Budweiser

It’s always Lawyer Time in this little corner of beerland. Budweiser, the flagship beer of Anheuser-Busch and the best-selling brew in America, has been scrapping over the rights to its name for decades, and there’s no sign of a letup anytime soon.

The Budweiser saga began in 1876, when the E. Anheuser Brewing Association. of St. Louis, MO, introduced Budweiser Lager Beer. (Founded in 1860 by Eberhard Anheuser, the company was renamed the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association in 1879, recognizing the contribution and leadership of then-president Aldolphus Busch.)

Bud was a hit. The decades flew by and Americans guzzled Budweiser by the barrelful (three million barrels per year by 1941, in fact). Americans continued to down Bud in mass quantities, and Budweiser became an American icon.

Meanwhile, in Czechoslovakia, trouble was brewing. It seems that when Eberhard Anheuser named his beer “Budweiser,” he was paying homage to the beer makers of a Czech town called Ceske Budejovice, known in Anheuser’s native Germany as “Budweis.” According to the folks in Budweis, their local beer has been known as “Budweiser” for several hundred years.

In 1895 the Czech brewery Budejovicky Pivovar (mercifully known as Budvar) began producing its own brew, marketing it under the name “Budweiser Budvar,” and the legal fireworks soon began.

In 1939, Anheuser-Busch and Budvar supposedly buried the trademark hatchet in the U.S., giving A-B the American rights to the name in exchange for Budvar’s ownership of “Budweiser” in much of Europe. But as Anheuser-Busch expanded into and began to dominate international markets, skirmishing flared again. The Czechs even took offense at Budweiser’s slogan “The King of Beers,” noting that Budweis brewers had called their product “The Beer of Kings” since the 16th century. And Budvar partisans pointed out that A-B’s Budweiser wasn’t even legally considered beer in Germany, where the “Reinheitsgebot” (Beer Purity Regulations) dating back to 1516 strictly forbid the use of rice in brewing beer.

In recent years plucky Budvar has again won the right to use “Budweiser” and “Bud” in the European Union countries, but court cases continue to rage from Sweden to Hong Kong. Budvar’s current tactic is to sell its beer in the U.S. as “Czechvar,” hoping that word of mouth about what they call (in a whisper, of course) “the real Budweiser” will win them the fame in bars that they have lost, at least for the moment, in the U.S. courts.

March 7, 2008 | Filed Under Food and Drink 

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