The St. Louis Post-Dispatch's beer blog (we are a proud beer town, remember?) reports that Bud Light has been surpassed by China's Snow brand as the biggest selling beer in volume*. The controversy is best summed up by an astute commenter to the blog:
"Talk about number manipulation for a stupid ranking. If you’re going to count all 25 or so brands that encompass ‘Snow’ then do the same for AB and see how you stack up. The list doesn’t even make sense. Snow is a line of beers. Snow Beer, Snow Dry, Snow Light, etc etc. Bud Light, when introduced was labelled as Budweiser Light, because that’s what it is. So if you’re going to include all of the beers that make up Snow, the only fair comparison would be to all of the beers that make up the Budweiser brand. Budweiser, Bud(weiser) Light, Bud Ice, Bud Dry…. Just because the name got shortened doesn’t change what it is.
Saying Snow sold more beer than Bud Light is like saying General Motors sold more cars than Honda Accord.
Is GM a more popular car than the Mustang?"
For those not floored at the utter injustice of the situation and just want the stats - here are the rankings that were released (in millions of hectoliters):
1. Snow 61.0
2. Bud Light 55.6
3. Budweiser 43.4
4. Skol (Brazil) 35.4
5. Corona 32.7
6. Heineken 29.1
* To give credit where credit is due: report was issued by Plato Logic, reported by Reuters and blogged about by STL Today - only for me to reblog it.
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America's losing its edge not only in auto industry but also beer sales? I thought times of economic strife and increase of umemployment brought on more drinking. What's next? Jarritos will overtake Coke simply because Coke and Coke Zero are listed as two separate "mega-brands."
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