Budweiser's Just Gonna Call Itself 'America' For A While

"America has no chill" is something you might feasibly say this summer, without a trace of irony, to indicate that your beer is warm.

If that drives you to madness (and it should!), blame Budweiser, which plans to rename its eponymous beer "America" from May 23 through the U.S. presidential election in November.

Mmm, nothing like a nice cold can of America. Lemme get an America, please. This party sucks, all they have is America. 

"We thought nothing was more iconic than Budweiser and nothing was more iconic than America," Tosh Hall told Co.Design  this week. Hall is the creative director of Jones Knowles Ritchie, the firm that helps the beer company with branding.

The name change would have been brazen enough, but Budweiser, which is owned by the Belgium-based company Anheuser-Busch InBev, didn't stop there. In a release Tuesday , Budweiser boasted that it will be slathering its new cans and bottles with snippets of America-related text.

That includes the Pledge of Allegiance and the lyrics of "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "America the Beautiful," which will all appear on Budweiser products in the coming months. As a reminder, this will happen because the company loves America so much, and definitely not because its sales have been waning in the U.S. or anything like that.

Budweiser didn't respond to requests for comment from The Huffington Post (specifically "Really?" and "Why?").

"We are embarking on what should be the most patriotic summer that this generation has ever seen, with Copa America Centenario being held on U.S. soil for the first time, Team USA competing at the Rio 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games,” Ricardo Marques, a vice president at Budweiser, said in the company's release. “Budweiser has always strived to embody America in a bottle, and we’re honored to salute this great nation where our beer has been passionately brewed for the past 140 years.”

Steve Kurowski of the Colorado Brewers Guild, a nonprofit that represents more than 150 craft breweries in Colorado, had a different interpretation.

"It is no surprise to see Budweiser Anheuser-Busch pull off something like this. They're doing everything they can to remain relevant in the American beer market," Kurowski, the guild's operations director, told The Huffington Post. "The ironic thing about this campaign is that Budweiser isn’t even an American-owned brewery these days."

Budweiser's redesign, accompanied by the tag line "America is in your hands," will feature heavily in a TV spot set to premiere June 1, the company said.

(Remember, this is the company that dropped the puppy from its Super Bowl commercials so it could run an ad  mocking craft beer while claiming that Budweiser, in contrast, is "brewed the hard way.")

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the announcement prompted much mockery on Twitter: