The C.U.P. Runneth Over

For decades, the American beer industry helped forge a singular national male identity with buxom, bikini-clad models, strapping pro athletes, and the like. But times have changed, and both brands and bros are struggling to change with them—tough stuff to navigate even when everybody is acting in good faith, which everybody most certainly is not. This being the mass-market realm of beer advertising, these crucibles tend to be fairly literal. Which brings us to the cups.

In just a few short years, the Stanley Quencher H2.0 Flowstate has surpassed previous “it” vessels (Tervis, Hydro Flask, S’well, etc.) to become the insulated tumbler of the moment, inspiring zeal and occasional blood sport within the ranks of America’s consuming public. As a status symbol in sororities and suburbs, Stanley’s big honking cup has also inspired many rip-offs during its short reign. This is what happens when you generate a reported $750 million in revenue out of thin air. Quencher H2.0 Flowstates are not for women per se, hydration being a fairly gender-neutral priority. But they’re not not for women. The pastel colors, the Barbie collaborations, the harrowing videos of legging-clad ladies scurrying through Target to snatch the latest limited-edition Stanley before it sells out and occasionally turning violent if it does—it all conspires to make the mug skew a little feminine. More anecdotally: How many men have you seen sipping from their own Stanley Quencher H2.0 Flowstate in your life? I have seen approximately zero. 

All of the above makes the mugs a popular shorthand for what Garbage Day’s Ryan Broderick has called “the great silent majority of American basicness,” like Ugg Boots or pumpkin spice lattes before them. In January 2024, for example, Saturday Night Live did a skit with Dakota Johnson called “Big Dumb Cups,” which skewers the Quencher H2.0 Flowstate as nothing more than an affectation of raw milk-curious MomTok types. “Is there a void in your life? Fill it with cup,” Chloe Fineman purrs like a lobotomized LuLaRoe representative while wearing an impossibly wide-brimmed wool felt hat. The thesis of the sketch—to the extent that there is one—is basically that women be shopping for Stanleys. Trenchant commentary it’s not, but the sketch (plus a million TikToks and Reels, many of which are much funnier) fully codified Stanleys in the mainstream zeitgeist as a mark of white-SUV-mom materialism. 

It’d be wrong to say Busch Light—a frat-party fixture virtually since Anheuser-Busch introduced it in 1989—is “for men,” but its sales have skewed that way for decades. Its marketing has followed likewise. Higher-end brands like Michelob Ultra find traction with women on the basis of sleek packaging, “super-premium” pricing, and what the industry calls the “perceived ‘better-for-you’ health halo.” Busch Light has bachelor-pad pricing, bottom-of-the-cooler utility, and . . . not much else. In seeking to zhuzh up its commodity pedigree with a shot of the coed zeitgeist, Busch has turned an envious eye to Stanley’s success with the ladies. Call it “Maslow’s hammered”: when all you’ve got is a bro brand, there’s only one way to nail a trend. You make it familiar for the fellas.

Enter Busch Light’s camo-wrapped Stanley-style tumblers: “Designed to look like a standard 40 oz. tumbler,” the press releases notes, “the Busch Light Camo C.U.P. [Can Utility Piece] is an insulated can cooler that keeps Busch Light Hunting Cans as cold and smooth as a mountain stream, and features wilderness-ready accessories like a tactical rope, trail cams, game calls and more.” Marvel briefly at that clunky backronym, then let’s consider the angles here. First of all, Stanleys are cups, and you can pour beer into cups. It’s one of their most endearing design features, in fact. Not Busch Light’s C.U.P.s, though. They’re meant to carry a twelve-ounce beer while it’s still in the can. Zoom in on the promo photo and you’ll find fine print that reads: “BEVERAGE COOLER ONLY. NOT FOR USE AS A DRINKING VESSEL.” The Treachery of Images, but make it camo. Incredible scenes. 

The C.U.P.s come in three styles, and each comes rigged with a kit for deer, duck, or turkey hunting. This tracks very literally with Busch Light’s push to align the brand with the outdoors: its parent company, now known as Anheuser-Busch InBev (ABI), has released a seasonal camo can to coincide with the start of hunting season since 2006. Figuratively, the collection pulls off a neat trick for Busch Light, ragging on the feminine basicness of the Quencher H2.0 Flowstate without ever openly acknowledging its appeal. Or as the press release puts it: “Taking aim at the oversized tumbler trend with a camouflaged C.U.P. collection that trades fashion for function.”

It’s worth noting how beer brands shape the popular understanding of masculinity. Busch Light’s Stanley for men came out before the election, and it is nowhere near as explicitly partisan as, say, the MAGA-boosting edgelords behind Happy Dad hard seltzer, but it sits comfortably within the conservative backlash among young men in America. If you want the newest Stanley colorway, you’re effete, silly, and soft. If you want the Busch Light camo mug with the fake antler handle, that makes you sensible, serious, and tactical. Got that? Of course you do. This stuff is not subtle. 

Women have always hunted, and they hunt even more in the United States these days than they did even a couple decades ago, but 77 percent of American hunters are still male. Like hunting, masculinity itself contains multitudes, but Busch Light, in “taking aim” at Stanley, presents a binary instead. Paracord and carabiners on one end of the insulated mug accessory gender spectrum, hand sanitizer and cute lil’ phone pouches on the other—and never the twain shall meet.  

Whether any of this has anything to do with the transphobic shitfit that right-wing operatives up to and including Leonard Leo engineered against ABI in 2023 for having the temerity to send trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney a can of Bud Light with her face on it is impossible to say. But it’s also impossible to ignore. The macrobrewer found itself on the wrong side of bomb threats, boycotts, and bombastic letters from at least a couple Republican senators during that now infamous imbroglio. Bud Light’s revenues in the United States took a major hit, and the brand is still recovering; Modelo Especial, a long-rising rival, finally deposed it from its long-held throne atop the stateside sales charts. As a globally diversified conglomerate, ABI was able to absorb the damage in this market and keep on chugging, but it was a brutal, prolonged period in the (beer) barrel. The firm first flailed around for a nonexistent middle ground, then hired the bully pulpit of Ultimate Fighting Championship head honcho and anti-woke wife-slapper Dana White for $100 million, and shoved its longstanding Pride promotions back in the closet. Like Adobe and Mercedes-Benz a decade prior, ABI got Gamergated. Its chosen path to redemption requires soothing the gender panic of its furious, mostly male antagonists.

That effort has yielded mixed results. Just as Busch Light’s C.U.P.s are only nominally about hunting, l’affair de Mulvaney was only nominally about boycotting trans influencers in beer ads. It was just a convenient wedge issue to aid in the broader right-wing project of resegregating society along racial and gender lines. Disciplining Bud Light for straying too far away from reflections of its traditional (read: straight male) drinker may not have influenced its portfolio-mate’s red-meat/-state Stanley spoof, but it certainly affirmed the reactionary wisdom that the corporate herd must be culled of “wokeness” that had supposedly run roughshod over the company, trampling its proudest accomplishments along the way.

Nearly two years after Mulvaney posted the fateful video of her dressed as Audrey Hepburn and sipping a Bud, some cultural revanchists are still beating that drum, including former ABI executive, and current finance chud, Anson Frericks. A fellow traveler with MAGA maître d’ Vivek Ramaswamy, Frericks turned the fiasco at his one-time firm into half a dozen cable press-hits to hawk the pair’s “anti-woke” fund in 2023 and a book the following year. “The D.E.I. movement demanded that companies pursue the same progressive goals, regardless of their mission and culture,” he wrote in last month in a New York Times op-ed to promote his new book Last Call for Bud Light that was almost as poorly reasoned as it was inaccurate. “When Anheuser-Busch embraced D.E.I., the partnership felt inauthentic. And that’s why it backfired.”

Not to put too fine a point on it, but “DEI” did not “destroy” Bud Light.

Long before that shitshow began, ABI execs had correctly identified that the brand would not return to its former glory by continuing to market to the stereotypical male drinker of yore. Anybody with a working knowledge of historical trends in the U.S. beer business could diagnose Bud Light’s woes likewise. Even as its domestic sales reached their high water beer mark in 2008, craft brewers were expanding American drinkers’ expectations for flavor and ingredient quality; Mexican imports were going on their fourth decade of seducing would-be Spuds MacKenzie loyalists with clear-bottled visions of Caribbean paradise. Cable television, the advertising vehicle upon which Bud Light rode to mass-market supremacy in the nineties, was just starting to fracture; the brand-friendly monoculture it had produced had already shattered.

In 2023, right-wing rags seized on comments from the brand’s marketer describing how she planned to revamp its “fratty” and “out-of-touch” positioning as proof positive that Big Woke was conspiring to emasculate an icon of the straight American male experience, but there’s no meaningful evidence of that sort of Great (Fridge) Replacement. The fact was, Bud Light needed to court those new customers because it had long since started losing its core demographic to Modelo, White Claw, and a million India Pale Ales. The conspiracy theory provoked a powerful reprisal from the right anyway, for two reasons. First, conservatives spent billions of dollars and dozens of years building a media apparatus to manufacture “scandals” like Mulvaney’s video, then tie them into ideological narratives (in this case, “woke capital” and “DEI”) to be guzzled by a conspiracy-primed, bigotry-addled audience. Second, whatever Stanleys are to today’s white women, Bud Light was ten times that for white men in the nineties and aughts. Its cultural hegemony—whether in mass media, or the beer aisle—isn’t coming back. Mulvaney’s video seemed to offer a tidy explanation for what led to its demise.

“They came to think: ‘This is our beer, this means something about us,’” William Knoedelseder, the author of Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America’s Kings of Beer told the Guardian in 2023. Even though Bud Light’s traditional customer base had been swapping it for craft beer and spirits for years, it was still a symbol of that mainstream masculinity. ABI lost billions of dollars misunderstanding its potency and has been triangulating rightward ever since. This happens with varying degrees of intention and subtlety. On one end of the spectrum is stuff like the Busch Light C.U.P.s, a coded promo gag for an indirectly related brand; on the other is ABI’s choice to bail on sponsoring St. Louis’ Pride Parade after thirty years of support, which it did last month. Somewhere in between is the announcement this past February from ABI’s North American chief executive, Brendan Whitworth, that the company would replace the industry-term “domestic beer” with “American beer” and wanted its vendors across the country to do likewise.

“Baseball isn’t popularly known as the domestic pastime, our troops don’t salute the domestic flag, and our country wasn’t built on the domestic dream,” he wrote in a memo to distributors obtained by the trade press. “That’s because the ‘American’ part matters, and the pride we take in this great country should also be properly and accurately applied to our great American beers.” As a positioning statement, Whitworth’s memo aligns well with the blood-and-soil MAGA movement that rolled the firm in the first place. The logic is valid, if not sound. But it’s not sound. “Domestic” and “import” are mostly business-facing terms, and the latter’s cachet has waned to the extent that macrobrewers including ABI now make some of their formerly foreign brands stateside. If American drinkers don’t care where, say, Stella Artois comes from (ABI tanks in Florida, Missouri, and New Jersey), they certainly won’t give a shit that stadium menus now list Bud Light et al. as “American.”

Then again, pop culture is powerful, and even the dumbest marketing both affects and reflects it. Busch Light’s can holder shaped like a cup that holds beer is dumb, which is fine, because most beer promos are. But the fact that the brand frames it as a functional, masculine alternative to Stanley’s H2.0 Flowstate affirms a similarly retrograde outlook on gender roles to the one that young American men are seeking out on the political right. And the fact that it doesn’t actually function—that it’s a confusing, unnecessary modification to something that worked perfectly fine, much like ABI’s recent rhetorical pivot to “American” beer—evokes the dishonesty of that worldview. It’s the performance of moral panic in service of grotesque politics; it’s denigrating a trend as feminine while butching it up for the boys; it’s claiming to “trade fashion for function” while objectively doing the opposite. Busch Light’s C.U.P.s are full to the brim with all of the above. But not with beer—you can’t pour that in there.