Friday’s ad is still another one for Budweiser, again from 1916. This is one is part of a series from the same year, with the two from the previous days being the three I know about. This one has the headline “Honored in Its Home Town and Famed the World Over.” The copy mentions that the “Saazer Hop Flavor” was “exclusive,” which seems very strange. And for that matter, when did we stop calling them “Saazer” and drop the “-er?” Like all of the ads, it ends with “Budweiser Means Moderation.”
Thursday’s ad is for another one for Budweiser, also from 1916. It seems like this is part of a series from the same year. This one has the great headline “The Better the Hops the Better the Beer Flavor.” Like yesterday’s ad, the parting shot is “Budweiser Means Moderation,” which was part of a strategy to convince people that beer should be spared that the brewing industry adopted far too late to stop the 18th Amendment from being ratified, establishing prohibition in 1920. Needless to say, it was too little, too late, but it’s a cool ad.
Wednesday’s ad is for Budweiser, from 1916. There’s some great copy on this ad, beginning with “Every Glass a Handful of Health.” According to the ad, “Each drop of Budweiser is alive and sparkling with the vital energy of Northern Barley and the tonic vigor of Saazer Hops.” Apparently it’s also the “unchallenged sovereign of bottled beers,” which must have been a precursor to A-B declaring themselves the king of beers.
Tuesday’s ad is for the Green Tree Brewery of St. Louis, and specifically their Buck Beer — apparently a bock — from 1906. Weird that they called it “buck” but then again perhaps they were thinking ahead and believed it was be easier to own or trademark the name which I confess I didn’t even notice was buck when I first looked at this ad.
Monday’s ad is for Heineken, from, I think, the early 1990s. I confess I don’t remember this ad campaign from Heineken, but I recently discovered that they had a reasonably long-running series of ads with the tagline “When You make a great beer, you don’t have to make a great fuss.” They’re all minimalist in design with witty text and that fussy tagline. I haven’t been able to find a lot of specifics about the campaign, apart from a few suggestions that it may not have run in the United States. But it’s pretty funny in the context of the ABI Super Bowl ad that accused craft beer drinkers of being to fussy about their beer.
Sunday’s ad is for the British ad campaign “Beer is Best,” from 1938. Part of “A Calendar of British Beer” from that year, March features a wonderful illustration of a farmer sowing his field with barley, and the text explains that this is the month for it, with some statistics of how much of the grain it takes each year to create all of England’s beer. “All the year round. Beer is Best.” Happy March.
Saturday’s ad is for Anheuser-Busch, from 1892. Apparently shortly after the competition of a new brewhouse in St. Louis, they celebrated by sponsoring “pen and sunlight sketches of Omaha and environs” with this ad. One curious feature of the otherwise simple image ad, is this line. “No Corn or Corn Preparations are used in the manufacture of Anheuser-Busch beer. It is, therefore, the highest-priced by the most wholesome and really the least expensive for its superior quality.” Funny they didn’t mention rice.
Friday’s ad is for the Bavarian Brewery, a.k.a. E. Anheuser & Co., from 1860. This, of course, was the brewery that would later be called Anheuser-Busch, but sixteen years before they’d start making Budweiser. Even then, it was a fairly large enterprise, with “bottling for export a specialty.”
Thursday’s ad is for Budweiser, from 1907. The simple ad from over 100 years ago is trying to make friends. For every tuxedoed, top-hatted man with a patriotic flag lapel pin is a friend of Budweiser.
Wednesday’s ad is another one for Anheuser-Busch’s “Malt-Nutrine,” also from 1908. Malt-Nutrine was promoted not as a non-alcoholic beer, but as a “pure malt tonic” and sold by druggists and grocers. “The Health of the Farmer” that the ad is touting comes from Malt-Nutrine containing “the combined juices of germinated barley and selected Saazer Hops.” Is that all? Hell, no. “Every bottle is charged with the strength and glory of the golden grain. Its aroma is the fragrance of the clinging hop vine and its living vigor is the cream of ripened barley. It infuses life into the blood — sustains all the vital powers and to the feeble, aged and run down it is a veritable restorer of recreative and soothing potency.”
