"It's a crime," Billy Arr said, sitting in Bobby's Idle Hour Lounge on Nashville's Music Row on Monday, a cold Budweiser in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
The offense: Anheuser-Busch's decision to hand over the reins of the famous Budweiser Clydesdales — and the all-American brew they represent — to Belgian beverage giant InBev.
Budweiser, the self-styled "King of Beers," and the best-selling brew in the United States, will become a part of the Belgian company by year's end, in a $52 billion stock-swap deal that will create the world's largest brewer.
"I've been drinking this stuff since the 1960s, and this is hard to take," said Arr, 65, a successful songwriter and artist whose compositions have been recorded by some of Nashville's most famous performers.
"I just hate to see another American company bite the dust," he said. "Soon there's not going to be anything left that's American. But I doubt they'll change anything about the beer except for raising the price. I'll keep drinking it for now, but if they take that American eagle off the label, then I'm out."
That seemed to be the consensus at Bobby's, a working songwriters' hangout that has been a Music Row fixture for more than three decades.
"Bud's the biggest brand here, and we don't even have any imported beer in the house," said Bobby's owner, Dianne Herald, 58. "I know the Budweiser folks, and they're good people. But I don't like them selling out to foreigners."
The closest Bobby's comes to selling a foreign beer "is Yuengling," Herald said, "and that's from Pennsylvania. Our distributors have asked us to carry Corona and Heineken. But we have no calls for those."
Around the bar Monday afternoon, every Bobby's customer was nursing a Bud or Bud Light, including Todd Milsap, 39, son of country music legend Ronnie Milsap.
"I'm not hip with it," the younger Milsap said of the Anheuser-Busch sale. "I drink Budweiser, and I don't do foreign beers. I won't even drive a foreign car."
Downtown at the Flying Saucer restaurant and bar behind the Union Station hotel, there was less hostility directed at imported brews. That makes sense considering there are dozens offered on its menu.
But that didn't make the InBev deal for Anheuser-Busch any more popular among the staff and lunchtime patrons.
"We have 82 beers on tap here, but not Budweiser," manager Kacee Dexter said. "We're all about specialty beers. But, hey, we do sell Budweiser by the bottle."
InBev "had better not change the recipe," Dexter said. "That would be really dumb. Everybody drinks Bud, so why mess with something that sells so well?"
Among the Flying Saucer's imported beers are some of InBev's products, though, including Beck's. But none comes close to the popularity of Budweiser, Dexter said.
InBev isn't well knownDespite more than 600 years of brewing beer in Belgium, InBev is more rootless than Anheuser-Busch. Based in Leuven, Belgium, it is run by a Brazilian management team and sells most of its beer outside Europe. It owns a massive portfolio of local brands from Siberia to Argentina that rarely travel. InBev has only recently started to push its two best-known brands — Stella Artois and Beck's — more widely.
Budweiser, though, is a household name in the United States. With Bud and its other brands, Anheuser-Busch holds more than a 50 percent share of the American beer market.
The combined company, to be called Anheuser-Busch InBev, would be the world's third-largest consumer products company by market capitalization after Procter & Gamble of the United States and Nestle SA of Switzerland.
The Anheuser-Busch board accepted the higher takeover offer Sunday night. It will give Anheuser-Busch stockholders $70 for each share of stock they own. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year.
Flying Saucer customer Larry Harris, 50, of Nashville, who described himself as a Bud drinker, said he thinks it's a shame that "an American institution such as Anheuser-Busch could fall to the greed of stockholders. There is some point where you just have to stop thinking about profit," he said. "This is capitalism at its worst."
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