Lite sales accelerating, the pressure was too great to resist. Busch needed to bet on his lead horse. He commissioned a recipe for what he called Budweiser Light. “He was investing a century’s worth of brand loyalty with this product,” Knoedelseder says. After tinkering with the recipe to lessen bitterness, per the chairman’s standards, the company debuted Budweiser Light in 1982 with commercials featuring a galloping Clydesdale that aired during sporting events. Bud Light, as it was later named, sold well among young and middle-aged professionals, but sales still lagged Miller Lite’s.
A Super Bowl ad changed everything. In 1987, Anheuser-Busch made a play for younger male drinkers with a 30-second spot during the big game featuring a bull terrier named Spuds MacKenzie—“Bud Light’s original party animal!” Spuds became a pop-culture sensation, skateboarding in sunglasses and drawing the thirsty gaze of scantily clad women. “He’s Spuds MacKenzie,” the narrator of a later ad exclaimed: “One party-loving, happening dude!” (Never mind that the dog who played Spuds was female.) Spuds came to embody the fun-loving-frat-boy image that set Bud Light apart from the more staid Budweiser brand.
The splashy ads helped boost Bud Light’s sales 21 percent in the first full year. By late 1994, Bud Light had passed Miller Lite as America’s best-selling light lager and trailed only Budweiser among all beers, meaning Anheuser-Busch owned the top two spots. Seven years later, in 2001, Bud Light passed Budweiser to become America’s best-selling beer, period: a staple at grocery stores and bars, a ubiquitous option at the ballpark, an entry-level lager to crush at college parties and tailgates.
But the light-lager market was never a monopoly. If you decide to give up Bud Light, it’s relatively painless to switch to the likes of Coors Light or Miller Lite. Drinkers view such brands as “interchangeable,” says Harry Schuhmacher, the publisher of Beer Business Daily: “They’re the same price and they taste the same.” What matters is how customers feel about the brand. Fueled by strong marketing and a loyal Hispanic customer base, the importer Constellation Brands has cultivated a broad following for Modelo Especial. Michelob Ultra, which slightly outsold Bud Light in recent scan data (and which is also owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev), is positioned as a light beer for active, health-conscious drinkers to enjoy after cardio or golfing 18 holes.
“They’re never getting that volume back,” says Dave Infante, who publishes the drinks newsletter Fingers. Bud Light sales peaked at 42.4 million barrels in 2008 and had dropped to 25.7 million barrels by 2020. Even before the boycott, “it was always preordained that it wasn’t going to be the best-selling beer in the country.”
“I had a really clear job to do when I took over Bud Light, and it was, ‘This brand is in decline, it’s been in a decline for a really long time, and if we do not attract young drinkers to come and drink this brand, there will be no future for Bud Light,’” Alissa Heinerscheid, vice president of marketing for Bud Light, told the Make Yourself at Home podcast in March. A month later, Heinerscheid was placed on leave as the company tried to control the fallout of the anti-Mulvaney boycott. Her effort to shed the company’s frat-boy image may have been too tall an order for a brand that built its empire by encouraging young men to imagine themselves as a literal horndog.
Let’s not get carried away, though. Just as Bud Light’s seemingly unshakable dominance was exaggerated, so too is the idea that it’s in a death spiral. Agitation over beer is nothing new. “The brewing industry has sustained a number of different consumer movements like this, in part because beer is ubiquitous in American life and easily recognizable,” says Allyson P. Brantley, the author of Brewing a Boycott. In 1966, two Denver-based Hispanic groups launched a boycott against Coors Brewing Company over its treatment of its Mexican American workers; it lasted until 1987. Jesse Jackson led a 1982 boycott against Anheuser-Busch to protest its lack of Black-owned distributors. Remember those controversies? Probably not. “Americans tend to not have very good lasting memories of boycotts,” Brantley says.
Coors responded to the backlash by creating subsidiary brands that hid the corporate connection, such as Killian’s Irish Red and Zima. (After mergers, Coors is now part of Molson Coors Beverage Company, a juggernaut that also owns Miller.) “You have to be a really knowledgeable consumer when you’re standing there in the beer aisle to know where these different products come from,” Brantley says. That dynamic seems guaranteed to blunt the impact of the latest boycott on Anheuser-Busch InBev’s bottom line. In America, the conglomerate offers more than 100 brands that include not only Michelob Ultra and Busch Light but also the likes of Stella Artois and Hoegaarden, plus once-independent craft breweries such as Goose Island. Representative Dan Crenshaw, the Texas Republican, tried dissing Bud Light by displaying a fridge full of beer from Karbach, a Houston brewery owned by … Anheuser-Busch InBev. The bucks go to the same bank account.
Even Bud Light’s new second-place standing requires more context. Reported figures don’t include draft sales at bars, restaurants, and other venues where you’re more likely to find Bud Light than Modelo Especial. By volume, Bud Light is “still easily the No. 1 beer year to date,” says Roth of Sightlines.
But tastes change. Schlitz was once America’s best-selling beer, and the original Budweiser’s run ended in 2001. Bud Light rose to prominence as a good-time brand that brings the party: Our beer is fun! Drink a lot of it! Today’s drinkers tend to have a more sophisticated self-conception. They also have far more options—and opinions. Beer exists in a fractious world in which anything can become ammo in the culture war, be it Disney movies or clothing at Target. No beer brand will ever be so dominant again. It’s difficult to know quite how to feel. Bud Light, engineered to be bland and widely appealing, is hardly a point of national pride. And yet the fracturing of the beverage market represents a certain loss of shared culture. There’s something bittersweet about that. Just a little, though. Not really too bitter at all.